A note on TRS and Wittgenstein’s thesis 7

Abstract

The author reflects upon a possible empirical interpretation of Wittgenstein’s well known thesis 7 in his Tractatus, as applied to some problems encountered when dealing with TRS.  The most general idea is that TRS is what ‘shows’, in Wittgenstein’s sense, rather than what can be rendered in terms of words; the reason being the threatening infinite regress behind any attempt at reducing the phenomena of TRS to primitive concepts as represented by definite segmental units.  Subsequently, the author touches upon certain more specific themes in the relevant domain. One of them is the problem of how to account for non-restrictive attributes or “appositions”. The author stresses the fact that they do not yield to interpretation in terms of something p such that ‘the speaker said that p’.  Another issue is that of an adequate interpretation of ‘I’. The author shows irreparable inadequacies inherent in Wierzbicka’s as well as in his own (previous) accounts of ‘I’. According to his new proposal, ‘I’ is equivalent to ‘someone’ with the first subscript (in an arbitrary list of subscripts) appended to the organism / body of the current speaker; the latter just shows in Wittgenstein’s sense.