What Ludwig Wittgenstein Actually Said About Truth
All 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein passages on truth, in full — what each one claims, what holds them together, and who argues the other way.
Ludwig Wittgenstein returns to truth seven times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. Austrian-born philosopher who twice changed the course of analytic philosophy — first with the Tractatus, then with the Philosophical Investigations.
What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is of its period, but the question underneath is not: what is truth for, and what does it ask of you?
Every Ludwig Wittgenstein passage on truth
“One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.”
“It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.”
“It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true. (4.442)”
“A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.) (4.464)”
“Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) (5)”
“To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.”
“What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.”
What holds these together
Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Ludwig Wittgenstein is not offering seven opinions about truth; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.
Ludwig Wittgenstein applied to a real decision
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts one such case to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data.
Argued as self-reliant restraint: You are protecting attention as a condition for thought. The risk is romanticizing refusal when adaptation would be wiser.
Work through these yourself
- A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data. — argued from self-reliant restraint and several competing positions
Who disagrees
Socrates, David Hume, John Locke and Albert Camus all address truth too, and they do not converge. Reading Ludwig Wittgenstein alone gives you a coherent position; reading Ludwig Wittgenstein against Socrates shows you what the position is actually choosing against.