Logical simples are to be discovered by logicians as Wittgenstein replied when asked about them despite being a logician himself. Does anyone care to take a stab at these logical simples?

When I can't sleep at night I do philosophy and I've noticed that my best philosophical thoughts are born out of sheer frustration at not being able to sleep. Yes, logical simples, are they hinges upon which beliefs can take place as per necessary or conditional situations imposed upon reality via scientific and mathematical truths?

In some sense, logical simples can't get any more foundational, even more so than mathematics that deals with measurement in space. Logical space being another concept I would like to learn more about.

What's a logical simple?

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

2 What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
2.02 The object is simple.

I'll stop there.

There is already metaphysical baggage ( well not really, it's like saying, 'Look, I don't know what air is; but, it's essential for my existence) lumped in proposition 2.02. Basically, according to Wittgenstein (as a fish trying to tell you how water feels like) it is a dare I say inexpressible proposition in language that can't be descriptively measured in isolation, as if one were to tell an alien 'water' is water without showing the ontological placeholder of water itself, this is in essence what logical atomism is about (at least according to Wittgenstein, Russel and Wittgenstein would have a contention here), it manifests its existence when seen in terms of the usage of references to a relational property in logical space (the totality of facts that compose the world, where 'objects' are points on a coordinate plane and 'facts' the relation of one object with another) with objects existing independently as placeholder names, while at the same time having a sense only when used in context.

I hope that wasn't too much. I'm looking for relevant parts of the text to better answer your question.

I'm gonna get some rest and get back to you MU with a more lucid and clear text after I organize the material.

Here's the problem. Every "fact" which I know of consists of a relationship between things. This fact is taken advantage of, by relativity theory. Nothing is at rest, because everything exists in relation to other things, and considering these relationships, produces the realization that the thing is moving.

The point is, there is no such thing as a "simple", This is a premise which has no basis in reality. A simple would be a symbol with absolutely no meaning, no relationship to other symbols, no context at all. If simples were real, a simple could not become a fact prior to being placed in a contextual relationship. The contextual relationship is essential to the fact. But this contextual relationship denies its status as a simple. Therefore a fact cannot be a simple.

The problem that Wittgenstein brings up with having recursive meanings is that some object's (simples) are required for there for things to have a meaning independent of other things in order for it to be understood [you can see this line of thinking in Wittgenstein's later use of some things needing to be shown instead of being said or 'described' (thus demolishing Russel's theory of descriptions in one blow), where he, in my opinion, borrows the concept of objects as simples from his previous work, which he never discredits and even reinforces with the example of a 'tool', if anyone recalls, for a builder acting as a placeholder for a simple object].

In other words, and I'm not sure if I can reference essentialism here; but, every object has a property (Wittgenstein uses 'atomic fact' in place of 'property' in the Tractatus along with 'logical form' to be more precise) and that property (atomic fact) is the set of relations that object has with its surroundings. However, referencing Kant for a moment, the sum total of properties (atomic facts) does not entail the object apart from the object itself, meaning that the sum total is something we would wish to know - but - never can, given the infinite state of affairs that object has in logical space (a modern definition could be used here, such as 'Hilbert space,' I don't think Wittgenstein would mind if we made that substitution nowadays given that all the facts about the 'world' are in essence the mathematical measurements one can carry out about two distinct objects in 'Hilbert space'. Furthermore, if one want's to get physical we could substitute 'quanta' for 'objects' in logical space or 'Hilbert space').

Analogously, if we take your argument to the extreme, we could boil it down to a version of Zeno's paradox, which just isn't true.

Personally, it's my opinion that the modern day computer and the seeming ability to simulate all aspects of reality by it validates everything Wittgenstein has said in the Tractatus. Anyone agree?

So, here is my take on the Tractatus that I have understood thus far. Anyone is welcome to criticise it or provide feedback.

The world is composed of facts, which are further composed of objects, which are elementary and simple.

Facts in the world are the atomic propositions each object has in relation to each other.

The world is the sum total of all atomic propositions presented in logical form.

Nonsense arises when we try and depict things that have no material relation to objects and facts.

Further, nonsense is what arises when one tries to depict facts that cannot be depicted within the same logical space. So to speak a metalanguage would be required to make statements about a lower class of atomic facts and propositions, one which we can't inherently know of itself, thus the claim that this work itself is an effort in futility and the needs to throw away the ladder once climbing upon this new understanding.

Logical space is a construct (one can think of it as a Cartesian plane), where what is logical are the facts between every element within that system.

'Logical form' and propositions exist as pictures that are composed of atomic facts. Pictures can't depict their own meaning supporting the claim that nonsense arises when one tries to depict a picture within that picture or within logical space.

Whereof one can't speak, thereof one ought to remain silent.

It's interesting, if you read about the experience of growing up in the Wittgenstein family, how little they were allowed to express emotion - and how much silent suffering this led to, culminating finally, for many of them, in suicide. Whereof one can't speak (one's homosexuality, or need for affection, or fear) thereof one must remain silent (even if one must kill oneself to do so). just one way of looking at things. Imo ludwig, suicidal himself, preserved his life only by struggling his way out from the tractatus and into the PI. maybe he just wanted to prove to himself it was possible to actually talk to another person and could only do thay by trying to prove it was impossible he was simply talking to himself about a world he alone created.

The Tractatus takes model theory for a fist order language and turns it into a spiritual exercise, or as a kind of ontology. It is disturbing in retrospect, but it has interesting connotations when you think about semanticists and logicians speaking of 'possible worlds,' and the way these are used model-theoretically to serve just whatever purpose the formal language requires of them.

A lot of these spiritual insights are now, unbeknownst to the people using them, mundanized; so the fact that 'the object is simple' is now simply to say that the domain of individuals is utterly independent from the world and from the properties borne. In the mid 20th century, this was super contentious and philosophers fretted about all sorts of weird paradoxes it caused (like every individual in the world being switched around with no empirical difference!). But now it's just a formal matter of course – a yearning spiritual question reduced to a formal tool. The rest of the Tractatus is the same (truth tables, and so on), the idea of the object containing all logical possibilities, logical space, etc.

The Tractatus takes model theory for a fist order language and turns it into a spiritual exercise, or as a kind of ontology.

What must your inner life be like in order to do this - and to believe absolutely in it? I'm aware of how reductive this sounds, but it just feels like a deeply lonely, utterly deprived, yet extremely intelligent person using the materials available to him to create a safe world (the philosophical equivalent of that house he made). Kind of like a logical Henry Darger - and just as strange. I could never get into the tractatus - it was too alien to me and I was too young, when I tried, to bracket my belief in its validity in order to understand it on its own terms.

One of the reasons linguistics interests me is that I think that it's a window into folk ontology, and that once we have deeper semantic models of natural language, deeper models of the way we view ontology (insofar as it's spoken of, which is really the only time ontology occurs IMO) will fall out for free. Just as an example, you can model tense in natural language pretty well with a dense, linear timeline. Reductively, this is 'why' people believe time is linear (quotes here because there's no commitment to directionality here, as if people's notion of time influences the language or vice-versa, and I don't think it matters). The same goes for substance and atomistic notions of individuals, divorced from their properties and the world – it turns out you can model language that way and it works.

The notions that the early positivists had were on the right track, but I think were off for a couple reasons. First, they just didn't have the tools to study language very well. Second, they thought that things were 'bewitchments' of language in some sense, and thought this could be overcome either by abandoning ordinary language in favor of artificial language, or fanatically restricting themselves to some (ironically artificial) subset of ordinary language. The problem, as I see it, is not that there is some arena you need to escape to to undo the bewitchment, but that all life is bewitchment, there's no real realm behind it, and a kind of linguistic neo-positivism or mirror-image positivism can untangle this and provide a sort of therapy, deeper than what traditional philosophy has allowed because of our limited empirical scope and lack of formal tools. The point, then, is not to build an ontology as a spiritual exercise, but to lay bare the ontology we commit ourselves to in talking, and as a result to take it less seriously once it's understood where these things come from.

I see Wittgenstein as attempting therapy in this sense, and there is something non-trivial about his discovery of the way a first-order language can create a complete, enclosed ontology, and then you can point the way to escape from it into the ineffable which isn't trapped inside the circle. It is lonely, but I don't think it's a futile effort. It's just that while Wittgenstein was trying to overcome this in one stroke of genius, what's needed instead is a gentle, subtle, and patient unwinding of the world and ultimately the death of ontology, which takes place over generations and generations. I take this task to have been making extremely slow progress for thousands of years. Wittgenstein's problem was simply that he took the matter too personally.

Well, you might be oversimplifying the matter here to a bare set of psychological needs or desires; but, Wittgenstein was driven by his doubts and uncertainties about life/the world/and human interaction. I wouldn't go down a slippery slope and overgeneralize that all of his work are just rationalizations of his particular set of circumstances culminating his existence.

For example, his work on the foundations of mathematics is only beginning to be appreciated by academics. There's still a plethora of insights he discovered that are still being appreciated to this day. I'll post more about his work on the foundations of the world as described in his Tractatus soon if anyone is still interested. It's really an eye-opening book if you understand his work as analogous to how a Turing computer works.

yes, it's definitely an oversimplification - I have no idea how accurate it is - but the things someone does under a deeper guiding passion can have their own merit. Someone can bury himself in programming for this or that reason yet the insights they gain about programming can still be valid within that domain. The thing with the Tractatus tho is it goes well beyond that - it tries to be an ontology. and that's where the psychological stuff always bleeds through

J.N. Findlay was an OLP guy and some-time devotee of Wittgenstein who renegaded hard and disavowed the whole philosophy, turning to classical idealism and mysticism instead. He claims to have mediated deeply and seriously on the Tractatus, and on the person of Wittgenstein, and come to the conclusion that he was a literal solipsist, and that in his presence you could 'feel' his solipsism, that Wittgenstein took the man LW to be a kind of avatar of Yahweh the transcendental ego, and that he was polite to other people in the way a deity was polite to satellites. Wittgenstein clearly had a deep sense of being alone, and it seems like many observers do conclude that he is not quite human, but something more: he has a status in analytic philosophy of a sort of saint, which no other philosopher (not Russell, Frege, Carnap...) has. To claim that something is Wittgensteinian is to show it to be worthy of praise without argument (indeed the argument is over who is more Wittgensteinian), and in my university there are several dozen sponsored workshops, with only one being devoted to an individual (not Marx, but Wittgenstein). Whether he was actually as much as people have the impression he was, it seems indubitable that part of his loneliness was an inability to speak to other people, and part of this came from being able to think of things that other people could not understand. (Note that he speaks of 'one person' understanding the Tractatus in the preface).

His saint status is quite deserved through his contributions to the humanities and his existential quest for searching the meaning of (or) being a 'human' and what that constitutes (paradoxically never revealed in his philosophy despite his very Schopenhauerian personality). Here is just a quote from Keynes:

When Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge University in 1929 John Maynard Keynes declared, "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train".

Keynes wasn't just any ordinary fellow for the matter.

I strongly suspect through my readings of Wittgenstein and knowledge about his personality through first and second-hand accounts is that he had a high level of (and I mean this sincerely) autism or high-level functioning Aspergers syndrome.

Despite many claims that he led a miserable existence, I think he found happiness in his sorrows and loneliness. He declared on his deathbed, "Tell them, I have had a wonderful life."

I think the Promethean allegory is apt in summarizing Wittgenstein's contributions and persona. A great man, indeed.

Going a little deeper, I feel like Wittgenstein internalized to a degree and extent unseen before of all philosophers before him. One can find Aristotelian, Utilitarian, Kantian, Nietzschian, Spinoza, Hegelian, Schopenhaur'ian, Socratic qualities in most of his works - possibly due to hating himself and doing away with his own ego/id, replacing it with a superhuman superego. I seem fixated on the fellow and to a great degree and extent revere him, just as many people who had the opportunity to meet him had also.

The Vienna Circle alone, with such utterly brilliant minds as Godel, Schlick, Carnap, Quine, Neurath all participated and read the Tractatus, not once; but, twice in reverence for the logical insight Wittgenstein had about the world. Godel never said that Wittgenstein had an influence over him in shaping his views; but, I suspect that to be false at face value. If anything, Wittgenstein's views were a template upon which he probably based most of his thoughts about logic and the meaning of truth.

I have always wondered if Wittgenstein was ever influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce or William James with their views on pragmatism during his transitional period from the Tractatus to the Investigations.

To hammer the point home, the closest comparison of Wittgenstein that comes to my mind would be of Van Gogh.