HCJ-Tractatus

The beginning of Wittgensteins' "Tractatus" deals with ontology, and what the world is fundamentally made of. The building blocks of reality are made up of objects. These combine to create state of affairs, which can be combined together to create complex facts. The world is a totality of positive facts. The space in which objects and states of affairs exist is called logical space.

The next part of the book describes how language works so that the world can be described accurately. According to Wittgenstein, language consists of complex propositions that are built from simple, elementary propositions. He believes that language mirrors reality by sharing its logical form. Names mirror objects, elementary propositions mirror states of affairs, and propositions mirror facts. Wittgenstein goes on to say that there are 3 types of propositions: Tautologies, which are always true. Contradictions, which are always false, and propositions with a sense, which can be true or false depending on what is or is not the case in the world.

Wittgenstein goes on to talk about pictures, and how in order to establish whether a picture is true or false, we must compare it to reality.