Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein

This paper is excerpted from a manuscript in which James Conant argues that Wittgenstein’s famous closing description of sentences of the Tractatus as nonsensical draws on a conception of nonsense at odds with the conceptions at play in a couple of standard interpretations. Conant describes these interpretations as (i) positivist interpretations which depict Wittgenstein as furnishing a method for distinguishing meaningful from meaningless discourse and which depict him, further, as using this method to reveal metaphysical claims as inherently nonsensical and (ii) ineffability interpretations which agree with positive interpretations in characterizing Wittgenstein as furnishing a method for distinguishing meaningful from meaningless discourse but disagree with positive interpretations in so far as they suggest that he does so with an eye toward illuminating metaphysical claims which, while they cannot properly be put into words, nevertheless remain accessible to thought. Conant claims that we can arrive at a more faithful account both of how Wittgenstein uses “nonsense” as a term of philosophical appraisal and also of what he means when he says that the nonsensical sentences of the Tractatus serve as “elucidations” if we recognize that Wittgenstein’s renderings of the notions of nonsense and elucidation are the product of his efforts to refashion Fregean construals of them. The part of Conant’s manuscript included here isolates as far as possible his account of how the Tractatus can be understood as Wittgenstein’s reshaping of lines of thought inherited from Frege. A.C., ed.