ABSTRACT
The Tractatus was clearly much influenced by writings on the philosophy of science, notably by those of Hertz. Indeed Wittgenstein is said to have thought that Hertz’s name ought to have been added to those of Frege and Russell as one of the ‘begetters’ of the book. To be sure, such anecdotes do not prove very much: he also spoke of Paul Ernst, a figure now little known outside German-speaking lands, as a name that ought to have been mentioned, obviously with reference to that author’s ‘Nachwort’ to the Grimms’ tales (Ernst 1910). Hertz thought that our minds were capable of making pictures or representations of reality and in such a way that the possible variations or alterations of the elements in the representation faithfully mirrored all the different possibilities for the physical system in question. Wittgenstein generalized this and took it not merely for an account of how natural science was possible for us but for something much more general, an account of how thought and language were possible. This was one respect in which the human race could not err: we can indeed say false things, but they are at any rate false. We can often not be sure that they are true; we can always be sure that they are either true or false. This insight – the realization that there was a framework within which the world was contained, the knowledge of which framework was logic, that logic, in this sense, was the possession of us all (rather like Descartes’ ‘good sense’), the simple and the learned alike, seemed to Wittgenstein of great importance, though I cannot discuss all the reasons for that importance here.
