ABSTRACT
In the first edition of this work I argued that the logic of the Tractatus is fundamentally flawed, a claim since challenged by Peter Geach and Scott Soames. 1 As the heading of this section indicates, I remain unrepentant on this matter, but I have come to see that the issues here are much more complex and far-reaching than I had previously supposed. The disputed point concerns the expressive capacity of the operator N introduced at proposition 6. In the previous chapter we saw how the N operator is used to construct quantified expressions. Here I shall ask whether Wittgenstein’s procedures are adequate to construct all formulas of a standard first-order quantificational theory. It is easy to show that, given the procedures explicitly stated in the Tractatus, it is not.
