Tractatus logico-philosophicus

A philosophical work by Ludwig Wittgenstein

6.126

Whether a proposition belongs to logic can be calculated by calculating the logical properties of the symbol. And this we do when we prove a logical proposition. For without troubling ourselves about a sense and a meaning, we form the logical propositions out of others by mere symbolic rules. We prove a logical proposition by creating it out of other logical propositions by applying in succession certain operations, which again generate tautologies out of the first. (And from a tautology only tautologies follow.) Naturally this way of showing that its propositions are tautologies is quite unessential to logic. Because the propositions, from which the proof starts, must show without proof that they are tautologies.


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