The Expressive Sufficiency of Language in the Tractatus

The unifying framework of Ludwig Wittgenstein's intellectual life was provided by a project of vast and monumental ambition. Its ground plan was laid out in his earliest work, the Tractus Logico-Philosophicus, with its grandiose vision of a perfect language, a symbolic manifold able to provide the means for accurate and complete characterization of reality.

The crux of the Tractatus lies in its commitment to the problematic idea that language—not exactly as we have it but as we can get it with some logical repairs—is capable of a complete and adequate descriptive presentation of the world's facts. But there is good reason to think that this idea of the ontological adequacy of available language is not only problematic but also illusory—that linguistic completeness and accuracy are an unrealizable mirage, not because they are so difficult to achieve, but because the very idea of their realization is ultimately as incoherent as it the idea of a complete and detailedly accurate mapping of terrain. All in all, the Tractarian position betrays a yearning for an impracticable absolute.

The Tractatus gets off to a peculiar and problematic start by riding roughshod over the crucial distinction between fact and fiction, stating true and actual facts and unrealized possibilities. As it represents the situation: “Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts” (2.0131). For logic all possibilities exist, and the distinction between actually and merely possible states of affairs is abolished. In logical rigor, nothing whatsoever is accidental or contingent: “In der Logic ist nichts zufallig” (2.012), and the world (1.2) is throughout a web of necessitation. The Tractatus thus becomes a logical revision to Spinoza's Ethics and on its principles, language and its inherent logic become means for the exposition of whatever can meaningfully be said.

Building Blocks of the Tractarian Position

On this basis, the position of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus regarding the relation of language to reality is predicated on his pivotal contentions regarding five crucial concepts. They stand as follows:

• I. World. The world (reality as he also calls it) is the totality of facts about what is actual and possible. (1-1.21)

• II. Facts. Facts are possible states of affairs. They comprise the world. (1.21- 2; 2.04)

• III. Thought.