Comments on Tractatus: 1 The world is everything that is the case

1 The world is everything that is the case.

Right off the bat he starts off with an empty tautology. Is 'empty tautology' an empty tautology? No, a tautology is a statement that is true under all interpretations. Something is empty when there is nothing instructive to be gained. This is collegiate late-night study-avoiding intellectual bullshit (I remember it well!). In my high school yearbook, we had to give a quote next to our picture (something pithy and meaningful, "If you love something, set it free,...") One guy just said 'Everything is'. That's it. Genius. A you-can-all-go-to-hell slap in the face, Anyway, W is being serious here. Wanker.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

OK...Come on. Really?

I'll bite. So he's in some sense redefining what you want people to think of as 'the world', 'facts, and 'things'. He's trying to pull the shades down (oops, I mean 'up' :) ) and show you that you're wrong to think of the world as sense objects (what I understand he means by 'things') and it is correct to think of it as statements. Almost Platonic. He's being kind of arrogant, and by 'kind of' I mean 'totally'. Anyway, why couldn't he just say 'let's talk about items of knowledge as opposed to sense objects'?

1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.

More stipulation then. He's defining 'world' to be a set of knowledge rather than, well, we've already forgot about all those other things.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.

'Determine' is just a fancy way of saying 'let's think of them as'. Considering the negation, as being specified at all, is clever and Taoist, but is just encouraging us to being perceptive of form and ground, that's all.

If one can take this as substantive, W is presenting in a sideways manner the ideas of correctness and completeness, that what we are talking about is propositions ('facts') and that 'the world' )a domain of discourse) is a set of propositions, and that set is complete (everything about the world is said in those facts -and- anything -not- in that set is -not- true of that world), something that would be said nowadays as sort of a closed world assumption: for a given world, there is no more and no less what is stated in a set of 'facts'.

1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

Kind of empty repetition of the previous.

1.2 The world divides into facts.

Kind of empty repetition of the previous. Or could be taken to be a deep deep principle of mathematics that 'is' is not a symmetric in English, that one must state (if not show) both directions the world is made up facts and (the other direction) nothing else. Or it could be bullshit.

1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.

I have little to say here (!!) other than this is pretty empty, that is, he is saying things that we already know. Is a statement of obvious simplicity ('the king has no clothes!') interesting or useful? Sometimes yes. Here it is hard to see.

Or is this just an expression of there's no middle between true and false?

This set of propositions (is that what these are, or are they recursively self-defining 'facts'?) is pretty sparse, but intended to introduce. Was this outline produced linearly or refined as needed? Of course both, but section this looks like a quick start to get the rest.


Now a comment on commenting. Obviously, I have something against Wittgenstein here. It could easily turn out to be the kind of sophomoric disdain one has for elementary knowledge that wasn't once so elementary. Fine. Revolutionary in his time (he made possible/motivated/kick started/inspired the school of logical positivism/the Vienna circle?), but boring now?