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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wittgenstein's 1921 masterwork proposing that meaningful language must share its logical structure with reality — the philosophical architecture that computing inherited and that its author spent the rest of his life dismantling.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written in the trenches of the First World War and published in 1921, proposed that meaningful language must mirror the logical structure of reality. A proposition pictures a possible state of affairs; its elements correspond to the elements of the fact it represents; whatever cannot be pictured cannot be meaningfully said. The book ends with a boundary between the sayable and the unsayable, and the famous injunction that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Its influence on twentieth-century logic, the Vienna Circle, and eventually the conceptual foundations of computer science is difficult to overstate. It is also the text whose author, by the 1930s, had concluded was fundamentally incomplete.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Tractatus gave the ancient dream of a perfect language — Leibniz's characteristica universalis, Frege's Begriffsschrift, Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica — its most rigorous and most austere expression. Meaning, on the picture theory,