My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands them eventually recognizes them as senseless [unsinnig], when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them… He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. (Tractatus 6.54) These statements must be taken seriously and therefore must be interpreted as literally possible. They have nevertheless been experienced by some philosophers as posing a major interpretational problem. For if Wittgenstein’s words are taken literally, we seem to have a (...) major problem in our hands. If what Wittgenstein had said before proposition 6.54 is literally nonsense, we apparently cannot understand his book at its face value. And, as was pointed out, this face value is that of a treatise in logical semantics. Hence.. (shrink)