Section 4:
Propositions 3.2-3.5

3.2 In a proposition a thought can be expressed in such a way that elements of the propositional sign correspond to the objects of the thought.

3.201 I call such elements 'simple signs', and such a proposition 'complete analysed'.

3.202 The simple signs employed in propositions are called names.

3.203 A name means an object. The object is its meaning. ('A' is the same sign as 'A'.)

3.21 The configuration of objects in a situation corresponds to the configuration of simple signs in the propositional sign.

3.221 Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.

3.23 The requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate.

3.24 A proposition about a complex stands in an internal relation to a proposition about a constituent of the complex. A complex can be given only by its description, which will be right or wrong. A proposition that mentions a complex will not be nonsensical, if the complex does not exits, but simply false. When a propositional element signifies a complex, this can be seen from an indeterminateness in the propositions in which it occurs. In such cases we know that the proposition leaves something undetermined. (In fact the notation for generality contains a prototype.) The contraction of a symbol for a complex into a simple symbol can be expressed in a definition.

3.25 A proposition cannot be dissected any further by means of a definition: it is a primitive sign.

3.261 Every sign that has a definition signifies via the signs that serve to define it; and the definitions point the way. Two signs cannot signify in the same manner if one is primitive and the other is defined by means of primitive signs. Names cannot be anatomized by means of definitions. (Nor can any sign that has a meaning independently and on its own.)

3.262 What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly.

3.263 The meanings of primitive signs can be explained by means of elucidations. Elucidations are propositions that stood if the meanings of those signs are already known.

3.3 Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning.

3.31 I call any part of a proposition that characterizes its sense an expression (or a symbol). (A proposition is itself an expression.) Everything essential to their sense that propositions can have in common with one another is an expression. An expression is the mark of a form and a content.

3.311 An expression presupposes the forms of all the propositions in which it can occur. It is the common characteristic mark of a class of propositions.

3.312 It is therefore presented by means of the general form of the propositions that it characterizes. In fact, in this form the expression will be constant and everything else variable.

3.313 Thus an expression is presented by means of a variable whose values are the propositions that contain the expression. (In the limiting case the variable becomes a constant, the expression becomes a proposition.) I call such a variable a 'propositional variable'.

3.314 An expression has meaning only in a proposition. All variables can be construed as propositional variables. (Even variable names.)

3.315 If we turn a constituent of a proposition into a variable, there is a class of propositions all of which are values of the resulting variable proposition. In general, this class too will be dependent on the meaning that our arbitrary conventions have given to parts of the original proposition. But if all the signs in it that have arbitrarily determined meanings are turned into variables, we shall still get a class of this kind. This one, however, is not dependent on any convention, but solely on the nature of the pro position. It corresponds to a logical form—a logical prototype.

3.316 What values a propositional variable may take is something that is stipulated. The stipulation of values is the variable.

3.317 To stipulate values for a propositional variable is to give the propositions whose common characteristic the variable is. The stipulation is a description of those propositions. The stipulation will therefore be concerned only with symbols, not with their meaning. And the only thing essential to the stipulation is that it is merely a description of symbols and states nothing about what is signified. How the description of the propositions is produced is not essential.

3.318 Like Frege and Russell I construe a proposition as a function of the expressions contained in it.

3.32 A sign is what can be perceived of a symbol.

3.321 So one and the same sign (written or spoken, etc.) can be common to two different symbols—in which case they will signify in different ways.

3.322 Our use of the same sign to signify two different objects can never indicate a common characteristic of the two, if we use it with two different modes of signification. For the sign, of course, is arbitrary. So we could choose two different signs instead, and then what would be left in common on the signifying side?

3.323 In everyday language it very frequently happens that the same word has different modes of signification—and so belongs to different symbols—or that two words that have different modes of signification are employed in propositions in what is superficially the same way. Thus the word 'is' figures as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for existence; 'exist' figures as an intransitive verb like 'go', and 'identical' as an adjective; we speak of something, but also of something's happening. (In the proposition, 'Green is green'—where the first word is the proper name of a person and the last an adjective—these words do not merely have different meanings: they are different symbols.)

3.324 In this way the most fundamental confusions are easily produced (the whole of philosophy is full of them).

3.325 In order to avoid such errors we must make use of a sign-language that excludes them by not using the same sign for different symbols and by not using in a superficially similar way signs that have different modes of signification: that is to say, a sign-language that is governed by logical grammar—by logical syntax. (The conceptual notation of Frege and Russell is such a language, though, it is true, it fails to exclude all mistakes.)

3.326 In order to recognize a symbol by its sign we must observe how it is used with a sense.

3.327 A sign does not determine a logical form unless it is taken together with its logico-syntactical employment.

3.328 If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. That is the point of Occam's maxim. (If everything behaves as if a sign had meaning, then it does have meaning.)

3.33 In logical syntax the meaning of a sign should never play a role. It must be possible to establish logical syntax without mentioning the meaning of a sign: only the description of expressions may be presupposed.

3.331 From this observation we turn to Russell's 'theory of types'. It can be seen that Russell must be wrong, because he had to mention the meaning of signs when establishing the rules for them.

3.332 No proposition can make a statement about itself, because a propositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the whole of the 'theory of types').

3.333 The reason why a function cannot be its own argument is that the sign for a function already contains the prototype of its argument, and it cannot contain itself. For let us suppose that the function F(fx) could be its own argument: in that case there would be a proposition 'F(F(fx))', in which the outer function F and the inner function F must have different meanings, since the inner one has the form O(f(x)) and the outer one has the form Y(O(fx)). Only the letter 'F' is common to the two functions, but the letter by itself signifies nothing. This immediately becomes clear if instead of 'F(Fu)' we write '(do) : F(Ou) . Ou = Fu'. That disposes of Russell's paradox.

3.334 The rules of logical syntax must go without saying, once we know how each individual sign signifies.

3.34 A proposition possesses essential and accidental features. Accidental features are those that result from the particular way in which the propositional sign is produced. Essential features are those without which the proposition could not express its sense.

3.341 So what is essential in a proposition is what all propositions that can express the same sense have in common. And similarly, in general, what is essential in a symbol is what all symbols that can serve the same purpose have in common.

3.3411 So one could say that the real name of an object was what all symbols that signified it had in common. Thus, one by one, all kinds of composition would prove to be unessential to a name.

3.342 Although there is something arbitrary in our notations, this much is not arbitrary—that when we have determined one thing arbitrarily, something else is necessarily the case. (This derives from the essence of notation.)

3.3421 A particular mode of signifying may be unimportant but it is always important that it is a possible mode of signifying. And that is generally so in philosophy: again and again the individual case turns out to be unimportant, but the possibility of each individual case discloses something about the essence of the world.

3.343 Definitions are rules for translating from one language into another. Any correct sign-language must be translatable into any other in accordance with such rules: it is this that they all have in common.

3.344 What signifies in a symbol is what is common to all the symbols that the rules of logical syntax allow us to substitute for it.

3.3441 For instance, we can express what is common to all notations for truth-functions in the following way: they have in common that, for example, the notation that uses 'Pp' ('not p') and 'p C g' ('p or g') can be substituted for any of them. (This serves to characterize the way in which something general can be disclosed by the possibility of a specific notation.)

3.3442 Nor does analysis resolve the sign for a complex in an arbitrary way, so that it would have a different resolution every time that it was incorporated in a different proposition.

3.4 A proposition determines a place in logical space. The existence of this logical place is guaranteed by the mere existence of the constituents—by the existence of the proposition with a sense.

3.41 The propositional sign with logical co-ordinates—that is the logical place.

3.411 In geometry and logic alike a place is a possibility: something can exist in it.

3.42 A proposition can determine only one place in logical space: nevertheless the whole of logical space must already be given by it. (Otherwise negation, logical sum, logical product, etc., would introduce more and more new elements in co-ordination.) (The logical scaffolding surrounding a picture determines logical space. The force of a proposition reaches through the whole of logical space.)

3.5 A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought.