This paper argues for a physicalistic interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein's general conception of world and language analysis is interpreted and exemplified in relation to the historical background of the psychophysical analysis of sense data and, in particular, color analysis. Three of his main principles of analysis—the principle of independence, the context principle and the principle of atomism—are interpreted and justified on the background of physicalism. From his proof of color exclusion in the Tractatus, it is shown that Wittgenstein (...) had a detailed conception of how philosophy should fulfil the task of distinguishing between sense and nonsense using physicalistic presuppositions. (shrink)

Explores the stable core of Wittgenstein's philosophy as developed from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.

The paper presents a formal explication of the early Wittgenstein's views on ontology, the syntax and semantics of an ideal logical language, and the propositional attitudes. It will be shown that Wittgenstein gave a language of thought analysis of propositional attitude ascriptions, and that his ontological views imply that such ascriptions are truth-functions of (and supervenient upon) elementary sentences. Finally, an axiomatization of a quantified doxastic modal logic corresponding to Tractarian semantics will be given.

This paper articulates a deflationary interpretation of the notions of meaning and necessity in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. This interpretation is developed through a new account of the socalled color‐exclusion problem and of why the formalism of the Tractatus fails to solve it. According to my analysis, this failure calls into question whether the limits of the sayable and the thinkable can be drawn from within language and thought by means of a purely formal logical analysis. I argue that the lesson to (...) learn from the color‐exclusion problem concerns the limitations of a formal logical analysis of language in eliminating the philosophical mythologies formed around the notions of meaning and necessity, and more generally the limitations of formalism as a deflationary strategy in philosophy. (shrink)