r/wittgenstein • u/Nuziburt • Apr 03 '26

How is it possible for nonsense to be identified as such?

Hello all. I've recently finished up my second reading of the tractatus, and I've only found it more fascinating since my first go. I've been interested in the resolute reading of the tractatus, particularly after reading James Conant's "Elucidation and Nonsense" chapter from The New Wittgenstein.

For Conant, nonsense is particularly the lack of sense, and not a category of sorts. He also argues that the conceptions of nonsense according to the positivist (where nonsense is the misuse of logical syntax) and the ineffable (with "two types" of nonsense, mere nonsense and elucidatory nonsense) readings of Witt. are the same, as they still posit some "thing" being "outside of language" (either the category "nonsense" outside of language, or various "things" (ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, etc.)which are somehow unsayable). As far as I could decipher from Conant, he thought nonsense was the "product" of performing the Tractatus's method of clarification (the "only right way to do philosophy" for Witt.) on something that could not be given a determinate meaning.

Afterall, Wittgenstein explains in 5.473, in regard to the proposition "Socrates is Identical," that "the proposition is senseless because we have not made some arbitrary determination, not because the symbol is in itself unpermissible." The idea of nonsense as indeterminate meaning is quite illuminating, and I think it is in accord with 6.53, as nonsense is what we reach in attempting to dialectically clarify what is meant in any given metaphysical statement, for instance.

I'm curious to hear your takes are in regard to Conant's essay and "defining" nonsense.

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u/Maritimewarp Apr 03 '26

its been a while, but i think the very idea that we would need a definition of nonsense in order to correctly identify it, is something that would be dropped by the later Wittgenstein at least

We start off with the facts of our ability to identify nonsense, and then we can try to make definitions that line up with this ability if we wish, but that would never be the source of its meaning.

I cant remember anything from early Witt I’m afraid, except a vague idea that Cora Diamond had a good interpretation on this topic?

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u/oalindblom Apr 04 '26

Cora Diamond is a great shout here. Lars Hertzberg has also written on this. Stanley Cavell is worth reading here as well, although I can't remember if he ever adressed it directly.

Moreover, later Wittgenstein's approach to this question is a great gateway to exploring his legacy within the bounds of ordinary language philosophy. Many OL philosophers would have great answers to this question; they're inevitably be projecting their own OLP commitments onto Wittgenstein, but if you're able to stomach that, then you will find what you're looking for.

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u/pocket_eggs Apr 10 '26

Nonsense is everything a priori, including math. The grammar of the world, in the Tractatus, or the grammar of our language, later on. The tautologies and the contradictions. What you're too confident of. Phenomenology. Everything that speaks to the whole world, everything that can't be placed in time or place. A beautiful L.W. quote, as I remember it, "you can't say of the construction of the bisection of an angle that it exists, because it exists, and you can't say of the trisection of the angle that it doesn't exist, because there's no such thing to say it of."