Nonsense and the Context Principle in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Abstract

Since the 1990s the discussion on the interpretation of the Tractatus has been centered on the dispute between the so-called standard reading and the novel resolute one. This dispute opposes two ways of understanding the very philosophical project that Wittgenstein advances in the book and, particularly, two ways of understanding his words in the penultimate proposition of the book: “my propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical” (TLP 6.54). According to Peter Hacker, the nonsense of the pseudo-propositions of philosophy, in particular of the philosophy of the Tractatus, are an attempt to say what cannot be said but only shown. In this sense it can be said to be “illuminating nonsense”. In opposition to the standard reading, James Conant and Cora Diamond proposed a different interpretation of the very notion of nonsense. This reading intends to take seriously what is said in 6.54, i.e., that the propositions of the Tractatus, being mere nonsense, do try to say what cannot be said. The idea that nonsense can make manifest “ineffable truths” results from not taking seriously Wittgenstein’s exhortation to throw the ladder away once one has climbed it. According to the so-called resolute reading of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was committed to an austere conception of nonsense, according to which we have no basis upon which to isolate the logical roles played by the working parts of a nonsense, for there are no working parts of a nonsensical proposition. This austere view of nonsense is justified by recurring to the context principle. In the present paper I take sides with a strong version of the austere view: nonsense can only arise from a lack of meaning, not from the presence of the wrong kind of meaning. The parts of a piece of nonsense can have no form (or logical syntax) and no content (or semantics). The expressions that compose it have no determinate content and they do not belong to any determinate logical category. I argue for this strong version by commenting on 3.31s, more specifically, by stressing the transformations that Wittgenstein introduced into Frege’s context principle, namely, the rejection of the distinction between sense and reference of names and the conception of names as unsaturated.