ABSTRACT
the main difficulties people have had in trying to understand Wittgenstein’s pronouncements on solipsism in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922) are connected with the proposition 5.62 of the book. This proposition has recently been quoted by Professor J. O. Urmson 2 in the following form:
In fact what solipsism intends is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world shows itself in the fact that the limits of language (the language, which I alone understand) means the limits of my world.
The clause in the brackets is, beyond reasonable doubt, a mistranslation. The German original reads: “… die Grenzen der Sprache (der Sprache, die allein ich verstehe) die Grenzen meiner Welt be- deuten.” The joker here is the word ‘allein’. In all the relevant examples that I have seen quoted in the dictionaries, this word is used to qualify the word it follows. The same is the case with all the other (relevant) instances of ‘allein’ that I have come across in the Tractatus (cf. 2.224 and 5.631). One of the dictionaries (Sanders, Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache) states that one of the nearly synonymous words nur, bloss, einzig is used instead of allein (to mean ‘alone’) in all the contexts where the position of the word could make it ambiguous. The parenthetical clause would be a case in point if ‘allein’ there meant ‘alone’.