The Simple Truth: Mystical Exercises in Tractarian Syntax

Abstract

F. H. Bradley argues that any plurality of objects possessing qualities or standing in relations to one another is impossible because it leads to a vicious regress. Bradley’s regress objection continues to draw the attention of some contemporary metaphysicians. I indicate how the problem can be resolved by developing relevant semantic and logical ideas from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein’s deflationary account of truth, together with his view that propositional signs picture or model possible atomic facts, shows how a proposition that seems to ascribe a quality to an object in fact does not. Guided by the semantic principle that the sense and reference of a proposition are determined by the senses and references of its parts, Wittgenstein adopts a convention for eliminating the identity sign in his logical syntax that allows for a regress-free internal realism about relations consisting of true sentences containing relation symbols along with different names or variables for distinct objects. Finally, in a manner reminiscent of Kant’s antinomies, Wittgenstein’s elucidation of necessity and impossibility in terms of sinnlos logical tautology and contradiction, together with his conception of the world as a limited whole, enables him to resist a prima facie powerful Tractarian reductio that Bradley might present in response to Wittgenstein’s apparent claims of metaphysical necessity