"Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic"
About this Quote
Wittgenstein is doing something sly here: he’s stripping logic of its usual status as a school subject you can be “bad” at and re-casting it as the background condition for having a thought at all. “Logic must look after itself” sounds almost laissez-faire, but the subtext is severe. Logic isn’t a fragile tool in human hands; it’s the scaffolding that makes “tool,” “hand,” and “mistake” intelligible in the first place. If you can genuinely describe something as a mistake, you’re already operating inside a logical space where correction is possible.
The second sentence lands like a provocation: we cannot make mistakes in logic. Wittgenstein isn’t bragging about human infallibility; he’s narrowing what counts as “logic.” A wrong inference, on this view, isn’t a botched move within logic so much as a misuse of signs, a confusion of rules, or a category error that shows you weren’t playing the logical game you thought you were. The “certain sense” is doing crucial work: he anticipates the obvious objection (people commit fallacies constantly) and replies by reframing fallacies as failures of clarity, not counterexamples to logic’s necessity.
Context matters. In the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, logic is not an empirical discipline but the form of representation itself, something you can’t get outside of to check. Later, in the Philosophical Investigations, that certainty migrates into “grammar” and rule-following: logical necessity is less a cosmic architecture than the internal discipline of our language-games. Either way, the intent is to puncture the fantasy that logic needs policing by a higher authority. There is no meta-logic referee standing above the field; the rules are what make the field.
The second sentence lands like a provocation: we cannot make mistakes in logic. Wittgenstein isn’t bragging about human infallibility; he’s narrowing what counts as “logic.” A wrong inference, on this view, isn’t a botched move within logic so much as a misuse of signs, a confusion of rules, or a category error that shows you weren’t playing the logical game you thought you were. The “certain sense” is doing crucial work: he anticipates the obvious objection (people commit fallacies constantly) and replies by reframing fallacies as failures of clarity, not counterexamples to logic’s necessity.
Context matters. In the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, logic is not an empirical discipline but the form of representation itself, something you can’t get outside of to check. Later, in the Philosophical Investigations, that certainty migrates into “grammar” and rule-following: logical necessity is less a cosmic architecture than the internal discipline of our language-games. Either way, the intent is to puncture the fantasy that logic needs policing by a higher authority. There is no meta-logic referee standing above the field; the rules are what make the field.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|
More Quotes by Ludwig
Add to List
