The first portion of Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus (1-3.328), doesn’t seem to be as wildly confusing after a second reading. It lacks the more artful style of any other philosopher I’ve ever read, that much is certain. But what it lacks in artful (or dare I say playfulness of) prose, it makes up with in conciseness.

These initial propositions seem to be trying to wheedle out what knowledge is, how knowledge relates to reality, how reality is represented in both thought and language, and how any language that is to be used to represent language ought to function (or how he intends to use it for the purposes of logically analysis, as the case may be).

Propositions 2.1 through 3.1 seem to be very nearly in line with what Bernard Lonergan posits very early in Insight, specifically:

2.1       We picture facts to ourselves.
2.12     A picture is a model of reality.
2.131   In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects.
3          A logical picture of facts is a thought.

This seems very clear to me in what I’ve gleaned from Insight previously: thoughts are the logical representatives of objects, through pictures (Lonergan calls them images). Still, I think they were both aiming at roughly the same apple. The idea of how knowledge comes to be is difficult. Wittgenstein’s mucking around with signs, symbols, the signified, signifiers, and signification seems to correlate directly with what I’ve learned of literary analysis. He breaks it down in a very forthright manner, seemingly.

However, the following propositions troubled me:

3.04       If a thought were correct a priori, it would be a thought whose possibility ensured its truth
3.05       A priori knowledge that a thought was true would be possible only if its truth were recognizable from the thought itself (without anything to compare it with).

But it occurred to me that he may be trying to banish all ideas of tautalogical arguments from his work by initially stating upfront that everything must be compared to some other thing and cannot prove itself true on its own. From earlier:

2.225    There are no pictures that are true a priori.
3            A logical picture of facts is a thought.

Which seems about as straight-forward as it can get.

There was a proposition that irks me a bit, if only because it seems to take the logic a step too far (and goes meta in itself far too early in the text):

3.1432         Instead of, ‘The complex sign “aRb” says that a stands to b in relation R’, we ought to put, ‘That “a” stands to “b” in a certain relation says that aRb.’

Which makes sense, but seems pedantic. Although it is in line with the previous propositions, it seems unnecessary and obtuse. It took me much page flipping and head scratching to grasp it (and to seemingly little purpose).

Related posts:

1. Wittgenstein & Me: A Love Story, Part III
2. Wittgenstein & Me: A Love Story, Part II
3. Philosophers love mathematicians, confusions aside
4. Those Damned Kids, Part One
5. Jane Austin and my Stupid Brain – Part 1