One day in the fall of 1911, while Bertrand Russell was taking tea in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge with a student, C.K. Ogden,^§AS1a an “unknown German” arrived.¹⁹ Ludwig Wittgenstein said he had come to see them because he was interested in mathematics and logic. He had been studying engineering at the University of Manchester, focusing his work on aeronautics.

We want to explore Wittgenstein’s thinking as a way to elaborate what we mean, somewhat differently, by “predication.”

By way of context, Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler had both been born in Vienna in 1889, six days apart. They went to the same school but Hitler fell behind a year and Wittgenstein moved ahead a year, so they ended up two grades apart. There is some chance that they knew each other, though they were divided by social class and school-defined ability. Wittgenstein was a son of the second most wealthy family in Austria, after the Rothschilds. His family had made their money investing in steel.²⁰

While studying engineering in Manchester, Wittgenstein’s interest had been piqued by the meaning of the mathematics. He had become aware of the writings of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege.^§MS1a He visited Frege at the University of Jena in the summer of 1911, who advised him to see Russell.

Wittgenstein stayed in Cambridge after that initial meeting and went to Russell’s lectures. They were poorly attended, often with only three or four students. This gave Wittgenstein ample opportunity to interact with Russell.

“My German engineer is very argumentative & tiresome … He thinks nothing empirical is knowable … He wouldn’t admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room … [and] as usual maintained his thesis that there is nothing in the world except asserted propositions.”²¹ Russell nevertheless offered his encouragement to Wittgenstein, who decided to give up engineering for philosophy.

Wittgenstein started working on a thesis on logic. He submitted it for his BA degree in 1913, but it was rejected because the regulations required that an academic text include referencing in order to distinguish what was original from ideas drawn from scholarly sources and requiring attribution.

Wrote Wittgenstein to the professor who had submitted it on his behalf:

Dear Moore,

Your letter annoyed me. When I wrote Logik [its title at the time] I didn’t consult the Regulations, and therefore I think it would only be fair if you gave my degree without consulting them so much either! … If I am not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to HELL directly; and if I am worth it and you don’t do it, then – by God – you might go there …

L.W.²²

An exception was not made.

Then the First World War came, and that was hell on earth. Wittgenstein joined the Austro-Hungarian army, served on the front line, and was taken a prisoner of war. After the war he became a primary school teacher in a small Austrian village.

Finally he finished the work that he had submitted unsuccessfully as his BA. It was published in German in 1921. He sent it to Russell and Ogden in England to see whether it could be published in English as a book.²³ Ogden worked on the translation with a young student, F.P. Ramsay, and it was published in 1922 under the Latin title that Ogden had suggested, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a riff on the title of Baruch Spinoza’s^§MS3.1.1a Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 1677.²⁴

The Tractatus was just 75 pages long. Along with a small children’s dictionary and one article, this was all Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. It is of interest to us as we work through our grammar of multimodality, partly because, in a way that became very typical of social theory by the end of the twentieth century, it grants so much to language as the core of human meaning. Or perhaps it doesn’t, and to this extent its meanings become lost in its depths of ambiguity – self-contradiction, even.^§MS2.3.2a

Here is our gloss on an elusive text, drawing out just those things that might help us elucidate our notion of predication. (“Elucidate” is Wittgenstein’s word for the role of philosophy in addressing the ordinary world, reduced to its bare bones after what he considered to be the declarative “nonsense” of metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics – and this idea we do like. “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity,” he said.²⁵)

In the Tractatus, the world consists of facts, and facts consist of objects that are logically connected with each other. “The object is the fixed, the existent; the configuration is the changing, the variable.”²⁶ Logic is expressed in language in the form of a proposition. “The proposition shows how things stand, if it is true. And it says, that they do so stand.”²⁷ This is all that is thinkable.

“All propositions of our colloquial language are actually, just as they are, logically completely in order … not a model of the truth but the complete truth itself.”²⁸ As a consequence, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”²⁹ And of the logic that language expresses, “logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.”³⁰

Wittgenstein’s “objects” we call entities, and their “configuration” or “variables” we call action. Entities and actions come together in events.

However, from the start, we are unhappy with Wittgenstein’s idea that the world is held together by mere configuration, or logic, as expressed via propositions in language. The world is more than things and their relations. And we mean something more active and varied than logic.

In our grammar, the world is held together by dynamics that can be activated across a number of quite different meaning functions. In this part of the book, we address agency in events that involve predication and transitivity connecting entities through patterns of action. To us, Wittgenstein’s view of reality has rather a static feel. There is then a lot more than logic that holds the world together, and we need more than logic to think that holding-togetherness.

Then, in our grammar – and in fact this is the very reason why we need a transpositional grammar – there is much meaning in the world that happens beyond or beside language and logic, in image, space, object, bodies, and sound. Language is only able to represent these meanings by transposition, and only partially given its affordances. We need multimodality to fill out or complement the meanings of language. And we need a theory of transpositions to explain the traffic between language and the world that gives language its meaning. Language has limited meaning by itself. To invert Wittgenstein’s now-famous formulation, the limits of my meaning are the limits of the affordances of my forms of meaning-making, and there is much awaiting my meaning that is beyond the scope of any one form.

Adding to our problem of Wittgenstein’s limiting meaning to language is a categorical problem about the form of meaning to which Wittgenstein ascribes limits. “Language,” as we have argued,^§MS0.2.7a is an unhappy aggregation of speech and writing. It would be simply impossible to represent or communicate the logical sections of the Tractatus in speech; these of necessity take the characteristic form of writing, closely aligned as it is to visual representation. So, if anything, Wittgenstein should more accurately refer in his theory to writing, rather than language.

Having found the limits of meaning in language, Wittgenstein admits, beyond that “there is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” The Tractatus ends in a self-contradiction. It is an anti-metaphysical metaphysics. It is a work of logic that drops much of our ordinary experience into the nonsensical, then the mystical. Then even philosophy. Having spoken declaratively for seventy-five pages, of his own propositions he now says, “he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)”³¹ His last words: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”³²

Wittgenstein sent a copy of the book to Frege, who replied, “You see, from the very beginning I find myself entangled in doubt as to what you want to say, and so make no proper headway.” Russell wrote a foreword, which Wittgenstein felt misunderstood his main arguments, some of which Russell privately considered “a curious kind of logical mysticism.”³³

Silence followed, or at least written silence. Wittgenstein’s next book, Philosophical Investigations, was not published until after his death, more than thirty years later.^§MS2.3.2a

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¹⁹ Ray Monk, 1990, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York, NY: The Free Press, pp. 38–39.

²⁰ Brian McGuinness, 1988, Wittgenstein: A Life; Young Ludwig 1889–1921, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 51.

²¹ Ray Monk, 1990, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York, NY: The Free Press, pp. 39–40.

²² Ibid., p. 103.

²³ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1973, Letters to C.K. Ogden, Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

²⁴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1922 [1933], Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, UK: Routledge.

²⁵ Ibid., §4.112.

²⁶ Ibid., §2.0271.

²⁷ Ibid., §4.022.

²⁸ Ibid., §5.5563.

²⁹ Ibid., §5.6.

³⁰ Ibid., §5.61.

³¹ Ibid., §6.54.

³² Ibid., §7.

³³ Ray Monk, 1990, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York, NY: The Free Press, pp. 163, 165.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 182-186. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s "Tractatus" §MS2.1.1a