- The world is everything that is the case.
I understand “the case” to merely be an informal way of saying “that which is true”.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
I am curious if Wittgenstein is refuting a previous paradigm or school of thought in philosophy, especially a specific philosopher. Is it fair to say that prior to Wittgenstein (and perhaps his predecessors such as Frege and Russell), most metaphysics, or attempts at describing the totality of reality, did in fact model it in physical terms, including space, time and matter? But is it fair to say that Wittgenstein wants to create a system of analysis which reflects reality as a collection of facts, but is not necessarily claiming that “facts” have the most ultimate and primary degree of existence, whereby physical objects are just an outgrowth of some purely logical world comprised merely of propositions, in a Platonic way?
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
Is Wittgenstein just emphasising that the set of facts describing the world has to be complete? Sort of like a minor comment in a court of law that you will tell the truth and the whole truth?
1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
It sounds like Wittgenstein really believes in this Platonic realm of pure facts existing in a more real way than the physical world that is apparently a mere reflection or consequence of it. But then, how can he explain or justify how this “world of facts” exists? What framework permits a realm of facts to exist abstractly, in and of themselves?
1.2 The world divides into facts.
Why is this statement significant enough to warrant a new decimal point number? It sounds like an altered phrasing of the previous notion, rather than introducing significant new propositional content. Is the concept of “dividing” important in any way?
1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.”
Someone told me that Wittgenstein doesn’t explain that he doesn’t mean any imaginable proposition exists independently of all others, but that in this section he’s only referring to “atomic facts” in some way. How is it possible that a fact could exist independently of any other fact, like that it is raining and the sky is wet? What kinds of facts is Wittgenstein thinking of here, and why doesn’t he explain that?