Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus · Chapter
3.3441 explained
Wittgenstein discusses the commonality among all notations for truth-functions, noting that they can all be replaced by the notations for negation and disjunction, thereby showing how a specific notation can yield general insights.
What happens
Wittgenstein discusses the commonality among all notations for truth-functions, noting that they can all be replaced by the notations for negation and disjunction, thereby showing how a specific notation can yield general insights.
Themes in this chapter
Logic and Tautology
The passage illustrates how truth-functional notations share a common logical form, reducible to negation and disjunction.
Characters to notice
- Mr. Wittgenstein
Author of the Tractatus, presenting the logical structure of truth-functional notation.
Key passages
“We can, for example, express what is common to all notations for the truth-functions as follows: It is common to them that they all, for example, can be replaced by the notations of “ ~ p ” (“not p ”) and “ p ∨ q ” (“ p or q ”).”
All truth-functional notations share the property that they can be expressed using only negation and disjunction.
This highlights the underlying unity of logical notation.