The Fixed Form of the World
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v15i3.5871Abstract
One of the most puzzling features of objects in the Tractatus is that they exist necessarily. Wittgenstein expresses this commitment at 2.022 and 2.023, where he says that there is a form common to all possible worlds and that objects constitute this fixed form. In this paper I argue that the necessary existence of Tractarian objects is a consequence of their simplicity, but to make sense of this inference we must understand simplicity in a logical and not a mereological sense. I also argue that we need to read into the Tractatus a view that he only makes fully explicit in 1929 in his early post-Tractatus remarks. This is the view that representation takes place within systems, and that objects are the images of the basic representational elements in such systems. This systematic view of representation is in tension with his commitment to the independence of elementary propositions—a tension that he only came to see clearly under the influence of Ramsey. In Wittgenstein’s response to Ramsey he gives up on the independence of elementary propositions and emphasizes the systematic nature of representation. In doing so he doubles down on a commitment to the systematicity of representation that was already there in the Tractatus. This allows us to see the necessary existence of objects as an expression of the following idea: we use the same systems of representation for thinking and speaking about any possible world. An object brings with it a whole system of representation that is used to represent facts of a certain form, where facts of this form are common to all possible worlds. This is the sense in which objects constitute the fixed form of the world.
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