Small rain lays great dust: peculiarities of ontology, theory of knowledge and philosophy of science in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Abstract

The author takes a close look at some of the concepts in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. She sets to show that the meaning of the notion ‘world’ is fully revealed only when Wittgenstein comes to speak of what ‘lies outside the world’. She then attempts to demonstrate that neither propositional logic nor the classical first-order logic enjoy a privileged position in representing the logical spacewhere both the world and the language lie. The paper argues that the Tractatus contains neither an ontology nor a theory of knowledge in the usual sense of the word and proceeds to analysing the possible motives of conventionalism and instrumentalism exhibited by Wittgenstein in the interpretation of scientific theories. The author contends that Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy is essentially different from the one shared by the adepts of positivism.