Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: Section 2 – 2.0141

Having written way too many words about the first few lines of the Tractatus in the last post, I’m just going to shut up and get right to it:

2. What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs.

2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).

2.011 It is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs. 

So here’s our first fact, according to W: states of affairs exist. Example of a boring state of affairs: the cup is on the table. These sort of things exist, and the very existence of such things is a fact (which in the Tractatus means it is atomically true, i.e that states of affairs exist is properly basic, and cannot be expressed in terms of other truths.)

It’s worth noting that this seems neutral on metaphysics, which is presumably the point. I take it W isn’t interested in questions like whether states of affairs are ‘really’ out there in a mind independent sense, or if they are some sort of Descartes’ demon-style illusion. (Is the cup on the table really there, or is it a virtual cup in the matrix, beamed into my brain by shady robots? Bah!) I suspect we should take his assertion as saying simply that there is something going on – something potentially expressible.

The third proposition is expanded on next, but here let’s just tie it in with the point I made last time that W gives a higher priority to states of affairs than to the objects which constitute them. To state that the basic (atomic) fact is that states of affairs exist, and then that objects are characterised by the roles they do or can play in states of affairs, is an inversion of the way we tend to think about these things intuitively.

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.

2.0121 It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that a situation would fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own. 

If things occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning. 

(Nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts.) 

Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others. 

If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations. 

2.0122 Things are independent in so far as they can occur in all possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with states of affairs, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to appear in two different roles: by themselves, and in propositions.)

2.0123 If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs. 

(Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.)

A new possibility cannot be discovered later. 

2.01231 If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties. 

To imagine a thing is to imagine it in a state of affairs. The comparison with spatial/temporal objects is telling: it is simply impossible to conceive a spatial object which is not embedded in some space. It does not make sense to do so – it is entailed in the kind of thing it is. In the same way, W asserts that a thing can only be conceived as embedded in states of affairs.

I’m finding it hard to tell how broadly he is using the word ‘thing’ here, and consequently whether he is saying something trivial or substantial. In the case of something like a cup, the point is easily grasped. I can’t isolate a cup from states of affairs – about the best I can do is imagine it floating in empty space, but then it is still in some state of affairs, namely it is floating in empty space! But this in itself is not saying much more than that spatial objects are spatial, and similarly that temporal objects are temporal.

If we were so inclined we could read W as rejecting Platonism, i.e. that we actually can’t conceive of things existing independently (abstract things, like numbers, circles, centres of gravity). But somehow I doubt that W wants to go anywhere near that sort of metaphysical speculation, and is after something a bit more meta.

Perhaps we can read it like this: if we are going to take numbers as things in the metaphysically independent way that the Platonist does, then all we end up doing is postulating another realm for them to dwell in – Plato’s realm of ideal forms. The long and short of it is, even if we separate these things out from normal states of affairs, we are not separating them from states of affairs as such, we are just changing the kind of states of affairs in which they can occur.

(The bit about ‘external’ and ‘internal’ properties of objects is unclear at this point, but it is something he returns to later in the Tractatus.)

2.0124 If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given.

Once you’ve got all the objects (likely a vast infinity), latent in them is all the possible ways they can combine with each other, and this exhausts the logical space of states of affairs. While I do think that he is granting special status to states of affairs as somehow prior to objects, his point here is that while a state of affairs may be expressed in terms of many different combinations of objects, it can never be expressed without any objects at all.

2.013 Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space. 

2.0131 A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place.)

A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on. 

2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

2.0141 The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object. 

In the first section, W put out the idea that what there is (in the first place) is not objects, but states of affairs. This was an inversion of the perhaps more intuitive way of looking at the world as objects first and foremost, which then combine into states of affairs.

In this section he maps out how we should think of objects if we take this inversion seriously: objects are what you get when you decompose states of affairs. Certainly, some states of affairs might share components, and hence we can have objects occurring in more than one. But this independence that objects have from appearing in particular states of affairs should not be confused with objects being independent from states of affairs as such – i.e from the possibility of occurring in states of affairs. This possibility, W is urging, is exactly what it is to be a thing.