Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in to a wealthy Austrian family, and he served in the Austrian Army in the First World War. He started Work on the Tractatus towards the end of the First World War. He studied engineering at Manchester which led to an interest in maths and philosophy. Ludwig was a student of Russell Bertrand, and learnt a lot from him; however a lot of his ideas laid out in the Tactatus seem to differ from that of his teacher, even pointing out faults in his logic. The book talks about logical positivism, and the connection between language and thought. He talks about the way in which the world works through language.
Ludwig’s theory is based on the way in which language is used in the world, and says that language is everything and everything is language. He says that without language the world cannot exist, and that logic is the structure of reality. Ludwig says that things can be true or false but also nonsensical, which is something that can’t be proved to be true or false therefore it simply makes no sense. Wittgenstein says that things can only be said that are true about the factual world, anything else is nonsensical such as a certain moral or ethical belief as it cannot pass the verification principle. He goes on to say in the book that the problem with a lot of philosophers theories is their inability to understand language, which means by his theory, makes some of the theories that they put forward nonsensical. He says the world consists of, and is determined by facts. This is the basis for logical thinking; he says there are objects in the world that which make the world exist. He says that without language objects cannot be verified. Space time and colour are forms of objects.
Ludwig often talks about a proposition which is the way to communicate something through spoken or written word; it is made out of specific names in a particular logical form. A proposition is a logical picture of reality, an example of this would be saying ‘this house is red’. There are types of propositions such as tautologies which are true and contradictions which are false. He says; ‘a proposition is neither probable nor improbable, either an event occurs or it does not; there is no middle way.’ This could relate to everyday life as people often chat a load of nonsense, and Ludwig says that there are only two ways to decipher a statement it either happens or doesn’t. Ludwig also talks about states of affairs, States of affairs is the combination of objects or things. He says that the structures of a fact consist of the states of affairs. To try and simplify, a factual statement consists of a combination of objects that fit in to each other like a chain to make sense, however a state of affairs can only exist if the proposition itself is true and not false. He says that; ‘language disguises thought’, he says that a human can speak without actually knowing how the sound of speech is made. He makes the comparison of clothes covering a body saying that you can’t tell what exactly the body looks like as the clothes cover the true form of the body. This could mean that some people often talk about things that they really know nothing about, either through straight lying or just pretending they are knowledgeable on the subject and they use language to disguise what they are actually thinking.
When talking about pictures we get a clear idea about his views on fact and logic. He says that a picture is fact; a picture represents what it portrays in pictorial form only. A picture represents a possible situation in logical space. To know whether a picture itself is true or false we must ourselves compare it with our reality. This means that we can use our own mind and experiences to find out whether something is true or false. A picture only shows something that is fact but the truth of it we can only discover personally.
One of his key ideas was solipsism; he says that you cannot talk about anything other than what exists in your world. He goes on to say that; ‘there are no grounds for believing that the simplest eventuality will actually be realized.’ Wittgenstein thinks that there is no way of knowing if anything will happen just before it has happened before, or something else has happened. He seems to think that the world is only what you can see before you and that you can’t know anything else other than what you have experienced personally and therefore you cannot make assumptions about anything else in life. He says that people may have different impressions of the world; however the facts and objects in the world remain the same. One person can view the world as fun and exciting where as other may see it as corrupt and harsh; however the facts of the world from the ground we walk on to the air we breathe are still exactly the same.
Ultimately he is saying that we must use language to try and explore facts as people can lie or not know what they are talking about. Understanding language and logic, we can ourselves find the truth without having to rely on what people are saying we can determine it for ourselves. The book shows what exactly a factual statement must consist of such as propositions, tautology etc. Without these principles what someone is saying cannot be true, or will be nonsensical which isn’t necessarily false but just doesn’t make sense. The world cannot be verified without the use of language, every proposition that is true makes the world and we need language to verify and confirm what is true.