The illogical structures of the Italian language according to Wittgenstein's thought in Tractatus

Document Type : research article

Authors

1 Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of History and Sociology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

Abstract

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) considers the objective of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus determining the boundaries of thought. “We should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought.” He defines the relationship between the universe, language and thought as a form of isomorphism due to the fact that they all have the same logical form. The author of Tractatus, introducing the Picture Theory of Language, categorizes the propositions of language into true, false and senseless (illogical). He explains the relationship between reality and picture in this way: “In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures.” Some of the main characteristics of the book are the extreme conciseness in mentioning the philosophical resources and the lack of examples. He doesn’t give examples for elementary propositions and this style of writing arouses the readers’ curiosity to find examples for the concepts of the early Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In this article, with the comparative study of the thought of the author of Tractatus and the grammatical structures of the Italian language, we try to distinguish between the structures with truth-value and the illogical structures of the Italian language. Wittgenstein scarcely uses the Symbolic Logic. This matter evokes our minds to grasp the relationship between the grammatical structure of ordinary languages and logic, from his point of view. By studying the small structures, we try to pave the way for understanding the relationship between the Italian language and the Picture Theory of Language.

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References

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Journal of Foreign Language Research
Volume 14, Issue 1
June 2024
Pages 169-180

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