Some remarks on logical form

Some Remarks on Logical Form is a short paper of about ten pages that Wittgenstein wrote in 1929, shortly after returning to Cambridge and to philosophy. It is the only academic article he ever published, and he disowned it almost immediately. Yet it marks a turning point: the first crack in the Tractatus, made by its own author.

What it is and how it came about

In January 1929 Wittgenstein came back to Cambridge after ten years away from academic philosophy. That spring he was invited to the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, held in Nottingham in July 1929. His text appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 9, pages 162 to 171 (the journal record).

By the time of the meeting he had lost faith in it. Instead of presenting the paper, he spoke about generality and infinity in mathematics. A few years later, in a 1933 letter to the journal Mind, he called it a short and weak article. Unusually for Wittgenstein, the paper was written in English.

What it says

The paper starts as a defence of the Tractatus programme. Ordinary language, Wittgenstein says, disguises logical form: sentences with the same grammatical shape can have very different logical structures. Philosophy should therefore find a clearer notation and analyse propositions down to their simplest, atomic parts.

Every proposition has a content and a form.

Some Remarks on Logical Form (1929)

But he adds that this analysis cannot be done from the armchair. We have to look at the phenomena themselves. And when he does, two problems appear.

First, many properties come in degrees: the length of a line, the pitch of a tone, the brightness of a colour. Wittgenstein concludes that numbers must enter into the structure of atomic propositions themselves. A statement like "this patch is this bright" cannot be broken down into a set of independent simpler statements.

Second, and more serious, is the problem of colour exclusion. If a spot in my visual field is red at a given moment, it cannot also be blue. The Tractatus held that elementary propositions are logically independent of each other. Yet "this point is red now" and "this point is blue now" clearly exclude one another, even though neither contradicts the other in the way "p and not p" does. Frank Ramsey had already pressed this point in his 1923 review of the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein's answer is that a complete notation must contain rules that forbid such combinations.

a perfect notation will have to exclude such structures by definite rules of syntax

Some Remarks on Logical Form (1929)

That small concession has large consequences. If atomic propositions can exclude one another, they are not independent, and the neat truth-table picture of the Tractatus breaks down. Within months Wittgenstein moved to the idea that propositions come in whole systems, laid against reality like a ruler, and that the rules governing them are a matter of grammar. That line of thought fills the Philosophical Remarks.

How to read it

The paper is short and written in clear English, but it is technical. You need a working knowledge of the Tractatus: atomic propositions, truth-functions and the picture theory. Read it after the Tractatus, and ideally next to Tractatus 6.3751, where the colour problem is first touched on. The text is reprinted in Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Hackett, 1993), and is freely available on the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project.

Why it matters

For anyone tracing how the early philosophy turned into the later one, this paper is a key document. It shows Wittgenstein still trying to save his first book while already undermining it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy places these years at the start of his so-called middle period. Commentators disagree about how much weight to give a text its author rejected, but most agree it captures the exact moment when the problem of colour, and with it the idea of grammar as a system of rules, entered his thinking.

Verdict

Read this if you know the Tractatus and want to see the first step away from it, or if you are interested in Ramsey's influence on Wittgenstein. It is short enough to read in one sitting, but without the background it will feel like a technical footnote. As a first text by Wittgenstein, it is the wrong choice.