The world is all that is the case and what is the case is the Bestehen of a Sachverhalten. One way of thinking about this is that the world is "how stuff hangs together". And it is holding together particular ways the facts might lie together--Sachlage — John Doe

This sounds good, except it's the possibility of things lying together, not facts.

Sorry, I'm a bit overwhelmed. I'll post screenshots of what I'm going on about here.






From.

Thanks for clarifying these confusing concepts, Srap Tasmaner and John Doe.

Yeah, we're not nearly there yet!

I'm going to wait for MN to chime in.

See y'all tomorrow.

See y'all tomorrow. — Srap Tasmaner

Still waiting on what @mcdoodle has to say. Sorry for jumping ahead, just that you kind of have to to clarify what is meant in some holistic manner of the whole shtick.

Hope you guys are having a good summer. I know I am. =]

It's generally regarded that T. 1.0 and 1.1 are conclusions to what follows. Also keep in mind that Wittgenstein is trying to solve the problems of the connection between thought, language, and the world. Wittgenstein believed that there was an a priori order to the world. The world has a fixed structure (Nb p. 62). Wittgenstein moves from the nature of logic, then to language, and finally to the world (Nb, p. 79).

Thought, language and world meet at the crossroad of perception, at least that seems to be a reasonable idea, and obviously would have occured to W, and his use of perceptual concepts at 2.0131 and 2.0251 cannot be accidental. Having said that, I'm still going to retract my earlier emphasis on the perceptual in the light of @Srap Tasmaner's earlier remarks, and I am not going to insist that "object" = "object of perception" or sense data, or whatever : although I reserve the right to retract that retraction as we move on. As I suspected from the beginning, the Tractatus seems to be peculiar (perhaps unique) insofar as to understand any part of it, you have to understand all of it, and I'm expecting a good deal of toing-and-froing in my opinions.

@Srap Tasmaner

Anyway, I think states of affairs are more or less by definition possibilities, and a fact is such a possibility obtaining. Thus the world (i.e., the actual world) is fully determined by which possibilities happen to obtain.

I can see that - there is as you indicate a lot of emphasis on modality in the opening sections dealing with states of affairs and objects, including what seems to be an almost impossible constraint on knowledge of objects requiring knowledge of all the possibilities for that object. However, on the other hand doesn't at least some of what is going on in these opening propositions suggest a distinction between actual and possible states of affairs? For instance, one thing we can be sure of is that in these sections, there is no such thing as a merely possible object: objects just are and they make up the substance of the world. States of affairs are combinations of these objects, so it looks like at least some states of affairs must be actual and not just possible.

Another thing that makes me doubt that states of affairs are just possibilities is that, possibilities - whatever they are - certainly seem to be real for W (although of course not actual) and so they exist, and at proposition 2 we have a fact described as the existence of states of affairs. If states of affairs are just possibilities, then 2 would seem to imply that facts are just possibilities too, whereas facts - like objects - seem to be always in the realm of the actual for W (don't they? he does talk about negative facts, of course, so perhaps talk about possible facts also makes sense for him). Anyway, this specific point may be a translational issue - perhaps (2) should better be read along the lines "a fact is the obtaining of states of affairs".

You can imagine a collection of things, but even if you imagined a collection of everything, you would not be imagining a world.

(

1) A collection of things;
(2) A collection of things arranged into states of affairs;

This distinction I do have a problem with, at least at the moment as an interpretation of W - given 2.012 and 2.0121 . I may not be understanding you clearly, but I take it that the idea is that the difference between (1) and (2) is that the latter has the requisite form. However, arguably whatever form a collection of objects has is derived from and only from those objects, so any collection of objects has form at least in some sense. So the issue would then be to find some non-accidental way of distinguishing between types of forms such that on the one hand we have states of affairs, and on the other just some other kind of collection of objects. Perhaps there'll be some answers to this when we move on to W's theory of representation.

By the way, the proposal about how to present subsequent post formatting as we move on to other sections seems to be a good one to me.

Should we move on, or do people think there is more to milk out of these first few propositions?

In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein tells us what the aim of the Tractatus is:

"The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood. The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

"Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather--not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

"It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense (Tractatus, p. 3)."

Should we move on, or do people think there is more to milk out of these first few propositions? — MetaphysicsNow

No no no, we can't move on yet!

(If there are things we think we'll be better able to address after covering more, I could see keeping a little list somewhere of what we want to come back to. That's reasonable.)

In this case, I'm not at all sure we have a common understanding of these sections and we haven't yet addressed the key issue here, which is the atomicity of atomic facts. I'd try starting on the latter, but don't we need the former first?

As for some Sachverhalten being actual rather than possible -- I'm a little puzzled by the dichotomy. S is actual entails S is possible. Do you do that differently?

arguably whatever form a collection of objects has is derived from and only from those objects, so any collection of objects has form at least in some sense — MetaphysicsNow

There's so much I want to say here but I'm at work now!

So yes, I think LW wants to say something just like this. The step I began with, of just imagining a collection of things, may be an imaginary step, a step no one can actually take. Maybe it's a step philosophers sometimes think they or others take.

Is it possible to get this wrong? I mean, is it even possible to imagine incorrectly here, or must we imagine things in their connectedness?

That connectedness, the way things participate in Sachverhalten -- couple thoughts. First, there's this strong sense of necessity everywhere. You can say that my car can just happen to be in a parking lot, but my sense is he wants to say my car can't just happen to be capable of being in a parking lot. This possibility seems to be, well, part of the essence of my car. And likewise of a parking lot, that it can have cars in it. Now one thing LW seems to walk right up to saying and not quite say is that an object just is all the possible Sachverhalten it could participate in, that these are an object's essence.

Historical-contextual note. If that's roughly the road we're on, this looks spookily like a context principle for things. Frege tells us the meaning of a word is the contribution it makes to determining the truth value of propositions in which it appears. Look familiar? W is coming really close to saying the essence of an object is the contribution it makes to ("the actuality of"?) the Sachverhalten in which it participates.

((Various autocorrect fixes.))

You must not think that when Wittgenstein if referring to objects or names that this corresponds to what we normally think of as objects and names. I would suggest getting clear on this before moving on.

However, on the other hand doesn't at least some of what is going on in these opening propositions suggest a distinction between actual and possible states of affairs? — MetaphysicsNow

As for some Sachverhalten being actual rather than possible -- I'm a little puzzled by the dichotomy. S is actual entails S is possible. — Srap Tasmaner

This is where I think it would be pertinent to use at least some comprehensive companion to refer to in regards to matters of what was meant by Tatasche, Sachverhalten, and Sachlage. I believe I might have answered this above in regards to the companion I quoted; but, I don't have a PDF available to that matter. Any suggestions or should we just dismiss this issue as to treating Sachverhalten as actual and obtaining to the world, and Sachlage as possible and not necessarily obtaining to the world, and Tatasche as being a composite of the previous two?

My issue was the suggestion that something isn't a possibility if it is an actuality. That struck me as an odd way to approach modality. I just want to avoid us talking past each other -- I don't know that there's real disagreement here between me and @MetaphysicsNow.

I wasn't raising an issue of interpretation at all.

You must not think — Sam26

Not the very best way to begin a post.

If you'd like to offer a different take on the passages under discussion, I'm sure we'd all be interested.

Any suggestions or should we just dismiss this issue as to treating Sachverhalten as actual and obtaining to the world, and Sachlage as possible and not necessarily obtaining to the world, and Tatasche as being a composite of the previous two? — Posty McPostface

I don't understand the "composite" business.

For the other issue, I'll have to wait until I can look at the text again. I don't think he distinguished Sachlage and Sachverhalt this way, but you could be right. His terminology is whatever it is, though, and we can certainly use terms he didn't to make these distinctions.

I just assume that Sachverhalt is what is actually the case in t=0, and Sachlage is what is possible in t=0....1.

Dunno if that makes any sense.

No, I don't want to start it another way. Why? Because it's clear that this is the case. If you do think of these things in another way, then you will be completely misguided. I'm not offering an opinion about this, i.e., it's well established.

Such a distinction makes perfect sense and would be useful. Whether it tracks W's usage is something we'd want to know, just to make sure we don't misunderstand him.

Yeah, if you know any companion that would answer this question about the lingering ambiguity please post a link. I'm also apprehensive to commit to that interpretation.

I believe you, Sam. But I'm under the impression you think we have already made a mistake or are in danger of making a mistake, only you haven't told us. And you haven't said what the right way would be.

We're just talking here. I'd like to hear what you have to say.

No, I'm not saying you're making a mistake, just trying to make sure there is no misunderstanding. I'm trying to point out things that should be kept in mind.

Thanks!

Let's see if we can put the "atomism" in "logical atomism"!

(The following are from the O&R translation.)

I'm going to pick out just a few remarks that are especially on point, but pretty much everything from 1 to 2.063 is required, and I'm leaving out a lot of local context to highlight these:

1.21 Any one ((i.e., any Tatsache)) can be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.
...
2.02 The object is simple.
2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be analysed into a statement about their constituent parts, and into those propositions which completely describe the complexes.
2.021 Objects form the substance of the world. Therefore they cannot be compound.
2.0211 If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense ((Sinn)) would depend on whether another proposition is true.
2.0212 It would then be impossible to form a picture of the world (true or false).
...
2.061 Atomic facts ((Sachverhalten)) are independent of one another.
2.062 From the existence ((Bestehen)) or non-existence of an atomic fact we cannot infer the existence or non-existence of another.

(One issue I'm just a little concerned about -- maybe not much -- is that from the style it can be hard to tell whether you're reading a positive claim or simply (!) a contextual definition. I think it's actually all the former and none of the latter in these remarks, but there are a few others I lean toward seeing as contextual definitions.)

2.021 - 2.0212 jumps out as being something like an argument, when mainly we're being treated to interwoven assertions.

1.21 and 2.062-2.062 are essentially equivalent, since we've already been told (2) that a fact is the existence of an atomic fact.

Let's start with a simple-minded analogy. (Not an example of what W is talking about, but an analogy, to get us started.)

We can imagine the world being different, different ways of the world being different. If I think to myself, "If only everyone were nicer to me!" that's a difference. I imagine the rest of the world going on as it does except everyone is nicer to me. But everyone is a lot of people, and it's a class that splits readily given any predicate: "If only everyone I know were nicer to me!" (Taken together with "If only everyone I don't know were nicer to me!" you get the original wish.) Everyone I know is still quite a few people and we could continue splitting using predicates (everyone I know from work, everyone I know from work I go to the bar with, etc.). It becomes natural to expect there to be a smallest unit of difference we could eventually reach -- "If only she were nicer to me!" for some "she". (We're going to pretend to stop here for a moment, since this is just an analogy.) At each point along the way, the complementary class could be left as is, still not as nice to me as I'd like, and only the new smaller class I'm looking at changing. Once we get to a single element -- "she" -- we can imagine only her being nicer and no one else.

When we think about differences in the way the world might be, we expect to be able to find a smallest unit of difference. Must we be able to do so? Can we imagine always being able to go still smaller, never reaching something that is only a class member and not itself a class?

The analogy we used solves itself. The difference we were interested in is niceness, and there is a smallest unit to which the predicate nice applies, a person. (Okay, we're pretending again -- we could wish she were nicer to us Tuesdays, or last Tuesday around 3, etc.) Our classes of people must have people as members, and we must be able to identify individual members, else what sort of classes are these anyway? (That's quite weak, but we'll save real thinking for the text itself.)

It seems clear that any predicate will have such a smallest unit of applicability, and then the smallest unit of difference in the world we can imagine is such a predicate applying or not applying to one such a unit.

That's it for the analogy, a simple-minded view of how something like analysis might work, and of what might count as a fact.

Tomorrow, I'll have a go at what W actually says unless someone else beats me to it.

When we think about differences in the way the world might be, we expect to be able to find a smallest unit of difference. — Srap Tasmaner

As far as I know, those are the atomic facts that pertain to actual facts. An interesting corollary question is whether Wittgenstein meant to impress upon us differing degrees of fact-hood or factually bound claims about the world depending on Sachverhalt and Sachlage. But, then again if the world is the totality of facts, then does that make this a redundant claim?

This is what I meant about there being 'composite' facts derived from atomic facts and/or states of affairs. Tatasche seems to entail both, yet I'm not sure if there was a distinction being made in the Tractatus about the two. In my mind, there is as I've read some notions of Wittgenstein implying the existence of 'plain facts' and 'complex facts'.

I'll stop there, as its verging on the nonsensical.

I'm reading the following to help clarify the issue:

Wittgenstein on facts and objects: the metaphysics of the Tractatus

Here's proposition 2.0201 that supports what I'm asserting about there being complex and simple facts:

2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be resolved into a statement about their constituents and into the propositions that describe the complexes completely.

This website is helpful:

http://faculty.fiu.edu/~hauptli/Wittgenstein'sTractatus.html

From the above referenced website:



Although, I disagree with the author that Sachverhalt are the same as Sachlage.

Edit: Actually, the author incorrectly references Sachverhalte as 'states of affairs', so maybe not such a great reference to the pertaining questions.

When we think about differences in the way the world might be, we expect to be able to find a smallest unit of difference. Must we be able to do so? Can we imagine always being able to go still smaller, never reaching something that is only a class member and not itself a class? — Srap Tasmaner

Well, these are just objects. The relation of objects (in a chain) are what constitute atomic facts. The properties of objects and things doesn't get mentioned until we bring up the idea of complex or simple facts, which are constituted in the form of states of affairs, I think.

@Srap Tasmaner<br /> There's something niggling at me that makes me want to say that the difference between an actual state of affairs and a possible state of affairs is significant to understanding W here, but I'm having difficulty putting my finger on what might be the difference between our positions here. I'll have a rethink and see if I can be more precise - but you may be right that there is nothing significant here.<br /> <br /> @Sam26" I think it is pretty clear that whatever "objects" are for W, they definitely are not the medium-sized dry goods we're familiar with in our everyday lives. Perhaps my use of "object" = "object of perception" gave you the impression that I was in danger of making that kind of link, but really I'm not. I am still tempted by the idea of linking W's logical space to the idea of the visual field, and so tying objects to smallest identifiable elements of the visual field, but (1) that's a long way from confusing objects with everyday macroscopic or microscopic things and (2) I'm not wedded to that idea. I appreciate that the Tractatus has very little to say explicitly about perception (5.5423 is about the only exception that I noticed during my skim read) and perhaps W thought that one of the problems with previous philosophy is that philosophers were trying to say things about perception that could not really be said (interestingly, 5.5423 has a diagram).

@Srap Tasmaner

It seems clear that any predicate will have such a smallest unit of applicability, and then the smallest unit of difference in the world we can imagine is such a predicate applying or not applying to one such a unit.

I think @Posty McPostface touches on what I'm about to say in his last post. Do we need to be careful about introducing talk about predicates when expounding W's arguments in this part of the Tractatus? 2.0231 says that we do not get material properties until we already have configurations of objects, and predicates are generally used to signify material properties. Unlike Frege who had a basic ontology of concept and object, and a corresponding predicate/name distinction, W in the Tractatus seems to be burrowing down deeper and has only objects and names. Of course, these are issues we'll be digging into in more depth when we start dealing with W's theory of symbolism. I get, though, that you are just giving an analogy of how one might argue for some kind of foundationalism, but we might need to come back to W's argument for foundationalism once we've dealt a little more with his ideas about depiction (somewhere he gives the metaphor of depiction involving putting out feelers, and there needs to be something that feelers can grab hold of - if everything they grab hold of dissipates when grabbed, then they never end up touching reality).

@Posty McPostface The link to the Jeff Speaks lecture notes was useful, thanks.

I'm travelling for the next few days - I'll have the Tractatus with me and will have some time to be on the internet, but it might be intermittent.

The link to the Jeff Speaks lecture notes was useful, thanks. — MetaphysicsNow

As we go along you might find these useful:

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Jeff Speaks
Wittgenstein on logical form and the nature of philosophy by Jeff Speaks

There's something niggling at me that makes me want to say that the difference between an actual state of affairs and a possible state of affairs is significant to understanding W here, but I'm having difficulty putting my finger on what might be the difference between our positions here. I'll have a rethink and see if I can be more precise - but you may be right that there is nothing significant here. — MetaphysicsNow

I actually sent an e-mail to Professor Jeff Speaks about this issue. I'll post what he has to say about it if he replies.

I also sent an e-mail to Professor Conant in regards to the same issue. Let's see who gets back.

This might help:

But, if you recall, Russell had a kind of convincing argument for the existence of
negative facts: suppose that we have a list of atomic facts f1 . . . fn. Now consider
some true sentence ‘not-S.’ Is the truth of ‘not-S’ determined by f1 . . . fn? It seems
not. For f1 . . . fn are atomic facts, and there is nothing to prevent a series of atomic
facts from being consistent both with the truth of S, the falsity of S, or even S lacking
a truth-value. Hence, Russell concluded, true negations of atomic propositions must
correspond to negative facts. How can Wittgenstein avoid this argument?
I think that his ideas about objects provide him a way out. Recall that, for Wittgenstein,
objects are not only what underlie change over time, but also what underlie
necessity and possibility: all possible changes to the world are just a matter of the
recombination of simple objects. As he puts it,
2.0124 If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of
affairs are also given.
If there are a fixed number of objects, then a list of all the states of affairs (i.e.,
atomic facts) will not be consistent with both the truth and falsity of a sentence S.
A worry about this view: the intuition that all objects exist only contingently.
Wittgenstein often discusses the world or reality. How are these two notions related?
(This question is made especially difficult by the fact that Wittgenstein seems to
say contradictory things in §§2.04, 2.06, 2.063.)I think that the basic idea can be
stated as follows: the world consists of all the existing states of affairs, whereas reality
consists of the world plus all possible but non-actual states of affairs. Wittgenstein’s
claim is then that the world determines reality: once we know everything about what
states of affairs exist, we know everything about what states of affairs could exist
as well. (Indeed, as Fogelin points out, this follows from the claims that the world
consists of states of affairs, that all objects must be in some state of affairs, and the
passage from §2.0124 cited above.) — Jeff Speaks

All will be revealed in due time. — Posty McPostface

It would be good if all of the comments on this thread were made within the context of a reading group that is off the ground. Just saying.