On the Correlation of Logic and Ontology in the Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus

The article criticizes the thesis that formal logic has no ontological value and does not play a prominent role in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The author of the article reconstructs the ontology of the Tractatus in order to show that formal logic is the representation of the structure of the world. The main attention is paid to the concept of sense and the distinction between two types of nonsense - sinnlos and unsinnig propositions. The author proves that the senselessness of propositions of logic, tautologies and contradictions, does not lead to the idea that formal logic does not have ontological value at all. Indeed, according to Wittgenstein, formal logic does not represent any reality (neither physical reality nor the reality of logical objects), but it plays a fundamentally important role in explicating the structural properties of language and in showing the internal relation between language and the world. Logical symbolism makes it possible to clarify and emphasize the relations between the objects within the sentence and the relations between the sentences themselves, which determines how the world can be given to us and what kind of image of the world we are able to form. This clarification does not characterize and does not affect the sense of sentences, but allows us to make it obvious in each specific case, since the structural properties of the language are revealed in formal logic in an explicit form. In tautologies and contradictions, the conditions for the correspondence of the picture that are provided by a proposition and the reality are annulled, but their connection with the representative function of language is still clearly traced, unlike those sentences of language for which the truthfinding procedure is generally impossible, namely for unsinnig propositions. Formal logic does not provide any particular picture of the world, but it marks the limits of description, defining the structural possibilities of proposition in general, and hence knowledge in general. Having no ontological content of its own, formal logic, from Wittgenstein's point of view, determines the formal possibilities of constructing any specific ontology, and in this sense it has meta-ontological value.

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