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.