ABSTRACT
The status Wittgenstein accords the kind of propositions under discussion is that of grammatical rules. This makes them as different as mathematical propositions are to psychological or to empirical propositions. The importance of the place occupied by the question of colour in Wittgenstein's philosophical reflections, well before Remarks on Colour, puzzled some of the philosophers who attended his lectures. In the early 1930s, Wittgenstein was convinced he had found the definitive answer to questions such as whether grammatical propositions are a priori or a posteriori, analytic or synthetic, and so on. According to Westphal, Wittgenstein's genius in Remarks on Colour is to have put his finger on a number of typical questions whose solution, if it could be found, would make an essential contribution to the question 'What, in the end, is colour?' The impossibilities they express are nothing more than straight logical contradictions of the standard type, and therefore nothing but logical impossibilities, in the sense of the Tractatus.
