Monday, January 20, 2014

Communication and Grammar

According to the Tractatus, a Proposition corresponds to a Fact in two respects--its components and its structure.  Now, as has been previously been discussed, the latter is difficult to defend, since in the empirical manifold there is no obvious sharp distinction corresponding to that of Subject and Predicate, especially in the case of action verbs.  Furthermore, while it seems difficult to argue that a shared vocabulary is essential to effective Communication, adherence to the rules of Grammar seems equally inessential to that end.  So, perhaps the most important reason why Wittgenstein repudiates his earlier concept of Description is that he comes to recognize that the internal Logic of a Proposition contributes nothing to it meaningfulness, thereby rendering the Logicist privileging of that Logic questionable, at best.

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