Abstract

Conant argued that the epistemology of logic developed in the Tractatus is self-undermining, like Frege’s, because it contends that contradictions are nonsense. The difference between them is that Wittgenstein is deliberately self-undermining: the theory of the Tractatus is “a structure of thought which is designed to undermine itself” (1992, 97). I offer a comparison between Wittgenstein’s and Frege’s terminologies to argue that Wittgenstein held, like Frege, that contradictions are impossible to assert but not nonsense. Thus, the theory of the Tractatus is not self-undermining.