Philosophical Investigations 26:4 October 2003

ISSN 0190-0536

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: True Thoughts

and Nonsensical Propositions

Andrew Lugg, University of Ottawa

At the end of the Tractatus Wittgenstein appears to contradict what

he says about his own remarks at the beginning of the book. In the
Preface he says: ‘[T]he truth of the thoughts that are here set forth
seems to me unassailable and definitive [scheint mir die Wahrheit der
hier mitgeteilten Gedanken unantastbar und definitiv]’ – indeed he speaks
of his ‘thoughts’ five times in the space of a page.1 Yet in the penul-
timate paragraph of the book he says: ‘My propositions serve as elu-
cidations in the following way: anyone who understands me
eventually recognizes them as nonsensical [Meine Sätze erläutern
dadurch, daß sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt’
(6.54). How can Wittgenstein believe his propositions are lacking in
sense while regarding himself as communicating thoughts? One
would imagine that insofar as he manages to express thoughts, he is
making sense, and insofar as his propositions are nonsensical, he is
not setting forth thoughts, never mind unassailably and definitively
true ones.
A common response to this difficulty is to discount one of
Wittgenstein’s pronouncements and take the other to represent his
true view.2 Given his belief in the cardinal importance of his
thoughts, one may be forgiven for supposing he could not have
regarded his propositions as nonsensical. And given the radically criti-
cal nature of his philosophy (compare 4.0031: ‘Alle Philosophie ist
“Sprachkritik” ’, and 4.112: ‘Philosophy does not result in “philo-
sophical propositions” ’), it is tempting to dismiss his claim about the
unassailable and definite truth of his thoughts as bombast. Both
responses, however, labour under considerable difficulty. The first is
1. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuin-
ness (London: Routledge, 1961), p. 5. References in the text are to this work.
2. See for instance R. Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (London: Kegan Paul,
1935), pp. 37–38, and C. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press,
1991), chapter 6.

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02148, USA.
 Andrew Lugg 333
suspect since Wittgenstein was not at all reluctant to brand his propo-
sitions as nonsensical and was unwavering in his opposition to think-
ing of philosophy as a body of doctrine. The second is problematic
because he did not hesitate a decade or so later, when he returned
to philosophy, to criticize and reformulate what he had said in the
Tractatus.3
Nor is it easy to rest content with the suggestion that Wittgen-
stein took himself to be expressing ineffable truths by means of non-
sensical propositions.4 This way of understanding the remarks of
the Tractatus harmonizes with the supremely confident tone of the
Preface and the uncompromising character of the declaration at 6.54
as well as with Wittgenstein’s recognition of ‘things that cannot be
put into words’, things that ‘make themselves manifest’ (6.522). But it
has the disadvantage of attributing to him the dubious conception
of important nonsense, a conception he does not invoke (indeed he
never speaks of nonsense as conveying truths or as being important).5
Worse still, there is the awkward fact that in his Preface Wittgen-
stein not only speaks of ‘the truth of the thoughts that are here set
forth’, he twice avers that thoughts are ‘expressed [ausgedrückt]’ in the
book.
The difficulties besetting these approaches can doubtless be eased
to a certain extent. There is little likelihood, however, that they can

3. See, e.g., L. Wittgenstein, ‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’, in J. Klagge and

A. Nordmann (eds.), Philosophical Occasions (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1993), pp. 29–35;
Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed. B. McGuinness, trans. J. Schulte and B. McGuin-
ness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 74; Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, trans.
A. Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. 212; and Remarks on the Foundations of
Mathematics, eds. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans.
G.E.M. Anscombe, revised edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), VII, §36. Moreover
Wittgenstein revised the Tractatus for the second printing. For instance he replaced
‘independent propositions’ at 5.152 by ‘elementary propositions’.
4. See G.E.M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 162; N. Malcolm, ‘Wittgenstein’, Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy, vol. 8 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 331; and P.M.S. Hacker,
Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
chapters 4 and 5, especially pp. 139–143.
5. Compare B. Russell, ‘Introduction’ to the Tractatus, p. 22; F. Ramsey, The Foun-
dations of Mathematics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1931), p. 263; R. Carnap,
The Logical Syntax of Language, trans. A. Smeaton (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1937), p. 283; and C. Diamond, op. cit., p. 181. Also compare L. Wittgenstein,
Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 1932–1935, ed. A. Ambrose (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979), p. 64: ‘Most of us think there is nonsense that makes sense and
nonsense which does not. . . . But these are nonsense in the same sense, the only
difference being in the jingle of the words’.

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334 Philosophical Investigations
be removed entirely and more than enough reason to explore the
possibility that Wittgenstein means us to understand him some other
way. In particular it seems worth considering whether he speaks as
he does because he believes unassailably and definitively true
thoughts cannot be sensibly set forth in the form of propositions.
On this view, to be examined in the balance of this paper, Wittgen-
stein takes sentences that express thoughts to be assertable only when
they are capable both of being true and of being false and regards
the assertion of all other thoughts, even indubitably true ones, as
nonsensical. He is to be read as noting in his Preface that his
thoughts, if true, are indisputably true, and as noting at 6.54 that this
very fact means the remarks of the book do not state facts about
the world, language, logic or anything else (and hence are not ‘mean-
ingful propositions’).
Before developing this suggestion, I should stress that Wittgenstein
would not have expected us to regard every remark in the Tractatus
as setting forth an unassailably and definitively true thought or as
being nonsensical. He would not have intended his criticisms of
other philosophers’ views or his pronouncements about the history
of philosophy to be so understood. There is no suggestion in the
text that he thought of ‘The conceptual notation of Frege and
Russell . . . fails to exclude all mistakes’ (3.325)’, ‘Most of the propo-
sitions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false
but nonsensical’ (4.003) and similar remarks as anything other than
straightforwardly true comments (see 3.331, 5.132, 5.525 and 5.5422
for other examples). Nor is Wittgenstein plausibly read as regarding
his contentions about philosophy being ‘Sprachkritik’ and not result-
ing in ‘propositions’ as beyond dispute or less than perfectly coher-
ent. He often challenged common opinion regarding the nature of
philosophy (see, e.g., 4.112), and he knew full well that there are
other intelligible conceptions of the subject.
In his Preface and at 6.54, I take it, Wittgenstein is alluding to
remarks like ‘The world is all that is the case’ (1), ‘A name means an
object’ (3.203), ‘The propositional variable signifies the formal
concept’ (4.127) and ‘The only necessity that exists is logical neces-
sity’ (6.37), remarks that seem to express significant thoughts about
the world, language and logic. He presents such remarks as ‘thoughts
[Gedanken]’ and is most naturally understood as referring to them
when he speaks of ‘my propositions [meine Sätze]’ (6.54). However
he may have regarded his observations about other thinkers’ views
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 Andrew Lugg 335
and the nature of philosophy, there can be little question that he
took ‘The world is all that is the case’, ‘A name means an object’
and the like to express unassailably and definitively true thoughts and
yet to be, for all that, nonsensical propositions. Since such remarks
are as true as anything can be, I imagine him thinking, they are not,
properly speaking, propositions at all.
Also to avoid misunderstanding I should note that Wittgenstein
uses ‘thought [Gedanke]’ in his Preface and ‘proposition [Satz]’ at 6.54
differently from how he uses them in the body of the book. None
of his remarks concerning the world, language and logic is a thought
in the sense of ‘[a] logical picture of facts’ (3) or a proposition in
the sense of ‘a propositional sign in its projective relation to the
world’ (3.12). Indeed, on the view of thoughts and propositions
adumbrated in the Tractatus, ‘unassailably and definitively true
thought’ and ‘nonsensical proposition’ are solecistic. Officially ‘[t]here
are no pictures that are true a priori’ (2.225), and ‘[a] proposition is
not a medley of words’ (3.141). Nor it is of any help that Wittgen-
stein also says: ‘A thought is a proposition with sense [Der Gedanke
ist der sinnvolle Satz]’ (4). While this remark seems to allow for the
possibility of nonsensical propositions, it leaves no room for unas-
sailably and definitively true thoughts, every such thought being, on
Wittgenstein’s own reckoning, devoid of sense.
To appreciate what Wittgenstein is claiming in his Preface and at
6.54, one needs to keep firmly in mind that he was not a technical
philosopher who aspired to use terminology as consistently as pos-
sible, but rather a thinker who used words – regardless of how he
had used them elsewhere – with an eye to hitting ‘the nail . . . on
the head’ (p. 3).6 The context in which his remarks occur can make
all the difference, and when trying to figure out what he is saying
it is essential to consider his immediate aims and interests. More
specifically, given the concerns of this paper, it is important to notice
that at the beginning of the Tractatus Wittgenstein is telling us what
to expect and at the end he is providing a warning. Whereas in the
body of the book he sets forth thoughts about the world, language

6. Though now rarely stressed, this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thinking did not escape
his contemporaries’ notice. See, e.g., the letters quoted in the editor’s introduction
to B. Russell, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, volume 6, ed. J.G. Slater (London:
Routledge, 1992), pp. xxvii, xxxi and xxxvii, and R. Carnap, ‘Intellectual Autobiog-
raphy’, in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle: Open Court,
1963), p. 25.

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336 Philosophical Investigations
and logic, in the Preface he draws attention to the fact that the
thoughts to come are not in any sense common or garden thoughts
and at 6.54 he alerts us to something we may have missed – that
what we have read is not in any interesting sense information.
Returning now to the question of what exactly Wittgenstein is
saying at the beginning and end of the Tractatus, the first point I
should like to make is that he understands the central remarks of the
book as tautologous in the pre-Tractatus sense he inherited from
earlier thinkers (as opposed to the post-Tractatus sense he himself was
largely responsible for). He works with a conception of a tautology
that covers sentences like ‘Every part is part of something’ as well as
sentences like ‘If A then A’, which are true by virtue of their truth-
functional connectives, and takes his remarks to be equally empty,
uninformative and without consequence.7 It is fundamental to
Wittgenstein’s thinking that, all appearances to the contrary notwith-
standing, what he is saying is no less truistic. As he sees it, the cat-
egory of tautologousness covers not only the prosaic ‘propositions’
philosophers usually take it to cover but also thoughts of the sort set
forth in the Tractatus (along with many other sorts of ‘propositions’
including ‘logical propositions’, ‘the propositions of mathematics’ and
‘propositions’ about the internal relationships among colours, tones
and the like).8
In noting that Wittgenstein took his remarks to be tautologous in
the wide, pre-Tractatus sense I do not mean to imply he had in mind
anything more precise than other thinkers at the time. My point is
that he appropriated the concept of tautologousness current when
he was writing and applied it to his own propositions. Like Russell
and other contemporaries, he wielded the intuitive notion of a tau-
tology in an informal and unselfconscious manner and did not feel
called on – as Carnap and other later philosophers did – to spell out

7. For the shift in the use of the word ‘tautology’ prompted by the Tractatus see B.
Dreben and J. Floyd, ‘Tautology: How Not To Use A Word’, Synthese 87 (1991),
23–49. Interestingly the old sense of tautology is still often invoked. See, e.g., W.V.
Quine, The Pursuit of Truth, revised edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992), p. 55, where Quine avails himself of ‘the intuitive notion of tautology, the
notion that comes into play when we protest that someone’s assertion comes down
to “0 = 0” and is an empty matter of words’.
8. Also see H.O. Mounce, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 102: ‘[T]he propositions of the Tractatus are not tautologies but they
belong to roughly the same category’. On my view Wittgenstein’s ‘propositions’ are
tautologies – and were regarded as such by him. They are genuine thoughts; they
are not out-and-out gibberish with ‘an appearance of sense’ (p. 104).

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 Andrew Lugg 337
the notion more clearly. In Wittgenstein’s view, thoughts the truth
of which can be determined a priori are tautologies, not substantive
truths, and ‘propositions’ that can be recognized to be true ‘from the
symbol alone’ say nothing (compare 6.113). From his standpoint the
important thing is that we shall come to see, if we reflect closely
enough on the thoughts he expresses, that they are just as tautolo-
gous as ‘If A then A’ and we are deluding ourselves if we think
otherwise.9
Consider the first remark of the Tractatus: ‘The world is all that is
the case [Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist]’. While this remark has a
metaphysical ring, it is better understood as a tautology in the tra-
ditional sense, indeed as a tautology in the simplest and clearest sense:
as a sentence that involves a repetition of ideas. Wittgenstein would
have regarded it as unassailably and definitively true since it refers to
the same thing twice, the ground covered by the phrase ‘the world’
being the same as the ground covered by the phrase ‘all that is the
case’. The thought is tautologous (and hence empty, uninformative,
devoid of consequences) if only because it is impossible for the world
to comprise more or less than what is the case (or comprise some-
thing else). As Wittgenstein himself tacitly acknowledged in a note-
book from the time the Tractatus was being prepared, ‘the world
exists’ is synonymous with ‘there is what there is’.10 He would not
have needed to be reminded that the two phrases mean the same
thing, and he could have added by way of explanation something he
had written slightly earlier: ‘A definition is a tautology and shews
internal relations between its two terms!’.11

9. Wittgenstein was well aware that the tautologous character of his remarks is not
so easily recognized as the tautologous character of ‘If A then A’. He writes in the
Preface: ‘Perhaps this book will only be understood by someone who has himself
had the thoughts that are expressed in it’, and later observed that ‘every sentence in
the Tractatus should be seen as the heading of a chapter, needing further exposition’.
M. Drury, ‘Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in R. Rhees (ed.), Recollections of
Wittgenstein (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 159.
10 L. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 2nd edition
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 86 (entry for 20 October 1916): ‘Aesthetically, the
miracle is that the world exists. That there is what there is’.
11 Ibid., p. 18 (entry for 24 October 1914). It is no objection that ‘was der Fall ist’
introduces the non-trivial idea that the world consists of facts, not of things (compare
1.1). On the present interpretation Wittgenstein also took ‘The world is the totality
of facts’ to be tautologous and ‘The world is the totality of things’ to be contradic-
tory (i.e. unassailably and definitively false). Frege seems to have understood what
Wittgenstein was saying – though he doubtless missed the point – when he wrote
to him regarding the first few remarks of the Tractatus: ‘At the beginning I find the

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338 Philosophical Investigations
And likewise for ‘A name means [bedeutet] an object’, ‘The propo-
sitional variable signifies the formal concept’ and ‘The only neces-
sity that exists is logical necessity’.While these remarks do not involve
a simple repetition of ideas, Wittgenstein would have considered
them to be equally as tautologous (in the broad sense) as ‘The world
is all that is the case’. For him it is impossible for a name to mean
something other than an object, impossible for a propositional vari-
able to signify a ‘proper concept’ instead of a formal one, and impos-
sible for necessity to be non-logical. (Compare 3.203, 4.1271 and
6.3: ‘The object is its [i.e. the name’s] meaning [Bedeutung]’; ‘Every
variable is the sign for a formal concept’; and ‘[O]utside logic every-
thing is accidental’.) In fact Wittgenstein is most charitably read as
believing each remark in the Tractatus of the sort under discussion
submits to the same treatment. ‘A propositional sign is a fact’ is tau-
tologous since ‘[w]hat constitutes a propositional sign is that in its
elements (the words) stand in a determinate relation to one another’
(3.14); ‘A proposition shows its sense’ is tautologous (4.022) since the
sense of a proposition is what it says, something that is ‘show[n]’
(4.461); ‘[L]ogic is a priori’ is tautologous (5.473) since ‘we cannot
make mistakes in logic’ and ‘illogical thought’ is an ‘impossibility’
(5.4731); and so on.
Wittgenstein does not, it is true, explicitly refer to his remarks as
tautologies and there can be no denying that he says: ‘[W]e call [a]
proposition [Satz] a tautology’ when it ‘is true for all the truth-
possibilities of the elementary propositions’ (4.46). Still he clearly has
in the back of his mind the older notion of a tautology as a sen-
tence that is empty and lacking in consequences. At 4.461 he appeals
to the unconditional truth of tautologies to explain their lack of
truth-conditions; at 6.1–6.11 he writes: ‘The propositions of logic
are tautologies. Therefore the propositions of logic say nothing’; and
at 6.3751 he declares that ‘[t]he statement that a point in the visual
field has two different colours at the same time is a contradiction

expressions “to be the case” [der Fall sein] and “fact” [Tatsache] and I conjecture that
to be the case and to be a fact are the same. The world is everything that is the case
and the world is the totality of facts. Is not every fact the case, and is not that which
is the case a fact? Is it not the same when I say, Let A be a fact, as when I say, Let
A be the case? What is the point of this double expression?’. Letter dated 28 June
1919, quoted in J. Floyd, ‘The Uncaptive Eye’, in L.S. Rouner (ed.), Loneliness (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), pp. 88–89. The translation is by B.
Dreben and J. Floyd. Also compare Frege’s letter of 3 April 1920 to Wittgenstein
(ibid., pp. 96–97).

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 Andrew Lugg 339
[i.e. the negation of a tautology]’. Moreover he used the word ‘tau-
tology’ in the traditional sense before and after completing the Trac-
tatus. Thus in 1915 he wrote: ‘[T]he complexity of spatial objects
is a logical complexity, for to say that one thing is part of another
is always a tautology’, and in 1929 he wrote: ‘One shade of
colour cannot simultaneously have two different colours’ and similar
sentences ‘do not express an experience but are in some sense
tautologies’.12
In fact Wittgenstein seems to have regarded his own remarks as
he regarded logical propositions – as ‘limiting cases . . . of the com-
binations of signs’ (4.466). He sees no significant logical difference
between ‘The world is all that is the case’ and ‘p … p’. To his way
of thinking both remarks are ‘part of the symbolism, just as “0” is
part of the symbolism of arithmetic’ (4.4611), each being obtainable
from a sinnvoller Satz by replacing one of its components with a
grammatically similar component – for instance by replacing ‘q’ in
‘p … q’ by ‘p’ and ‘inhabited’ in ‘The world is inhabited’ by ‘all is
that is the case’. For Wittgenstein both kinds of tautology function
as degenerate propositions (or hinges) around which ordinary, non-
degenerate factual propositions turn.‘The world is all that is the case’
is – as he later noted it in connection with ‘p … p’ – ‘a degenerate
proposition, which is on the side of truth’; it too functions as ‘an
important point of intersection of significant sentences’, ‘a pivotal
point of our method of description’.13
A better and more striking comparison, though, is with Wittgen-
stein’s conception of the propositions of mathematical physics,
propositions that are hardly tautologies narrowly understood. His
insistence on the unassailable and definitive truth of ‘The world is
all that is the case’, ‘A name means an object’ and the rest is remi-
niscent of nothing so much as his insistence on the a priori charac-
ter of ‘the axioms of mechanics’ (6.341). As Wittgenstein construes
them, the remarks of the Tractatus and the axioms of Newtonian
mechanics are alike in that they both define a ‘purely geometrical’
network of concepts, ‘all [the] properties [of which] can be given a
priori’ (6.35). In the case of ‘The world is all that is the case’ and ‘A
name means an object’, as in the case of the ‘law of least action’,

12 Notebooks 1914–1916, op. cit., p. 62 (entry for 17 June 1915), and ‘Some Remarks
on Logical Form’, op. cit., p. 32.
13 Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, op. cit., III, §33.

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340 Philosophical Investigations
‘what is certain a priori proves to be something purely logical’
(6.3211). There is no difference to speak of, between such remarks
and ‘the principle of sufficient reason, the laws of continuity in
nature and of least effort in nature, etc. etc.’. They are also ‘a priori
insights’ about the possible forms of propositions (6.34).14
Wittgenstein saw himself, as he saw the mathematical physicist, as
concerned with the representation of phenomena (as opposed to the
description of them). His aims, though much more general than
the mathematical physicist’s, are not significantly different. Whereas
the mathematical physicist aspires to characterize what counts as a
‘proposition of physics’ and supply ‘bricks for building the edifice of
science’ (6.341), he aspires to characterize ‘the most general pro-
positional form’ (4.5) and supply bricks for building any conceivable
edifice. The system of thoughts expressed in the Tractatus, like
mechanics (die Mechanik), says: ‘Any building that you want to erect,
whatever it may be, must somehow be constructed with these bricks,
and with these alone’. For Wittgenstein, the philosopher’s task is to
detail what is necessary for a sign-language to represent how things
are by providing an ‘essential feature’ of a proposition, specifically a
feature ‘without which the proposition could not express its sense’
(3.34). Philosophy is concerned with ‘the logical syntax of any
sign-language’ (6.124) and, in much the same fashion as mechanics,
it ‘imposes a uniform form on the description of the world’ (6.341).15
I have been concentrating on Wittgenstein’s claim in his Preface
that his thoughts are unassailably and definitely true.What has already
been said, however, also helps clarify why he would end up declar-
ing his propositions nonsensical. This seemingly harsh judgement
follows directly if, as I have been insisting, he took his remarks to
be tautologous. Since he identified making sense with being infor-
mative and regarded tautologies as unassertable, he could hardly avoid
concluding that any attempt to state his remarks in the form of

14 Also compare 6.35: ‘Laws like the principle of sufficient reason, etc, are about
the net and not about what the net describes’. On the interpretation being pro-
posed, the central remarks of the Tractatus are likewise about the net rather than what
it describes.
15 Also like the axioms of mechanics, the thoughts in the Tractatus are comparable
to ‘the number-system [with which] we must be able to write down any number
we wish’ (6.341). Incidentally, Wittgenstein did not hesitate to write at a time when
the main ideas of the Tractatus were already in place: ‘My whole task consists in
explaining the nature of the proposition’ (Notebooks 1914–1916, op. cit., p. 39, entry
for 21 January 1915).

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 Andrew Lugg 341
propositions is nonsensical.16 While ‘The world is all that is the case’,
‘A name means an object’ and the like (assuming they are tautolo-
gies) are not nonsensical in the way that ‘Socrates is identical’ is
nonsensical (see 5.473), they are – when understood as propositions
– nonsensical nevertheless. Indeed, had Wittgenstein regarded his
remarks as propositions, he would have left himself open to the
charge of failing to notice that his insistence on their tautological
character means they are not (fact-stating) Sätze.
The point can also be developed slightly differently. What I am
suggesting is that Wittgenstein deemed his remarks – construed as
propositions – to be nonsensical because he took sentences to be
assertable only when they have contrasts. The reason ‘The world is
all that is the case’ is unassertable is that the more ‘the world’ is taken
to cover, the less the sentence says, and its content – and hence the
possibility of its sensibly stating anything – vanishes completely when
‘the world’ is taken to cover all that is the case.17 In fact Wittgen-
stein’s thinking in the Tractatus is not so very different from his think-
ing in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’, where he says: ‘[I]t is nonsense to say
that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine
it not existing’ (and notes it is equally nonsensical to speak of the
experience of feeling that one is ‘safe whatever happens’, ‘safety’ being
a matter of being ‘safe from this or that’).18 Since understanding a
proposition requires knowing what the world would have to be like
both in the event that it is true and in the event that it is false,
16 Wittgenstein’s identification of sense with conveyable information has often been
noted. See, e.g., A. Kenny, Wittgenstein, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973, p. 46.
Also compare A. Coffa, ‘Carnap’s Sprachanschauung Circa 1932’, in PSA 1976, eds. F.
Suppe and P. Asquith, 1977, p. 212: ‘The inability of a sentence to be supported by
or to conflict with a fact was, for Wittgenstein and later positivists [sic] the very
mark of its inability to convey information about the world; the very mark, that is,
of what they misleadingly called a “meaningless” statement’. Also in this regard it is
important to remember that Wittgenstein held that nothing ‘can be said’ except the
‘propositions of natural science’ (6.53) and believed a proposition ‘cannot be given
a sense by assertion’ (4.064).
17 Compare G. Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, 2nd edition (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1980), p. 40: ‘It is only in virtue of the possibility of
something not being wise that it makes sense to say “Solon is wise”. The content
of a concept diminishes as its extension increases; if its extension becomes all embrac-
ing its content must vanish altogether’. On Wittgenstein’s ‘contrastive view of
meaning’, see W.D. Goldfarb, ‘Metaphysics and Nonsense: On Cora Diamond’s The
Realistic Spirit’, Journal of Philosophical Research 57 (1997), pp. 57–73, especially 67–69.
18 L. Wittgenstein, ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, in Philosophical Occasions, op. cit., pp. 41–42.
Also compare p. 42: ‘One may be tempted to say what I am wondering at is a tau-
tology. . . . But then it’s just nonsense to say one is wondering at a tautology’.

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342 Philosophical Investigations
remarks like those of the Tractatus, which lack contrasts, are not
propositions strictly speaking (and anyone who understands Wittgen-
stein must eventually come to recognize that his Sätze are ‘non-
sensical [unsinnig]’).19
While Wittgenstein does not say in so many words that his
thoughts cannot be stated in the form of propositions since they are
tautologies, he undoubtedly thinks this. When discussing properties
and relations necessarily possessed by the objects that exemplify
them, for instance, he writes: ‘The existence of an internal property
of a possible situation is not expressed by means of a proposition
[but] expresses itself in the proposition representing the situation’,
and goes on: ‘It would be just as nonsensical [unsinnig] to assert that
a proposition had a formal property as to deny it’ (4.124). In other
words it is a mistake to regard a (tautologous) Satz like ‘Darker shades
of blue are darker than lighter shades’ as a proposition, it being
‘impossible . . . to assert by means of propositions that such internal
. . . relations exist’ (4.122). ‘Darker shades of blue are darker than
lighter shades’ lacks a meaningful contrast since it is ‘unthinkable’
that darker and lighter shades of a colour ‘should not stand in [the]
relation [of lighter to darker]’ (4.123), and there is no escaping the
conclusion that this sentence, even though tautologous, is not a
(meaningful) proposition.
The parallel with what Wittgenstein says about Newtonian
mechanics is again worth considering. To his way of thinking the
remarks of the Tractatus and the axioms of mechanics both concern
the representation of facts and it is nonsensical to treat either kind
of sentence as representing how things are. For him ‘The world is
all that is the case’ and ‘Force equals mass times acceleration’ are
equally true a priori (and hence equally unassertable) and the pos-
sibility of describing the world by means of the system of remarks
adumbrated in the Tractatus no more tells us something ‘about the
world’ than does ‘the possibility of describing the world by means
of Newtonian mechanics’ (6.342). Neither sort of remark asserts
anything and neither counts as a genuine proposition. (Also it is
worth noticing that at 6.2 Wittgenstein refers to ‘the propositions of

19 Compare: ‘Propositions represent the existence and nonexistence of states of

affairs’ (p. 41), and ‘Notes on Logic’, Notebooks 1914–1918, op. cit., p. 98: ‘What we
know when we understand a proposition is this: we know what is the case if the
proposition is true and what is the case if it is false’.

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 Andrew Lugg 343
mathematics’ – propositions he would not have for a minute dreamed
of disparaging – as ‘pseudo-propositions [Scheinsätze]’.)
It should not be thought that I am running roughshod over the
fact that Wittgenstein maintains that while tautologies (narrowly
understood) ‘lack sense’, they are ‘not . . . nonsensical’
(4.461–4.4611). To the contrary, I am claiming that he construed his
own remarks exactly the same way. He took both types of sentence
to be ‘sinnlos’ because they say nothing, and regarded both – pro-
vided they are not asserted – as ‘nicht unsinnig’. In the one case no
less than the other what is nonsensical is treating a proposition that
says nothing as though it provides information.We are to understand
tautologies – in the broad or narrow sense – as sinnlos when taken
to ‘represent [stellen]’ the ‘scaffolding of the world’, and as unsinnig
when taken to ‘describe’ it (6.124).20 On Wittgenstein’s view ‘The
world is all that is the case’ is as sinnlos as ‘p … p’, and asserting ‘p
… p’ is as unsinnig as asserting ‘The world is all that is the case’.
(Actually Wittgenstein reckoned the sinnlos/unsinnig distinction to be
of wide application and took the principles of mathematical physics,
statements about internal relations among colours and much else
besides to be sinnlos when unasserted, unsinnig when asserted.)
Nor is the distinction between saying and showing, which loomed
so large in Wittgenstein’s thinking at the time of the Tractatus, being
overlooked or played down. My contention has been that Wittgen-
stein believed that ‘the logic of the world’ is shown in the tautolo-
gies of the Tractatus in much the same way as he believed it to be
‘shown in tautologies by the propositions of logic [and] in equations
by mathematics’ (6.22). As I read him, the fact that his remarks are
tautologies, like ‘[t]he fact that the propositions of logic are tautolo-
gies’, ‘shows the formal – logical – properties of language and the
world’ (6.12). It is as true of tautologies broadly construed as of tau-
tologies narrowly construed that ‘[w]hat can be shown, cannot be said’
(4.1212), and in both cases the thoughts in question have to be pre-
sented, displayed, exhibited (rather than represented, asserted, said).
Once again ‘The world is all that is the case’, ‘A name means an
20 At 6.124 Wittgenstein first refers to logical propositions as ‘describ[ing] the scaf-
folding of the world’, then corrects himself, adding: ‘rather they represent it’. In C.K.
Ogden’s translation of the Tractatus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1933),
which was vetted by Wittgenstein, ‘stellen’ is rendered as ‘presents’. On the question
of how carefully Wittgenstein examined Ogden’s translation, see G.H. von Wright’s
‘Forward’ to L. Wittgenstein, Letters to C.K. Ogden (Oxford: Blackwell, and London:
Routledge, 1973), pp. viii–ix.

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344 Philosophical Investigations
object’ and similar remarks are like ‘p … p’; they can only be shown
and any attempt to assert them results in a nonsensical formation of
words.21
When Wittgenstein speaks at 6.54 of his ‘propositions’ as ‘non-
sensical’, then, he is not dismissing his previous remarks and going
back on his claim in the Preface about his thoughts being unassail-
ably and definitively true. He is noting that his remarks make no
sense when understood as propositions, assertions, Sätze that say
something. Having declared in 6.53 that ‘the correct method in phi-
losophy [die richtige Methode der Philosophie]’ is ‘to say nothing’ other
than ‘propositions of natural science’, which have nothing to do with
philosophy (and to demonstrate to those who ‘say something meta-
physical’ that they have ‘failed to give a meaning to certain signs in
[their] propositions’), he goes on in 6.54 to note that his remarks
are not propositions of natural science, still less propositions designed
to convey something metaphysical. Once we understand him, he tells
us, we shall see that he is presenting thoughts, not putting forward
substantive claims. However it may appear, his Sätze are not propo-
sitions with sense, propositions about the world.
At this juncture it should not seem surprising that besides speak-
ing at 6.54 of his remarks as nonsensical (unsinnig), Wittgenstein also
says they elucidate (erläutern). If the present way of regarding the
remarks of the Tractatus is correct, it made good sense for him to
write: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsen-
sical’. A thought that elucidates our means of representation is unas-
sailably and definitively true (or unassailably and definitely false), and
it is nonsensical to assert it. What goes by the board when we have
climbed the ladder is not Wittgenstein’s elucidations, only the illu-
sion that they describe the logic of language (and provide informa-

21 Compare Anscombe, op. cit., p. 163: ‘[A]ttempts to say what is “shewn” produce
“non-sensical” formations of words’. Where I part company with Anscombe is over
her claim that in Wittgenstein’s eyes only logical truths ‘are . . . “tautologies” ’ and
her insistence that there is a distinction ‘in the theory of the Tractatus between logical
truths and the things that are “shewn” ’. Also see L. Wittgenstein, ‘Notes Dictated to
G.E. Moore’, Notebooks 1914–16, op. cit., p. 110: ‘Even if there were propositions of
[the] form “M is a thing” they would be superfluous (tautologous) because what this
tries to say is something which is already seen when you see “M” ’. In my view what
Wittgenstein says about the law of causality applies to his own remarks (with obvious
changes): ‘If there were a law of causality, it might be put in the following way:There
are laws of nature. But of course that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest’ (6.36).

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 Andrew Lugg 345
tion about the nature of representation). The remarks of the book
are nonsensical only when taken as (assertable) propositions; regarded
as elucidations, they are ‘senseless’, and Wittgenstein was not being
careless when he let C.K. Ogden’s translation of ‘unsinnig’ as ‘sense-
less’ pass without comment.22
Also, it should now be clear how the way of viewing the Tracta-
tus I am promoting differs from the three common ways of viewing
it mentioned at the outset. Instead of dismissing Wittgenstein’s con-
tention that his thoughts are unassailably and definitively true, I have
argued that he construes them the same way as he construes logical
propositions, the laws of mathematical physics and other propositions
he took to be a priori. Instead of discounting his declaration that his
own Sätze are nonsensical, I have emphasized that he took them to
be unassertable because they are tautologous. And instead of trying
to reconcile his two characterizations of his remarks by invoking the
idea of important nonsense (and the idea of ineffable truth), I have
noted that he took the presentation of unassailably and definitively
true thoughts to be very different from the statement of facts in the
form of propositions. The trouble with standard thinking about the
nature of the remarks of the Tractatus, as I see it, is that it attends
insufficiently to Wittgenstein’s view that the truth concerning sym-
bolism and representation has to be exhibited rather than said, pre-
sented rather than described.23
Still the grains of truth in the usual interpretations have not been
lost sight of. I have not denied Wittgenstein aims to present the
essence of representation, nor have I questioned the view that he
believes the propositions of the book ‘disintegrate’, nor have I dis-

22 Ogden renders the passage as: ‘My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he
who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless’. Also it is worth noting
that Wittgenstein accepted Ogden’s translation of ‘unsinnig’ as ‘senseless’ at 4.124 and
5.473 as well as at 6.54.
23 The reading of the Tractatus I am proposing is in some respects close to Carnap’s
view of how it ought to be read.The main difference is that Carnap saw the remarks
of the Tractatus as analytic propositions, i.e. propositions that are assertable despite
their being devoid of ‘material content [inhaltsleer]’. It is, I think, wrong to complain,
as Carnap does, that Wittgenstein failed to recognize that ‘the logic of science can
be formulated, and formulated not in senseless, if practically indispensable pseu-
dosentences, but in perfectly correct sentences’ (R. Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Lan-
guage, London, Routledge, 1937, p. 283). For more on the difference between
Carnap’s and Wittgenstein’s conception of tautologies, see B. Dreben, ‘Quine’, in
R. Barrett and R. Gibson, Perspectives on Quine (Oxford, Blackwell, 1990), especially
p. 86.

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346 Philosophical Investigations
puted that he means what he says about his remarks both in the
Preface and at 6.54. My efforts have been mainly directed at under-
scoring something additional: that he regarded the tautologies that
express his thoughts about language, logic and the rest as
unassertable, took the remarks of the Tractatus as disintegrating into
truth, and believed that ‘presenting’ the logic of language is very dif-
ferent from ‘representing’ phenomena (and what is shown in the
work is no deeper than what is shown by logical propositions).24
Once we notice that tautologies cannot be sensibly asserted, we
can allow that while nothing is said in the Tractatus, much is pre-
sented. We can straddle the fence and see why Wittgenstein would
claim his work is valuable not only because it provides ‘on all essen-
tial points, the final solution of the problems’ but also because
‘it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved’
(p. 5).
Lastly in case it has gone unnoticed, I should mention that, if I
am right, Wittgenstein viewed his remarks in the Tractatus in much
the same way as he viewed similar remarks in his later writings. My
point has been that he believed, early and late, that the logic of
language cannot be captured in the form of propositions and from
beginning to end he was of the opinion that philosophy consists, as
he put it in the Tractatus,‘essentially of elucidations’ (4.112).Through-
out his life, he worked with a conception of nonsense as uninfor-
mativeness and disparaged ‘philosophical propositions’ about the
essential nature of the world (while acknowledging the possibility of
‘thoughts’ regarding the framework within which substantive remarks
about the world can intelligibly be stated).25 What dropped by the

24 As I understand Wittgenstein, he takes the remarks of the Tractatus to disintegrate

no less than tautologies since they ‘are the limiting cases – indeed the disintegration
[Auflösung] – of the combination of symbols’ (4.466) and holds that his Sätze are
dispensable in exactly the same sense that logical Sätze are dispensable (compare
6.122). Also compare the ‘Notes Dictated to G.E. Moore’, op. cit., p. 118: ‘A tautol-
ogy (not a logical proposition) is not nonsense in the same sense in which, e.g., a
proposition in which words which have no meaning occur is nonsense. What
happens in it is that all its simple parts have meaning, but it is such that the con-
nexions between these paralyse or destroy one another, so that they are connected
in only some irrelevant manner’. For a very different view of how the remarks of
the Tractatus disintegrate, see T. Ricketts, ‘Pictures, Logic, and the Limits of Sense’,
in eds. H. Sluga and D.G. Stern, The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially pp. 93–94. In Ricketts’s view
Wittgenstein’s remarks collapse into gibberish pure and simple.
25 Compare L. Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures 1930–1932, ed. D. Lee (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 112: ‘[I]n philosophy all that is not gas is

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 Andrew Lugg 347
wayside in his later work was mainly his concern with ‘the logic of
depiction [der Logik der Abbildung]’ (4.015). As time went by the idea
that tautologies present the scaffolding of the world figured less cen-
trally in his thinking while his view of ‘philosophical propositions’
as tautologies remained more or less intact.26

Department of Philosophy
University of Ottawa
65 University Street
PO Box 450, Stn. A
Ottawa, Ontario KIN 6NS
Canada

grammar’; Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., §371: ‘Essence is expressed in grammar’;

and L. Witttgenstein, On Certainty, eds. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright,
trans D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969): ‘Am I not getting
closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described?’
26 I should like to acknowledge Burton Dreben’s criticism and encouragement
and thank Lynne Cohen, Nadine Faulkner, Paul Forster, Warren Ingber, Puqun
Li, J. McDonald, J. Ploude and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for helpful
comments on earlier versions of this paper.

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003