Hey girls and boys! I am currently studying Wittgenstein's work thanks to a course I am taking in my U. Studying can get really boring if you are passively receiving information and not discussing the things you find. So let start with some questions, but first let me make clear how I will start this discussion:

a. English is not my native (Yo hablo español), so except some grammar mistakes once in a while. Keep in mind that Spanish punctuation is slightly different from the one you use in English, so except an excesive amount of commas.

b. Wittgenstein's work is far from clear and organized, way far. That means that I won't be trying to make my questions terminologically precise. Instead, I will try to make them as simple as possible. We can start with a simple question and then go to the hard, messy and intricate parts.

c. Let's keep the discussion relevant and important. Is to common for us to get lost in things that bear no importance at all, even for our own theories, however abstract they are (mainly, discussions about words and the order of words). Talking about things that can't prove their influence over our beliefs can't prove themselves to be profound or interesting, and that's booooooriiiiing. I invite you to extend Wittgenstein's discussions and your interpretations of Wittgenstein proposals as far as you can.

Now let's go to the questions

1. What is the point Wittgenstein is trying to make when he tells us that the proporties and the nature of a general proposition are not clear at all?

This is how I get it. Wittgenstein starts to talk about how language (which almost always refers to logical language) works. Language tries to refer to things in the world and language seems to share a structure with the world. But, we can also talk about propositions that don't point at anything in the world; i.e., we can talk about tautologies and propositions whose elements are totally general, propositions that don't point at any particular thing in the world. Then, how can we say that these propositions have a meaning? how can we tell if they are true or false? how can we tell if they are tautologies or contradictions if there is nothing they refer to?

2. What is showing and how is it different from saying?

Wittgenstein talks a lot about showing in the Notebooks, but doesn't explain what exactly is to show. How can we show something? Why saying is different from showing? Showing is a kind of saying? Saying is a kind of showing?

3. Are there particular things in the world?

Language seems to share an structure with the world. Is hard to believe that language exist as an exact representation of what the world is, but it seems plausible to think that language works structurally as the world does. So, if language can only share an structure with the world, how can it point at particular things in the world? Do names point at things in the world or just serve to indicate a kind of structure in the world? Is it possible to talk about the existence of particular things?