ABSTRACT
The Tractatus tells us that the analysis of propositions ultimately results in elementary propositions which are concatenations of names. Responding to this criticism of carelessness P. M. S. Hacker took the view that what may look like carelessness when construed as a representation of his own earlier views becomes accuracy when regarded as criticism. He claimed that ‘the concept of an object in the Tractatus is incoherent, and there are or could be no such entities.’ The first thing that should be noticed about L. Wittgenstein’s ‘objects’ is that, unlike B. Russell’s items of acquaintance, but like the ‘terms which denote’ of the Principles, they are inceptive of the propositions in which they can occur. The conception of objects which Wittgenstein characterises by saying that ‘objects are in a manner of speaking colourless’ has its counterpart in the idea that a part of a proposition which contributes to its sense, i.e. an expression or a symbol, is a variable proposition.
