Tuesday, February 27, 2007

3.2 In propositions thoughts can be so expressed that the objects of the thought match the elements of the propositional token.


My first attempt to comment on this was: Really? What then are the elements of the propositional token (sentence)? Not letters, presumably, or sounds. Words perhaps, or phrases. If I say “The chair was quite soft” then the words “the chair” will correspond not with one particular possibility space (or point in logical space, or object) but with many (however many such points there are in a chair, as it were, or chair-possibility). The same goes for the words “quite soft”. Do they cover a specific range of possibility-spaces? Surely not. There is vagueness here, or so it would seem. An analysis of such a propositional token as “The chair was quite soft” results in vague and infinite sets of ‘objects’. (Infinite because, by 2.0131, at least some objects exist in an infinity of objects of a similar kind.) Nothing really gets clarified or made determinate.


On a second look, I'm inclined to emphasize the word "can" in Wittgenstein's remark.

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