An Elucidatory Interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Much has been written on the relative merits of different readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus. The recent renewal of the debate has almost exclusively been concerned with variants of the ineffabilist (metaphysical) reading of TL‐P – notable such readings have been advanced by Elizabeth Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and H. O. Mounce – and the recently advanced variants of therapeutic (resolute) readings – notable advocates of which are James Conant, Cora Diamond, Juliet Floyd and Michael Kremer. During this debate, there have been a number of writers who have tried to develop a third way, incorporating what they see as insights and avoiding what they see as flaws in both the ineffabilist and resolute readings. The most prominent advocates of these elucidatory readings of TL‐P are Dan Hutto (2003 Hutto, D. D. 2003. Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy: Neither Theory nor Therapy, Basingstoke: Palgrave. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Marie McGinn (1999 McGinn, Marie. 1999. ‘Between Metaphysics and Nonsense: Elucidation in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’. Philosophical Quarterly, 49: 491–513. [Google Scholar]). In this paper we subject Hutto’s and McGinn’s readings of TL‐P to critical scrutiny. We find that in seeking to occupy the middle ground they ultimately find themselves committed to (and in the process commit Wittgenstein to) the very ineffabilism they (and Wittgenstein) are seeking to overcome. Keywords: ineffabilismtherapyelucidationnonsenseWittgenstein Notes 1 There is ‘another’ interpretation of the Tractatus, which was once popular, and which aims to be anti‐metaphysical: namely, the positivist interpretation of the Vienna Circle et al. We do not focus on this interpretation in the body of the text for two reasons: firstly, because of its current unpopularity, at least ostensibly, as a way of taking the Tractatus; secondly, because it is, in the final analysis, not substantially different from the ‘metaphysical’ interpretation, as both endorse a ‘substantial’ conception of nonsense (for further explication, see Section 5 of James Conant, ‘Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein’, in Alice Crary and Rupert Read (eds) The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2000 Conant, James. 2000. “‘Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein’”. In The New Wittgenstein, Edited by: Alice, Crary and Rupert, Read. 174–218. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), pp. 174–218.) We cannot explore the positivist reading of the Tractatus further here; suffice it to say that we would argue that the metaphysical interpretation focuses on thought and world, and is ‘Realist’; while the positivist interpretation focuses on language and is ‘Anti‐Realist’. We believe that neither Realism nor Anti‐Realism captures Wittgenstein’s thought, even in TL‐P. 2 This reading is also sometimes referred to as the ‘resolute’ reading. It should be noted that we do not discuss in the present article an important matter which has emerged in recent resolute readings of TL‐P; this concerns the question of the ‘frame’. While Jim Conant and Cora Diamond hold onto the idea that TL‐P has a frame, which is not to be thrown away with the rest of the text, other resolute readers such as Juliet Floyd (and Rupert Read) have insisted that all is to be overcome. Warren Goldfarb has referred to the former as Girondin readers and the latter as Jacobin. We hope that this subtlety need not occupy us in the present context (though see n. 41 below). 3 Daniel D. Hutto, Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy: Neither Theory nor Therapy (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2003 Hutto, D. D. 2003. Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy: Neither Theory nor Therapy, Basingstoke: Palgrave. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 4 The seeds of Hutto’s interpretation can be found in his paper (jointly authored with John Lippitt) ‘Making Sense of Nonsense: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 98 (1998 Hutto, D. D. and Lippitt, John. 1998. ‘Making Sense of Nonsense: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 98: 263–86. [Google Scholar]), pp. 263–86. 5 ‘Between Metaphysics and Nonsense: Elucidation in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, Philosophical Quarterly, 49 (1999), pp. 491–513. 6 For more detail and defence of such a reading of PI see Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004 Baker, Gordon. 2004. Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects, Oxford: Blackwell. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); David Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 ——. 2004. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]); Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read, ‘Memento: A Philosophical Investigation’, in J. Goodenough and R. Read (eds) Film as Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005 Goodenough, J. and Read, R., eds. 2005. Film as Philosophy, Basingstoke: Palgrave. [Google Scholar]), pp. 72–94; and R. Read, ‘Throwing Away “the Bedrock”’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 105 (2005 Read, R. 2005. ‘Throwing Away “the Bedrock”’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 105: 81–98. [Google Scholar]), pp. 81–98. Compare also the important work of Cavell (in H. Sluga and D. Stern (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 Sluga, H. and Stern, D., eds. 1996. The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), pp. 261–296), Goldfarb (1983 Goldfarb, Warren. 1983. ‘I Want You to Bring Me a Slab: Some Remarks on the Opening Sections of the Philosophical Investigations’. Synthese, : 254 [Google Scholar]) and Stephen Mulhall (2001 Mulhall, Stephen. 2001. Inheritance and Originality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]) on the opening of the Investigations. 7 ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, in H. Sluga and D. Stern (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 Sluga, H. and Stern, D., eds. 1996. The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), p. 444 (though Stern means only to be talking about the later Wittgenstein). 8 We offer here a general characterization of this interpretation. Examples of readings that follow this line in detail can be found in P. M. S. Hacker’s Insight and Illusion (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997 Hacker, P. M. S. 1997. Insight and Illusion, Bristol: Thoemmes Press. [Google Scholar]) and (perhaps best of all) in G. E. M. Anscombe’s Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996 Anscombe, G. E. M. 1996. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Bristol: Thoemmes Press. [Google Scholar]). Meredith Williams, ‘Nonsense and Cosmic Exile: The Austere Reading of the Tractatus’, in Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss (eds) Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance (London: Routledge, 2004 Kölbel, Max and Weiss, Bernhard, eds. 2004. Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), pp. 6–32, is a notable defender of such readings. (See also n. 2 of McGinn.) 9 Russell himself interpreted the Tractatus in this ineffabilistic way. And like many such readers, he found ineffabilism an unorthodox vehicle for putting forward philosophical views, and was not convinced by the vehicle: ‘What causes hesitation is the fact that, after all, Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said.’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1961 ——. 1922. Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, Edited by: Ogden, C. K. London: Routledge. and trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, London: Routledge, 1961 [Google Scholar]), p. xxi). 10 Except where indicated otherwise, we use the ‘authorized’ (Ogden) translation of TL‐P. However, this point is equally clear in the Pears–McGuiness translation: ‘[T]he aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather – not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts, for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). // It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense’ (p. 3). 11 Perhaps the best account of this telling point about 6.54 is James Conant’s, in ‘Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder’, Yale Review, 79 (1991), pp. 328–64. 12 Or a ‘God’s‐eye view’, or a ‘a sideways‐on view’, or an ‘external point of view’ ... With John McDowell and others, part of the burden of our argument here is that there is every reason to believe that Wittgenstein entirely gives up the fantasy of a position outside language – indeed, that he gives it up in the Tractatus (cf. TL‐P 4.12, the Preface, etc.) Now, it might be objected against us here that our claim that a Frege/Russell philosopher ‘should realize’ such‐and‐such stands in tension with our claim that the Tractatus (as opposed to its author) has no teaching, in the sense that it has no content. But this, of course, would be to misunderstand the intended ‘force’ of our discussion at this point. Our discussion at and around this point in our text is directed toward a Frege/Russell philosopher on his own terms. We do not make the rhetorically disastrous move of already assuming our own interpretation of the text to be right. We instead allow the Frege/Russell philosopher to have the assumptions that he wants: for instance, that Wittgenstein is giving arguments, which are such that one understanding them precisely should realize such‐and‐such or so‐and‐so, and so on... 13 We would emphasize here the active nature of coming to see nonsense. 14 Hutto divides ineffabilist readers into theoretical and doctrinal readers and rejects both in chapters 2 and 3 of his book: ‘Although I have rejected theoretical readings on the grounds that Wittgenstein had set his face against philosophical speculation and explanation, this does not rule out the possibility that he was advancing doctrines, in the sense of stated principles or beliefs. Perhaps, his was simply an attempt to lay down a series of a priori truths. [...] As the only way to make sense of the doctrinal reading is to assume that he was committed to a metaphilosophy at odds with the central aspects of his stated project, such readings are unfaithful to some of [Wittgenstein’s] own remarks. Moreover, they suffer from deep inconsistency in that they must characterise “Wittgenstein as rejecting the idea of an external standpoint, [yet] offer interpretations of his thought which keep this idea in play”’ (pp. 90–1; the quotation within the quotation is from Crary and Read, The New Wittgenstein, p. 4). 15 McGinn, p. 496. 16 Hutto, p. 93. The talk of therapeuts trying to hear the Tractatus as getting ‘messages’ across is worrying and indicative. Hutto’s wording also raises a pertinent counter‐question: what could it really mean for there to be ‘classes’ of nonsense? 17 McGinn, pp. 496–7. 18 Hutto, p. 102; McGinn, p. 497. 19 We should note that the term that seems to have been settled upon, by proponents and opponents alike, for denoting the family of readers who oppose ineffabilist readings is resolute. We will stick with ‘therapeutic’ for reasons that will become clearer as we progress. 20 This is how Hacker sees therapeutic/resolute readings of the Tractatus – see his ‘Was he Trying to Whistle it?’, in Crary and Read, The New Wittgenstein, pp. 353–389. 21 For example, there is a body of literature that argues for the ineffability of aspects of the Holocaust. In this case those aspects are not metaphysical, but rather abhorrent in the extreme. 22 McGinn writes (p. 503) that Wittgenstein’s remarks achieve ‘a certain order in the reader’s perception ... of language’. On one reading, this might be harmless. McGinn might simply be meaning to index, for instance, the purpose‐relatively‐useful sense of there being a difference between signalling or calling and language that Wittgenstein investigates in the opening of the Investigations. But if McGinn thinks that ‘uncovering’ an ‘order’ in language or clarifying the ‘logical articulation’ of our language gives one any access to a something, even if that ‘something’ be far less than a theory, less even than a thesis (or indeed a truth), then she has already fallen into an ineffabilism. We have already given some reason to believe that she does think this; and we give more below. The remarks of the Tractatus do not clarify by revealing philosophical truths; they clarify only ordinary sensical remarks, which they enable one to see as ‘making themselves clear’, or indeed as being already clear. We shall return to this point. 23 McGinn, p. 504. There is a risk in McGinn’s phrasing here of an illusion of literal perspicuous vision, as if this ‘seeing’ were not just a metaphor, but rather one could literally chart the whole of grammar, as if from outside/above. This risk, this illusion, we believe, is fully realized in the Analytical Commentaries on the Philosophical Investigations of Peter Hacker (and Gordon Baker, who has recently distanced himself in print from this reading – see, e.g., n. 10 of Baker’s ‘Wittgenstein: Concepts or Conceptions?’, in Wittgenstein’s Method). It is important to see the ‘seeing’ that is involved here, according to McGinn, as metaphorical through and through, or at most as aspect‐seeing ... Compare McGinn, p. 508: she repeatedly writes as though we just manage to see many philosophical things/truths. (See also n. 26 below.) 24 Hutto, p. 85 (our italics). 25 Hutto, pp. 85, 103, 110–11. 26 Hutto, p. 124. This is explored in detail by Michael Kremer (2002 Kremer, Michael. 2002. ‘Mathematics and Meaning in Tractatus’. Philosophical Investigations, 25: 272–303. [Google Scholar]). For example, on p. 297 he argues that ‘We should not read talk of “showing”, and correlatively of “perceiving”, “seeing”, “recognizing” that which is shown, on the model of a relation between a subject and some ineffable fact‐like entity. ... This form of the idea of showing is exactly what the Tractatus wants to teach us to abandon. Rather, we should read talk of “showing”, and correlatively “seeing”, on the model of the demonstration of a technique, and the uptake required to understand the demonstration.’ When one looks at how McGinn in practice explores these matters, one finds that, by contrast, she makes it look as though something is seen. See, e.g., pp. 507–8 and p. 504 of her text, as well as passages quoted in our text below. 27 Hutto, p. 103; McGinn, p. 498. 28 McGinn, p. 502. 29 Hutto, pp. 101–2. 30 To be fair to McGinn, we should add that elucidatory remarks could be nonsensical and nevertheless prompt us to recognize a distinction that we did not see clearly before, e.g. (to use one of her examples) the distinction between propositions of logic and maximally general truths. However, it would be needful then to recognize that even (the bringings‐about of) such distinctions are themselves only therapeutic moves, and that any wish to stabilize such a distinction itself amounts to a regression to a scientistic or metaphysical conception of philosophy, and manifests a proneness to unwitting delusions of sense. We do not find such recognition in McGinn’s work. 31 Hutto, p. 93. 32 McGinn, p. 498. 33 Ibid. 34 Hutto confirmed this as his view on reading an earlier draft of this paper. 35 McGinn, p. 513. 36 Ibid., 498. 37 Why do we say ‘crucial’? Why privilege 6.54? Internally, there is good reason to do so in that it is quite plainly a or even the culmination of the text; and, moreover, it is a culmination that gives an explicit over‐arching instruction on how to read the entire text. At the very least, if 6.54 is not as significant as we think, then that proves that Wittgenstein understood what he himself was doing quite poorly. Of course, that is quite possible; but interpretative charity suggests that one should persist in attempting to read a text as if it were understood by its own author until one finds very strong reasons not to do so. We have yet to be presented with any such reasons. Externally, Wittgenstein’s famous letter to von Ficker provides a strong cue toward taking seriously the Preface and the ‘conclusion’, including obviously 6.54, of the Tractatus. That external evidence was, of course, a primary motivation in the original fomentation by Diamond and Conant of the ‘resolute reading’ of the early Wittgenstein. 38 See, for example, his ‘Elucidation’, or similarly the longer manuscript ‘The Method of the Tractatus’ (which in its full‐length version is still forthcoming – this text, from which the former is excerpted and adapted, is cited by McGinn, n. 4, and included in edited form in E. Reck (ed.) From Frege to Wittgenstein (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 374–463). 39 How exactly Conant understands the latter (das Klarwenden von Satzen) – and this is crucially different from how McGinn understands it – is best explained in n. 102 of Conant, ‘Elucidation’. 40 McGinn, p. 502. 41 It might be objected against us here that surely we must concede that early Wittgenstein was unwittingly in the grip of certain theoretical preconceptions about language, conceptions expressed in his commitment to a certain conception of analysis, and that, in virtue of this, certain strands in his work do, just as McGinn suggests, betray his elucidatory aims. For even Conant and Diamond concede this much – see especially their joint paper ‘On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely: Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan’, in Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss, Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance (London: Routledge, 2004 Kölbel, Max and Weiss, Bernhard, eds. 2004. Wittgenstein’s Lasting Significance, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). It would take us too far afield to attempt to resolve this issue here; but, as Read and Deans argue in Parts 2 and 3 of their paper ‘Nothing is Shown’ (Philosophical Investigations, 26 (2003), pp. 239–269), accepting this view of the early Wittgenstein is by no means compulsory. This question divides ‘strong’ from ‘weak’ resolute readings; it divides ourselves and Juliet Floyd on one side from Conant and Diamond on the other. 42 McGinn, pp. 509–10. 43 Hutto would resist this view strongly – see his Beyond Physicalism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), sec. 2.3. 44 This rather seems to conflict with what McGinn writes on p. 504, concerning there being for Wittgenstein ‘no propositions that are true a priori’. 45 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 127. (See also Zettel, passim.) Try, then, another label for McGinn’s approach – the ‘Formalist Grammatical’ reading. She, like Max Black, attempts to place the elucidations of TL‐P in a logically similar niche to the (sinnlos) propositions of logic; and she suggests that their role is very alike the role of ‘grammatical remarks’ in Wittgenstein’s later work. See the final section of this paper for some more detail on this. 46 Cf. Philosophical Investigations 89; and the notes on Kremer above. 47 McGinn, p. 502. 48 It is striking that the German word Wittgenstein uses here is überwinden – the very word made famous by Nietzsche, in his struggles, in his attempts, to persuade his readers to (self‐)overcome. We suspect (though we cannot pursue the matter here) that this echo is not accidental, or at least not without resonance and potential significance – and that it is not compatible with McGinn’s approach. 49 Wittgenstein, Letters to C. K. Ogden with Comments on the English Translation of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, ed. G. H. Von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), p. 51. This passage, we believe, fairly decisively undermines the McGinn interpretation, just as thoroughly as it undermines the standard metaphysical interpretation. It gives the lie to McGinn’s effectively ineffabilist thought that Wittgenstein is still getting us to recognize something about ‘the harmony of language and reality’ by means of his elucidations. (If carpers still carp, asking whether we can rely on a text which is not within the body of TL‐P, then one need look no further than the oft‐ignored 5.5563. It gives the lie to something that McGinn appears to believe, namely, that Wittgenstein in TL‐P regrettably believes that ordinary language cannot be described itself as in logically perfect order. For while Wittgenstein in TL‐P did (regrettably) think that ordinary language was invariably not ‘logically perspicuous’ – thus there is scope (see 3.325, 4.002, etc.) for its being made clearer what thought a thought is – we are not thereby making the thought sharper/clearer. McGinn appears to us to elide – not, as needed, to distinguish – these two points.) We are suggesting that if the Tractatus is read properly, it is not necessarily thoroughgoingly committed to a fatal mythology of symbolism – unlike McGinn, who is committed to a residual linguistic ineffabilism. (See also p. 50 of the Letters to Ogden, alongside p. 505 of McGinn.) 50 Here Wittgenstein is making the same point as the later Gordon Baker (in Wittgenstein’s Method) – and we – makes about ‘perspicuous presentation’: it is to be understood as an achievement term. ‘Elucidate’ is intended by Wittgenstein in this same achievement sense. It is not intended to indicate a content that is to be learnt or ‘gestured at’, but ‘simply’ to bring about an achieved/achievable reorientation. We are concerned that both Hutto and McGinn regard Wittgenstein as using ‘elucidate’ as an intransitive verb. (For more detailed discussion of these issues, see Conant, ‘Elucidation’.) 51 Elucidated used transitively, e.g. ‘I struck him’, ‘I elucidated it.’ It is transitive because we can say of him/it that he/it was struck/elucidated; whereas to say ‘I ran’ (as in the sentence ‘I ran along the road’) or ‘I elucidate’ is intransitive because the verb does not take an object. 52 Compare Wittgenstein’s Preface (see n. 10 above). Unlike McGinn’s, our account is (we believe) faithful to Wittgenstein’s injunction to draw ‘limits’ only in language, and to be clear that what is on the other side of those limits is (only) nonsense. That is not to say, of course, that the Tractatus does not have any covert metaphysics. In believing that it does, we do not differ from McGinn or indeed from ineffabilism in general – but the therapeutic reading of TL‐P argues that you will find this metaphysics in the wrong place if you do not take seriously Wittgenstein’s aim in TL‐P of overcoming all metaphysics. Note, for example, that ‘ineffabilism’ and ‘the picture theory’ are not attacked by the later Wittgenstein. But some things are, such as the Russell/Frege subliming of logic and the idea of ‘logical space’, neither of which, so it would seem, Wittgenstein entirely overcame even by proposition 7 of TL‐P. 53 We note further that the term ‘elucidation’ first enters TL‐P at 3.263. McGinn, surprisingly, says nothing about this occurrence of the term. 54 See n. 19 of Conant’s ‘The Method of the Tractatus’ for devastating criticism of the ‘formalist’ interpretation of TL‐P. 55 PI (and OC, etc.) features grammatical remarks: these may at various moments in one’s philosophical struggle seem to one to be senseless, nonsensical, stipulative, sensical (seemingly true‐or‐false), and perhaps more besides. TL‐P engages (one) in its analogue to grammatical investigation – namely, the activity of elucidation. This much of what McGinn evidently supposes it would be hard to dissent from. But her quasi‐formalist rendering of elucidations makes it look as if they really should be part of the symbolism (like tautologies) – and this just IS a mythology of symbolism, we have suggested. This cannot be an adequate reading of 6.54, which requires that we throw away the nonsensical, not that we (e.g.) let the merely senseless ‘fall away’ when we recognize it as senseless – and the production of an adequate reading of 6.54 was expressly McGinn’s main aim in her paper (see again p. 497). It may seem an unsatisfactory aspect of our interpretation of McGinn that we seemingly cannot decide whether she is an ineffabilist, a positivist or a formalist reader of TL‐P. But we think that this is actually a symptom of her confusion – she cannot decide, and oscillates between all of these and the therapeutic reading. Her effort to generate an elucidatory reading which is not simply an unstable pot‐pourri of all four of these reading‐genres is, we have argued, unsuccessful. It is quite odd, however, that she does not mention the Blackian ‘formalist’ possibility, which on the central question of the status of elucidations seems possibly the reading closest to her own. Perhaps the reason she does not favour ‘formalism’ (besides its well‐known defects) is her insistence, remarked earlier, that ‘the idea that all logical truths are tautologies’ is itself to be excluded from the alleged ‘elucidatory core’ of TL‐P. 56 What does harm is to think that one has grasped and can set out the grammar of our language so as to refute metaphysicians, solipsists, sceptics, etc. This, as we have said, unfortunately seems to remain McGinn’s and Hutto’s implicit wish/dream. 57 A fuller treatment of the matters discussed in this paragraph would bring out the importance to 5.4733 also of Wittgenstein’s remarks concerning ‘internal relations’ and concerning ‘the context of significant use’ (as emphasized by Conant in his ‘Elucidation’ and also by Denis McManus in his forthcoming book on the Tractatus). But we think that our text above is sufficient for present purposes. 58 It is important to bear in mind that the Context Principle (CP) is above all a methodological recommendation, not a quasi‐metaphysical assertion. The failure to see its relevance throughout Wittgenstein’s work links McGinn and Hacker – see, for example, the argument of Witherspoon’s paper, especially pp. 333–8, wherein Witherspoon shows exactly where in McGinn (pre 1999) goes wrong, and falls into a sophisticated version of positivism (‘Conceptions of Nonsense in Carnap and Wittgenstein’, in Crary and Read, The New Wittgenstein, pp. 315–350). McGinn’s failure to take proper account of the Context Principle in her thought on any stage of Wittgenstein’s career, together with her wish to have Wittgenstein enable us to say or at least ‘see’ things about language, eclipses the – secondary – question of which particular variant of positivism or ineffabilism or formalism (or what hybrid of the three) she ascribes to TL‐P, and which to PI or OC. For more detail on (the centrality of) the Context Principle, see the work of Conant, Ricketts’s essay in Sluga and Stern, The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, and the 1997 exchange between Goldfarb and Diamond in the Journal of Philosophical Research, 30. 59 Letters to Ogden, p. 51 – and see also the passage from p. 51 quoted above. McGinn has, one might say, been deceived by the grammar of the word ‘elucidation’... 60 It is important to understand that we do not intend this as a general, quasi‐technical, quasi‐positivist distinction which can be wheeled in to do philosophical work. On this score, the discussion on pp. 70–1 of Goldfarb’s ‘Metaphysics and Nonsense’ (1997) is well taken: ‘Wittgenstein’s talk of nonsense is just shorthand for a process of coming to see how [certain strings of] words fall apart when worked out from the inside’ (p. 71, our italics). 61 One reason why this must be so is that, crucially, the distinction between saying and showing as employed by the ineffabilists – and once again we fear that on this point McGinn must backslide into their position (and/or else into some variant of positivism) – is a mashed‐together and incoherent rendition of two different distinctions. (I) There is what is said by ordinary propositions (something) and tautologies (nothing) versus what their form shows us (that they are propositions, or that they are tautologies) – a distinction made by Wittgenstein in the body of the Tractatus. (II) Then there is what is said by nonsensical propositions (nothing) versus what is allegedly shown by them (e.g. the way language hooks up to reality), or what is allegedly elucidated for us by means of them – II is a ‘distinction’ not found in the Tractatus, but it has to bear the main weight of any more or less traditional reading of that work. For detail on why the distinction between saying and showing is thus a hopeless basis for any genuinely elucidatory reading of that work, see nn. 11, 19, 20, 26 and 68 of Conant, ‘Elucidation’. 62 By which we do not mean to say that McGinn actually succeeds in ‘making sense of’ (quantitatively) more of the text than does (say) Anscombe. What we mean is simply that her reading seems at least to give some hope of not turning out to be evidently irresolute, and of not requiring Wittgenstein to be fundamentally inconsistent and without intellectual integrity. Plus that, as discussed above, she has at least the ambition, as do resolute readers, of sketching genuine continuities between Wittgenstein’s early and later work. 63 See Read’s discussion at pp. 91–2 of his ‘Throwing Away “the Bedrock”’. 64 See also n. 60 above: it is very important to understand, then, that ours is not an interpretation on which the early Wittgenstein implicitly buys into a fact‐stating ‘picture’ of language. Ineffabilist and positivist interpretations of the Tractatus centrally do; and our interpretation precisely sets its stall out via the overcoming of those interpretations. To read Conant and Diamond with understanding, as one of us (Read) endeavours to do, for instance, in Part 1 of ‘Nothing is Shown’ (with Deans), is to understand that we ‘resolutists’ do not call the Tractatus nonsense because it fails to conform to a model of fact‐stating language, but, rather, simply because in the end it does not do linguistic work, does not amount to anything: because it fails to exhibit the kind of solidity or non‐ambiguity that working language has to it. The ‘propositions’ of the Tractatus systematically hover – to such an extent that, in the end, whether or not they are propositions at all is itself something on which they hover. (See Read’s ‘Throwing Away “the Bedrock”’ for development of this theme.) 65 This would also stand as an indication as to why Wittgenstein sought to dispense with the ladder metaphor in his later work. 66 See again Conant, ‘Elucidation’, n. 102. 67 This paper owes a large debt of thanks to two people in particular (neither of whom would concur with its content): Luke Mulhall and Dan Hutto. Dan read a late draft and made extensive and helpful comments, giving us much pause for thought and much more work to do. The paper would simply not exist without Luke Mulhall’s initial thoughts and writings on these matters, thoughts of which he later thought better! Thus our greatest debt is to him. Indeed, Mulhall’s Ph.D. thesis is, in our opinion, the most profound non‐therapeutic, elucidatory reading of TL‐P that we have come across. Others who have helped at key points throughout the paper’s genesis are Jim Conant, Rob Deans, Simon Glendinning, Kelly Dean Jolley, Marie McGinn and David Oderberg; thanks to all. We also thank the audiences at the University of Chicago Wittgenstein Workshop and at the Notre Dame Philosophy Department for helpful comments

Commit · Hacker · Nonsense · Scrutiny · Logic, programming, and type systems · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

• Ineffability investigations

  Open Access•Timothy D Knepper•International Journal for…•2008

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• From Frege to Wittgenstein

  Edited by Erich H Reck•From Frege to Wittgenstein•2002

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• The New Wittgenstein

  Alice Crary, Rupert Read•New Wittgenstein•2002

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• I want you to bring me a slab

  Open Access•Warren Goldfarb, Warren D Goldfarb•Synthese•1983

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• Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein

  Open Access•H O Mounce•Philosophical Books•1970

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• Mathematics and Meaning in Tractatus

  Open Access•Michael Kremer•Philosophical Investigations•2002

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• Between Metaphysics and Nonsense

  Marie Mcginn•The Philosophical Quarterly•1999

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• Insight and Illusion

  Constantine Sandis, P M S Hacker et al.•Insight and Illusion•2021

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