Sense or Nonsense? Wittgenstein on the Limits of Language

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the climax of Wittgenstein’s earlier work. Wittgenstein’s task in the Tractatus remains controversial, but one theme he appears to return to over and over is the attempt to distinguish that which it is possible to say. This article explores this element of Wittgenstein’s thought, and hopefully serves to illuminate several other important ideas in the Tractatus in doing so. This article covers his view on philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrine, the relationship between “thinking clearly” and sense, and the dispute about what counts as nonsense.

Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is often presented as an attempt to define what can and cannot be said, and correspondingly what can and cannot be thought. Wittgenstein presents a conception of philosophy as something singular, unlike other areas of intellectual life, and different above all from the natural sciences: philosophy “is not a body of doctrine but an activity.”

The activity in question appears to be concerned with thought – specifically, with thinking clearly. Wittgenstein shares with Gottlob Frege, the German logician whose work inaugurated modern-day philosophy of language and modern philosophical logic, a conviction that natural language obscures the clarity of thought.

In other words, it is the ambiguity of language which makes it difficult to distinguish speech that corresponds to clear thinking from that which does not. On the one hand, it seems obvious that the purpose of philosophy would be to make such determinations (that is, those between what can and cannot be thought).

Thinking Clearly

What is wrong with thinking unclearly? Why focus on it? One way of phrasing the issue is in terms of inconsistency which emerges as a result of language being stretched to (indeed, beyond) its limits, and this torturing of language resulting in misunderstandings.

Wittgenstein is especially concerned that certain ways of speaking, certain combinations of words, might lead us to pose questions to which there can be no answer. Wittgenstein clearly thinks that at least some of what is called philosophy in his day, and likely in ours as well, is precisely this kind of futile exercise.

Although Wittgenstein’s influence over modern-day Anglophonic philosophy (that is, philosophy written and spoken about in English) is probably exerted more by his later work than by the Tractatus, this conception of the purpose of philosophy – to clear away profound-sounding nonsense and ask questions which really can be answered – has proven extremely long-lasting. Indeed, it arguably constitutes one of the main, non-spurious differences between the way philosophy is done in the English-speaking world and the way it is done elsewhere.

Where Wittgenstein loses many of his fans, even some of the most ardent, is when he claims that the mark of good philosophy is just in the dismissal of unclear thinking. Again—it is an activity, and so at its best, philosophy leaves us where we would have been had we never learned to speak unclearly in the first place.

Much of the Tractatus might seem to run against this anti-philosophical impulse, and to indulge in the kind of profound-seeming philosophizing that Wittgenstein seems to warn us about elsewhere in the book.

Yet unlike many of the philosophers who came before him, Wittgenstein is not interested in attempting to make sense of the world in itself, nor in using language to understand things as they are independent of us. The focus of Wittgenstein’s project is on our attempts to make sense of things, on the way we speak and think, not on things themselves.

If Wittgenstein is concerned with sense, then he is concerned with it only within its proper context. What is sense, what constitutes it? We make sense of things, and we are able to make sense of them because there is a particular way that things are – that is, there are facts. For Wittgenstein, the world is simply the totality of facts, not of things – in other words, it is constituted by how things are arranged. Things, or objects, are the totally unanalyzable constituent parts of which facts trace the arrangement. If the facts had been different, this would not be because there were different objects, but because they were arranged differently.

Again, facts are to do with the arrangement of objects or things, not of what they are. Sense is borne (or fails to be borne) by propositions. There is some dispute about whether propositions that do not bear sense are to be called propositions, pseudo-propositions, or either depending on the context. Regardless, propositions that bear sense are made up of signs. The configuration of signs expresses a configuration of objects, and if it does in fact track with the configuration of objects, then it is true. If it doesn’t, it is false.

Wittgenstein is often understood as dividing propositions into three distinct kinds. First, there are propositions that express thoughts. The criterion for a proposition making sense is that it can be pictured in the world. Consequently, this is often known as the “picture theory” of language. An important feature of these propositions is that they might be true or false—their truth value is not predetermined.

Second, there are propositions, which are often referred to as “pseudo-propositions,” to which there is no corresponding thing that can be pictured. To use some more characteristic Wittgensteinian terminology, we might say that whereas genuine propositions are signs which correspond to that which they signify, pseudo-propositions are signs without such a correspondence.

The third kind of proposition are logical constants—tautologies and contradictions (those which are true by definition or false by definition). These are propositions without sense because they similarly cannot be pictured, but they do have a truth value that is pre-determined. By pre-determined, we should understand something like—“it cannot be otherwise.”

Sense and Nonsense 

The upshot of all this is that, for Wittgenstein, the limits of language are located at the boundary of sense and nonsense, and determining what we can and cannot say is going to involve a closer analysis of this boundary.

It is worth saying at the outset that the simple conflation of pseudo-propositions with nonsense has come into criticism. There is an alternative understanding of Wittgenstein that hopes to interpret him as applying the term “nonsense” in a more limited way. This also constitutes an attempt to limit him to applying the term in a way more in keeping with ordinary language.

Cora Diamond is just one contemporary philosopher who has argued that nowhere in the Tractatus does Wittgenstein actually commit himself to the view that just because something is a pseudo-proposition, that means that it is nonsensical. On this view, Wittgenstein holds that some pseudo-propositions are, in fact, nonsensical, but there is no reason to think that all pseudo-propositions are. Mathematical propositions are an example they give of pseudo-propositions which are nonetheless not nonsense.

As Adrian Moore paraphrases the argument, the propositions of mathematics “count as pseudo-propositions for Wittgenstein because he takes them to be equations and therefore, on the account of equations that he proffers in the Tractatus, representational devices that are neither true nor false. He is nevertheless quite happy to acknowledge that they have a clear, codifiable, and important use.”

Moore himself suggests an issue with this view, which runs as follows. Even though the propositions of, say, mathematics, have a very clear and obvious use, the propositions of the Tractatus itself also have a use (there is a point to them), even if what it is far from obvious. Wittgenstein’s philosophy must be understood as, at least to some degree, therapeutic.

The concern with determining language’s limits should not be understood only as an attempt to figure out what we are able to say, but as something that allows us to make peace with what we cannot say:

“The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping philosophy when I want to — The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.”

Yet Wittgenstein explicitly states that the Tractatus is nonsense, so “being of use” is not enough to salvage language from being nonsensical. To make that claim, we would have to find some further ground on which to distinguish the use of the Tractatus from the use of mathematics, and then attempt to make this distinction fit all forms of expression.