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This chapter presents three more crucial ideas in the interpretation of the Tractatus. The first is ‘resolution’; it discusses attempts to articulate quite what ‘resolute readings’ of the Tractatus involve and introduces some of the main criticisms that critics of ‘resolution’ offer. The second is an understanding of what it might be to ‘elucidate’ nonsense. This understanding, which is presented partly through an exploration of examples of nonsense from Lewis Carroll’s work, shows a certain sense in talking about ‘understanding nonsense’ and nonsense having a ‘logic’. The third is an interpretation of the intent behind Wittgenstein’s remarks about ‘internal relations’ and ‘internal properties’. These ideas are drawn upon in the interpretation of the Tractatus as a working-through of the confused pseudo-logic of con-formism.

This chapter presents some of the crucial proposals that the Tractatus offers concerning the nature of objects, facts, propositions, names, and what he calls ‘the internal relation of depicting that holds between language and world’. It explores how Wittgenstein defends these proposals on the grounds that they free us from any commitment to there being impossibly ‘substantial’ logical truths. It sketches a possible interpretation of those proposals as articulating, nonetheless, a species of what is called ‘con-formism’ (cf. Ch.1), a species which is distinctive in being, strictly speaking, inexpressible. It goes on to argue that this interpretation is mistaken. An argument against con-formism is presented and how Wittgenstein’s sign/symbol distinction helps to articulate the confusion that con-formism embodies is explained.

This chapter reviews how the author’s reading presents those features of the Tractatus (described in Ch. 1) that Wittgenstein himself described as crucial. It clarifies the interpretation of the say/show distinction and explains how that theme runs through the many and superficially diverse interests of the book. It offers an interpretation of why Wittgenstein said that the ‘point’ of the Tractatus is ethical and connects this interpretation to his reflections on logical truth. Crucial to the diverse forms of philosophical confusion discussed is a spiritually significant willingness to confusedly endow words with a life of their own: this enchanting of, and enchantment by words transposes on to them, and the world which we then see them as ‘fitting’, responsibilities that are actually ours to bear.

Guided by the picture analogy, this chapter explores further how we succumb to the illusion that a con-formity between language and world underpins meaningful language use. It is argued that this illusion emerges as a result of our both having adopted particular ‘methods of comparison’ and failing to recognize that very adoption; certain equivocations over what we mean by ‘objects’ and ‘names’ — in other words, yet more sign/symbol conflations — serve to disguise this confusion, and hence, to conjure up this illusion. The role of Wittgenstein’s remarks about the ‘internal relatedness’ of propositions and names, and objects and names, in articulating and drawing our attention to the above confusions is further explored.

This chapter returns to Wittgenstein’s proposals about ‘objects’ in order to reveal how they can also be seen as reflecting our failure to ascribe sense to the notion of the thinker ‘coming to’ or indeed already being ‘in contact with’ its world. We cannot make sense of deep worries about the capacity of ‘what we think about’ to be thought about: there are no questions to be raised in connection with the referents of the terms of the ultimate analyses of our propositions, about ‘their existence’, ‘their composition’, or ‘how they can combine to form facts’. But that points not to how the world must be constituted in order for thought to be possible, but to a confusion at the root of the idea of ‘thought being possible’.

This chapter examines the Tractatus’ discussion of thought and subjectivity, particularly its remarks concerning the ‘internal relatedness’ of thoughts and their constituents, thoughts and facts, and subject and world. By reflecting on the notion of first language learning, a sense is identified in which subject and world might be said to be ‘internally related’: we can make no sense of the notion of the subject ‘coming to’ or indeed already being ‘in contact with’ its world. On this basis, a reading is presented of Wittgenstein’s puzzling and apparently sympathetic remarks about solipsism. In discussing and criticising alternative interpretations of the ‘internal relation’ between subject and world, further light is shed on the notion that Wittgenstein is casting doubt on whether we have a clear idea of what it is for thought to be ‘intelligible’ and for language to be ‘meaningful’ to ‘work’.

During the first half of the twentieth century there was widespread agreement as to whether the way to understand the historical emergence of economic development in the West was through the theoretical lens provided by Adam Smith. This chapter critiques Smith's view of the transition through which the pre-capitalist social property relations were transformed into capitalist property relations – a transition that is believed to have been mistakenly attributed by Smith to the expansion of trade. It is argued instead that the rise of capitalist social property relations in England, which led to economic development, was instead catalyzed by the growth of specialization, investment, and the rising labour productivity in agriculture. In addition, it is argued that industrial and economic development were caused by the separation of the manufacturing from the peasantry.

This chapter looks back once again at Wittgenstein’s methodology, picking out aspects that may be more easily understood in the light of Chs. 5-9. It examines further the ‘elucidatory’ method Wittgenstein uses in the Tractatus, its ‘therapeutic’ character, its necessarily ‘argumentative’ form, and its relationship to what he calls ‘the only strictly correct method in philosophy’. The author’s interpretation is placed in relation to claims made by other ‘resolute’ readers and criticisms made of ‘resolute’ approaches.

This chapter argues that Wittgenstein’s proposal that ethics is ‘inexpressible’ represents a rung on a ‘ladder’ that is to be ‘climbed’ and then ‘thrown away’. Evidence presented in the previous chapter is reviewed and other aspects of that evidence explored. It is argued that the forms of ‘inexpressible knowledge’ to which Wittgenstein leads us in his reflections on ethics — and logic — only loom if one is already under the influence of confused notions of what ‘knowledge’, ‘reasons’, and ‘expression’ represent in these spheres; confusions to a recognition of which Wittgenstein’s talk of ‘the inexpressible’ is meant to lead us. As elsewhere in the Tractatus, such talk leads us to recognize that confusions underpin philosophical projects to which we are committed, confusions that, once again, arise out of certain sign/symbol equivocations. How this realisation modulates the previous chapter’s proposals concerning ‘conscience’ and ‘decency’ is explored.

This chapter presents an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s proposal that we see propositions as analogous to pictures. Thinking through this analogy in the way that Wittgenstein suggests reveals both a certain truth in his proposal that propositions and the names that make up those propositions are ‘internally related’, and a confusion in the belief that there is a substantial and philosophically interesting ‘relation’ to be found here. It is argued that the picture analogy helps us recognize ‘the illogical’ as merely the product of sign/symbol confusions, something that is not recognized by those who attempt to explain how ‘the logical’ differs from ‘the illogical’ on the basis of a substantial philosophy of thought and language.

This chapter discusses how Wittgenstein’s conception of ‘the illogical’ as sign/symbol confusion affects our understanding of logical and ontological ‘types’. It explores the notion that the confusion that ‘the illogical’ embodies needs to be addressed by introducing novel notations rather than constructing theories of logical and ontological ‘types’. It considers what talk of such ‘types’ amounts to if there is no real task for such theories to perform.

This chapter deals with the explanation that the key to economic development is in the social relations and political and legal institutions of society. Whereas population and resources models concentrate on such matters as the density of settlement, soil quality, agricultural yields, rents, prices, wages, standards of living, and population trends, the models discussed in this chapter stress the leading roles played by the contrasting lifestyles and priorities of lords and peasants, the conflictive relations between landlords and tenants, and the institutions of feudalism, vassalage, and villeinage in determining the pace and direction of economic change. The last part of the chapter presents some general remarks about the strengths and weaknesses of Marxist models of economic and social development. It assesses the main Marxist models as they relate to the periods before and after the Black Death.

This chapter considers the Taylor Grazing Act as a political instrument to adjudicate existing property relations and rights. It also investigates a range of angles on the act, beginning with the view from Washington at the time the bill was under consideration. It then describes how organized ranchers and the new grazing officials in the Department of the Interior understood the implications of the Taylor Grazing Act on ranchers' property interests. It explores how the rearrangement of property relations sparked an administrative battle in Washington indicative of the powerful attachments that public land agencies had to public property. When Harold Ickes spoke of the department's “custodianship of a vast national estate,” he also signaled an important shift in the relationship of the West to the federal government and to the rest of the country. Real property was at the center of the two departments' desires to consolidate their administrative control.

Chapter 6 deals with the connection between the structure and properties of solids as revealed and studied in polymorphic systems. The subject is divided into properties that depend on the one hand on the bulk—that is, the three-dimensional arrangement of the molecules and the interactions among them—and on the other hand the consideration of the crystal as an “oriented gas” serving to act as a matrix for the molecules to permit the study of molecular properties. Among the properties described in the former category are electrical conductivity, organic magnetic materials, photovoltaicity and photoconductivity, second harmonic generation, chromoisomerism, photochromism, thermochromism and mechanochromism, and the mechanosalient effect. The latter category includes a discussion of spectroscopic studies (infrared, Raman, and ultraviolet/visible), excimer phenomena, time-resolved studies of excited states, photochemical reactions and thermal and gas reactions, along with a variety of emission phenomena. The chapter closes with a brief survey of rapidly emerging and developing high pressure studies