Elucidating the Tractatus: Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy of Logic and Language

摘要

According to the traditional account, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein distinguishes between truths that can be put into words and truths that can only be "shown" by a symbolism. Organizing her chapters around Wittgenstein's "great problem" of how a proposition expresses its sense, and setting herself the task of showing that his project is essentially a "clarificatory" one, McGinn examines his critique of Frege and Russell's view that quantifiers and truth-functional connectives represent functions, his rejection of the closely related view that the laws of logic are universal truths, his distinction between meaningful propositions and tautologies and contradictions, and his rejection of Russell's view that the first-person pronoun refers to an object.