WITTGENSTEIN ON SENSE AND NONSENSE

Abstract

One of the problems in the Tractatus is the question of relationship between language and reality, or of the correspondence between our thinking and talking about the world and the way the world really is. Wittgenstein claims that there is a strong interconnection between language and thought. In searching for an answer to a fundamental philosophical question about the limits of thought, Wittgenstein is investigating the features of an ideal language in which nonsense cannot be said. He starts from Frege’s notion of sense, which, as I will argue, he reduces to absurdity. Further, I elucidate Wittgenstein’s key distinction between saying and showing by relating the conditions which need to be fulfi lled for saying with Gaunilo’s condition for conceiving, while Wittgenstein’s condition for showing I interpret as the condition for “conceiving through words”. Finally, I conclude that nonsense is what violates both conditions, Gaunilo’s and Wittgenstein’s.