The difference between saying and showing and how to overcome philosophical problems

Abstract

The difficulties encountered for a detailed interpretation of many a key passage of the Tractatus, together with the critical comments the author himself has leveled during his later philosophical development at some aspects of the vision of language in his first opus frequently has had the consequence that some interpreters lose sight of the general target of the work and the degree to which Wittgensteinian philosophy is moved by one and the same philosophical worries during the whole life of the austro-british thinker. An argument of the motives behind the key distinction of the Tractatus between what a proposition says and what it shows suggests that the vision that is the source of this tractarian distinction is forcefully at work also in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein.