Tuesday 24th November, 1914: In his private diary, LW again records that it is grimly cold, and that the Vistula is completely covered with drifting ice. He wishes that he wasn’t here: ‘Here there’s an everlasting unrest, and nobody knows what to do. The NCOs are always vulgar, one encouraging the other to ever greater audacity. There are of course exceptions’. Last night he spent on guard duty, and worked a lot. Today, he reports, ‘von Ficker sent me a poem by poor Trakl, which I think is amazing, without understanding it. God be with me!’ (GT2, SS.27-8). In his notebooks, LW introduces a new analogy, declaring that the proposition and the situation ‘are related to one another like the yardstick and the length to be measured’. The fact that the *proposition* ‘φa’ can be inferred from the *proposition* ‘(x).φx’ shows how generality is present even in the *sign* ‘(x).φx’, and the same holds for any generality notation. ‘In the proposition we hold a proto-picture up against reality’. LW notes parenthetically that when investigating negative facts, one feels as if they presuppose the existence of the propositional sign. He then asks himself whether the sign of the negative proposition *must* be constructed by means of the sign of the positive one. And he notes that he believes that this is so. He asks why one shouldn’t be able to express the negative proposition by means of a negative fact. It is as if one was to take the space outside the yardstick, instead of the yardstick itself, as the object of comparison. He asks himself how the *proposition* ‘∼p’ really contradicts the *proposition* ‘p’. The internal relation of the two signs, he notes, must mean contradiction. Finally, LW declares that whenever we have a negative proposition, it must be possible to ask *what* it is that *isn’t* the case. The answer to this question is in turn only a proposition, of course. (He notes that this remark is incomplete). (NB, p.32).
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 07:43:49 +0000