Reality And Representation

Reality, Representation, and Projection

Reality, Representation, and Projection is an important collection of new essays on a range of topics relating to realism and its rivals in metaphysics, logic, metaethics, and epistemology. The contributors are some of the leading authors in these fields, including the late Ian McFetridge, Mark Johnston, John Skorupski, Christopher Peacocke, Michael Williams, Edward Craig, Michael Smith, John Campbell, Peter Railton, David Wiggins, Bob Hale, Simon Blackburn, John Haldane, and Crispin Wright. Several of the essays constitute definitive statements of their views. In some cases authors write in response to the essays of other contributors, while in other cases they proceed independently. Although not primarily historical, this collection includes discussions of philosophers from the Middle Ages to the present day, from Aquinas to Wittgenstein. No one seriously interested in questions about realism, whether as a general philosophical outlook or as a particular position within specific debates, can afford to be without this collection.

Reality and Representation

Representation and Reality in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Jos L. Zalabardo puts forward a new interpretation of central ideas in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerning the structure of reality and our representations of it in thought and language. He shows the origins of Wittgenstein's picture theory of propositional representation in Russell's theories of judgment, arguing that the picture theory is Wittgenstein's solution to some of the problems that he found in Russell's position. Zalabardo defends the view that, for Wittgenstein, facts in general, and the facts that play the role of propositions in particular, are not composite items, arising from the combination of their constituents. They are ultimate, irreducible units, and what we think of as their constituents are features that facts have in common with one another. These common features have built into them their possibilities of combination with other features into possible situations. This is the source of the Tractarian account of non-actual possibilities. It is also the source of the idea that it is not possible to produce propositions answering to certain descriptions, including those that would give rise to Russell's paradox. Zalabardo then considers Wittgenstein's view that every proposition is a truth function of elementary propositions. He argues that this view is motivated by Wittgenstein's epistemology of logic, according to which we should be able to see logical relations by inspecting the structures of propositions. Finally, Zalabardo considers the problems that we face if we try to extend the application of the picture theory from elementary propositions to truth functions of these.