Tuesday, December 05, 2006

2.063 The total reality is the world.


Tricky. 1.12 says that the totality of facts determines both what is the case and what is not the case. 2.05 repeats this idea. But then 2.062 seems to contradict it. It is not the facts that tell us what the non-facts are, but their being all the facts that does so. So in addition to all the facts we need another fact, namely that these are all the facts. But don't we then get into an infinite regress? It cannot be a fact that these are all the facts, since "these" refers to a set that excludes that last, seemingly all-important, fact. The existence of states of affairs cannot itself be a state of affairs. Our attempt to define a logical space or world consisting of all that is possible and allowing for the possibility of specifying exactly which possibilities are actualized and which are not seems to have hit a wall. Cf. 4.12.

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