[lit-ideas] Re: The Wittgenstein Tautology -- as identified by Torgeir Fj...

Thanks to R. Paul for his comment. 
He quotes from Pears/McGuinness's translation

''What we cannot speak about we must
pass over in silence.'

and writes:

"This does not strike me as tautologous at all. It is an injunction, an
injunction derived from the section immediately preceding it, 6.54, around 
which 
Donal McEvoy and I have been doing a little logical dance. It is, if you like,
both an injunction and a reminder, no more tautological than 'The boss is the
boss.'"

Okay -- so the issue is 'tautologous-to-Fjeld', 'tautologous-to-Speranza', 
and 'tautologous-to-Paul'. Must say that 

The boss = the boss.

strikes _me_ as tautologous.

Incidentally, I was reading Octavio Paz, The Double Flame, where he has this 
famous passage by Montaigne. Paz writes:

"Pondering the reason for the friendship that united him to the poet Etienne 
de La Boetie, Montaigne answered his own question:

    "Because he was he and I was I".

And he adds that in all this "there was an inexplicable and foreordained 
force, the intermediary of this union". A lover would not have answered 
differently."

Now, I wonder how (the heck) one gets to formalize Montaigne's 'tautology' in 
a way that is _not_ analytic?

But back to Wittgenstein, if it _were_ a grammatically correct injunction, 
wouldn't it read "what you _may_ not speak...". I mean: 'can' literally refers 
to _physical_ necessity (not deontic), so it _does_ strike people (Fjeld, me) 
as 'tautologous' that what we CAN not speak about we MUST pass over in 
silence". Looks like a case of

    ought -> can

or -- and reading 'must' as 'ought' -- is it, as Sinnott-Armstrong has it, 
that 'ought' merely _conversationally implicates_ 'can'?

Sorry for convoluted obscure wording...

Cheers,

JL


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