The Determination of Form by Syntactic Employment: a Model and a Difficulty

This paper develops a model for understanding the Tractarian doctrine that a sign insyntactic use determines a form. This doctrine is found to be in tension withWittgenstein's agnosticism with regard to forms of reality

Wittgenstein in Exile by James Klagge

Output Type: Book Revie

High Temperature Electronics Design for Aero Engine Controls and Health Monitoring

There is a growing desire to install electronic power and control systems in high temperature harsh environments to improve the accuracy of critical measurements, reduce the amount of cabling and to eliminate cooling systems. Typical target applications include electronics for energy exploration, power generation and control systems. Technical topics presented in this book include:• High temperature electronics market• High temperature devices, materials and assembly processes• Design, manufacture and testing of multi-sensor data acquisition system for aero-engine control• Future applications for high temperature electronicsHigh Temperature Electronics Design for Aero Engine Controls and Health Monitoring contains details of state of the art design and manufacture of electronics targeted towards a high temperature aero-engine application. High Temperature Electronics Design for Aero Engine Controls and Health Monitoring is ideal for design, manufacturing and test personnel in the aerospace and other harsh environment industries as well as academic staff and master/research students in electronics engineering, materials science and aerospace engineering

Frege on Syntax, Ontology, and Truth's Pride of Place

Frege's strict alignment between his syntactic and ontological categories is not, as is commonly assumed, some kind of a philosophicalthesis. There is no thesis that proper names refer only to objects, say, or that what refers to an object is a proper name. Rather, the alignment of categories is internal to Frege's conception of what syntax and ontology are. To understand this, we need to recognise the pride of place Frege assigns within his theorising to the notion of truth. For both language and the world, the Fregean categories arelogicalcategories, categories, that is, oftruth. The elaboration of this point makes clear the incoherence of supposing that they might not align

Solipsism And The Graspability Of Fact

Wittgenstein’s Tractarian discussion of solipsism opens with the claim that ‘[t]he limits of my language mean the limits of the world’ (TLP 5.6.) According to this paper, Wittgenstein expresses here a thought that the subject makes no sense of her thinking having content going beyond in kind that which she possesses in thinking. What the subject possesses in thinking is furthermore a truth or falsity, so that the idea is ruled out of truth-independent substance to the world. At the same time, however, thinking is an act of the subject given to her only as such – only as something she does, and so only as a determination of herself. Truth is not therefore independent of the subject; rather, as Wittgenstein puts it, ‘the world is my world’ (TLP 5.62). This conclusion threatens an idealism under which the nature of truth is explained by reference to that of the subject; objectivity is grounded in a deeper subjectivity. This threat is deflected by the recognition that the solipsist’s subject is an essentially undistanceable ‘I’ without content or character, so that ‘solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism’ (TLP 5.64)

Wittgenstein on Representability and Possibility

First paragraph: It is a central claim of the Tractatus that a proposition “contains the possibility of the state of affairs it represents” (TLP §2.203). This essay seeks to understand this claim, and so to understand why “we cannot think anything unlogical” (TLP §3.03), why “it is impossible to judge a nonsense” (TLP §5.5422)

Zalabardo on Semantic Unity and Metaphysical Unity

In his paper ‘The Tractatus on Unity’, José Zalabardo argues that the Tractatus makes important contributions towards the resolution of two related problems, the problem of semantic unity, and the problem of metaphysical unity. The problem of metaphysical unity consists in explaining how the unity of a fact arises out of the multiplicity of its constituent objects. The problem of semantic unity consists in explaining how a propositional representation doesn’t merely introduce various objects but furthermore represents them as combined in a certain way. According to Zalabardo, Wittgenstein takes rather different attitudes to these two problems. The semantic problem is solved by the idea, central to Wittgenstein’s picture theory, that a representation is a fact which exemplifies in its own combinatorial mode the way in which it represents its objects as combined. The metaphysical problem, by contrast, is rejected as relying on a mistaken conception of facts as compounds. In this response, I take individual issue with both attributions, and briefly query also their coherence