Logischer Holismus und Wittgensteins „praktische Wende“

Logical Holism and Wittgenstein’s ‘Practical Turn’. – Logical holism is the idea that each elementary proposition belongs to a system and is logically connected to other propositions of that system. In this paper I explore this idea and draw its connections to the nature of negative propositions and the ‘problem of recognition’ on the basis of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. In the first section I argue that in January 1930 the idea leads Wittgenstein to a better understanding of how the negative feature is expressed in propositions, thereby raising the problem of recognition to which he is not yet able to find a proper solution. In the second section I explore how the problem still persists during Wittgenstein’s ‘practical turn’. What he now calls the ‘problem of representation’ forces him to change again his conception of propositions. In the final section I argue that this change is mainly due to the modification of his conception of hypotheses which urges a solution to the problem of representation, though the problem remains unsolved in January 1930.

An Incoherence in the Tractatus

After he had rejected much of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein, upon at least one occasion, still “thought that in the Tractatus he had provided a perfected account of a view that is the only alternative to the viewpoint of his later work”—a perfected account: that is to say (at least) a well-knit, coherent one. It seems to me that this merit must be denied the whole account presented in the Tractatus and I would like to explain why.The Tractatus holds that every true or false proposition is analyzable as a truth-functional compound of elementary propositions. It further holds that elementary propositions are completely independent of one another. “The simplest kind of proposition, an elementary proposition, asserts the existence of a state of affairs” (4.21).

The Absolute Summability of Fourier Series

An elementary proposition states that an absolutely convergent series is convergent, i.e. that ifthen