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Wittgenstein And The Grammar Of Physics: A Study Of Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1929-1930 Manuscripts And The Roots Of His Later Philosophy, Anton Alterman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1929 Wittgenstein began to work on the first philosophical manuscripts he had kept since completing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) in 1918. The impetus for this was his conviction that the logic of the TLP was flawed: it was unable to account for the fact that a proposition that assigns a single value on a continuum to a simple object thereby excludes all assignments of different values to the object (the "color exclusion" problem). Consequently Wittgenstein's "atomic propositions" could not be logically independent of one another.

Initially he thought he could replace the "logically perfect language" of the TLP with …