Adding 4.0241 to TLP
Abstract
Tractatus 4.024 inspired the dominant semantics of our time: truth-conditional semantics. This is focused on possible worlds: the content ofpis theset of worlds wherepis true. It has become increasingly clear that such an accountis, at best, defective: we need an “independent factor in meaning, constrainedbut not determined by truth-conditions” (Yablo 2014: 2), because sentences can bedifferently true at the same possible worlds. I suggest a missing comment which,had it been included in theTractatus, would have helped semantics get this rightfrom the start. This is my 4.0241: “Knowing what is the case if a sentence is trueis knowing its ways of being true”: knowing a sentence’s truth possibilitiesandwhat we now call its topic, or subject matter. I show that the famous “fundamentalthought” that “the ‘logical constants’ do not represent” (4.0312) can be understoodin terms of ways-based views of meaning. Such views also help with puzzling claimslike 5.122: “Ifpfollows fromq, the sense of ‘p’ is contained in that of ‘q’ ”, whichare compatible with a conception of entailment combining truth-preservation withthe preservation of topicality, or of ways of being true.
Citation
Berto , F 2019 , Adding 4.0241 to TLP . in G M Mras , P Weingartner & B Ritter (eds) , Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics : Proceedings of the 41st International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium . Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society , vol. 27 , de Gruyter , Berlin , pp. 415-428 . https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110657883-025
Publication
Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics
Type
Conference item
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.