Luiz H. S. Santos

As “Shut up and Dance” begins, we sympathize with Kenny as he is blackmailed by computer hackers who threaten to release a video of him masturbating to pornography. But as the episode closes, our attitude flips. He wasn't just looking at pornography, but child pornography! Kenny's not a victim, he's a villain, and the hackers are vigilantes. But should we be celebrating? What Kenny did was deplorable of course, but should we wish for such things to happen to deplorable people? Should the hackers have just notified the police? Or must we apply this kind of punishment to truly attain justice? If so, what does it tell us about our notion of justice? Would we want to live in a society that encourages vigilantes? Should we become vigilantes ourselves?

We’ll approach the notion of object in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921), initially from the so-called “substance argument”. The discourse about necessary conditions for the propositional sense cannot be treated in terms of truth or falsity in the Tractatus without resulting in a infinite regress. Such a situation is avoided by postulating a substance made up of simple objects, thus ensuring the assumed total determination of sense. Passages from the Notebooks (1914-1916) suggest that the idea of simples is given in the ideia of logical analysis and is reached without the necessity of examples for objects. Another early Wittgenstein’s remarks provide examples for objects based on itens of phenomenical nature, such as a point in the visual field. An important analogy for the phenomenical approach for the object, which is found in the aphorisms 2.013-2.0131 of Tractatus, presents a problem for the absolute simplicity. This problem concerns the notion of form, a concept that attributes an ontological dependence to the object given by its essencial capacity of occurrence in atomic facts. The form of the objects results from an appropriation of the Context Principle used by Frege in his Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) and differs from the notions of pictorial form and logical form. The dependence assigned to the object through its form contradicts the independent subsistence established by its simplicity. The Tractarian object results from necessary demands for determination of propositional sense, reached by means of an clarificatory analysis which prioritizes the transformative and regressive modes of analysis. Simplicity and Context Principle are, under this perspective, rules of a syntax for a logical or significative use of language, which are reflected in the Tractarian ontology through the ideia that the logico-philosophical investigation of language reveals essencial aspects of the intimate structure of the world.

O objetivo deste artigo é elucidar a ideia tractariana de forma lógica. Partimos da identificação de diferenças conceituais significativas entre ocorrências do termo “forma” no texto do Tractatus. Estas diferenças permitem a obtenção de dois conceitos distintos. O primeiro deles é a forma dos objetos; o segundo, a forma de afiguração. No interior desta última noção, é possível ainda identificar a ideia de uma forma lógica de afiguração, a qual é distinta da forma de afiguração devido à sua generalidade. Argumentamos que tanto a noção de forma dos objetos quanto a de forma lógica de afiguração podem ser entendidas sob a luz de uma reflexão sobre a apropriação wittgensteiniana do Princípio do Contexto de Frege. O uso relevante deste Princípio para a noção de forma lógica, o qual configura um expediente também utilizado por Frege numa explicação sobre a função de letras variáveis em matemática, envolve a noção tractariana de expressão [Aüsdruck]. Por seu turno, a forma dos objetos é um conceito que surge de uma espécie de intromissão ontológica do princípio na ontologia tractariana. Este movimento contraria um pressuposto de Frege quanto ao alcance do princípio, cuja aplicação está restrita à linguagem e não se estende à referência ou significado [Bedeutung] dos sinais linguísticos.