Abstract

On the face of it the structure of the Tractatus has realism baked in. The book starts out from a world of facts, and then proceeds to argue in stages so as to arrive at a single form that any proposition representing how things stand in the world must have. It is only when we examine the details of this argument that this straightforwardly deductive argumentative structure begins to fall apart. When correctly understood, I suggest, Wittgenstein's stance is much more nuanced and less easy to categorize.