Topics Philosophers

Question Struggling with Wittgenstein. "The World is all that is the case". Does this mean both positive facts ("Paris is the capitol of France") AND negative facts ("Lyon is not the capitol of France") I can say "It IS the case that Lyon is not the capitol of France". Or does Wittgenstein mean only the pos. facts, i.e what has been actualized? Thanks.

Accepted:
February 29, 2012

Comments

I am not confident about all that Wittgenstein is trying to get at, but one thing he's reaching for might be made clearer by recalling the contrast he sets up: the world is not a collection of things, but of facts. Perhaps the root idea is that if we had to describe the world, we could not do so by simply listing all the objects that there are. Rather, we'd find ourselves saying that this is the case, and that is the case, and so on. We'd find ourselves making a series of that-claims, rather than merely naming objects. That is, we'd list all the facts that obtain.

I don't know what Wittgenstein was up to, i.e., whether he'd include among the facts of the world the "negative" fact that Lyon isn't the capital of France. As the questioner says, it plainly "is the case" that Lyon isn't the capital of France, so the first line of the Tractatus suggests that this fact does help comprise the world. But that's just my conjecture.

At least one questioner wanted to see more give-and-take on this site, so I thought I'd query Prof. George's answer. It seems to rely on the unstated premise that if we have to list facts in order to describe the world, then that implies (or gives us some reason to think) that the world is a collection of facts. But in order to describe the Eiffel Tower, we can't just list all of its parts; we'd have to list facts about the Eiffel Tower. I don't think that gives us any reason to conclude that the Eiffel Tower is a collection of facts rather than a concrete, physical object.