The Simple Truth

Mystical Exercises in Tractarian Syntax

Abstract

F. H. Bradley argues that any plurality of objects possessing qualities or standing in relations to one another is impossible because it leads to a vicious regress. Bradley’s regress objection continues to draw the attention of some contemporary metaphysicians. I indicate how the problem can be resolved by developing relevant semantic and logical ideas from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein’s deflationary account of truth, together with his view that propositional signs picture or model possible atomic facts, shows how a proposition that seems to ascribe a quality to an object in fact does not. Guided by the semantic principle that the sense and reference of a proposition are determined by the senses and references of its parts, Wittgenstein adopts a convention for eliminating the identity sign in his logical syntax that allows for a regress-free internal realism about relations consisting of true sentences containing relation symbols along with different names or variables for distinct objects. Finally, in a manner reminiscent of Kant’s antinomies, Wittgenstein’s elucidation of necessity and impossibility in terms of sinnlos logical tautology and contradiction, together with his conception of the world as a limited whole, enables him to resist a prima facie powerful Tractarian reductio that Bradley might present in response to Wittgenstein’s apparent claims of metaphysical necessity.