ABSTRACT

The propositions of the Tractatus (TLP) are meant to give illumination by being recognized as nonsensical, yet many expositors devote their labours to clarifying and rendering more plausible the myth that the work embodies. They fail to make the necessary leap to the destruction of that myth by its own absurdity. I have argued this elsewhere for the ontology of objects that form the framework of the world.1 The work looks as if it gives a theory of language – a semantical theory of how propositions can be true or false – which rests on that ontology. But in fact it cannot, on its own principles, give for language or for the truth and falsity of propositions any account that rests on describable features of the world. Such an account would be metaphysical and the work itself is a subtle form of the rejection of metaphysics.