5.557 The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are.

What lies in the application, logic cannot anticipate.

This is clear: Logic must not collide with its application.

But logic must be contiguous with its application.

Therefore logic and its application may not overlap each other.

So elementary propositions do not depend on objects. Rather, what objects there are depends on elementary propositions, which depend on the application of logic, on what we arbitrarily choose to do. In this sense at least there are no elementary propositions, or objects. What it means to talk of logic and its application overlapping one another, I do not know.

White (p. 25) says that what Wittgenstein writes here and in the following remark shows that to discover what objects are would require an empirical investigation. “What we can say is that if we consider the requirements that Wittgenstein lays down for his objects, they would have to be very different from the tiny particles that we first think of when we hear the phrase ‘simple objects’.”

Black (p. 306) suggests ‘touch’ where I have ‘be contiguous with’ and Pears & McGuinness have ‘be in contact with.’