Russell is therefore not merely a linguistic philosopher who is concerned with the relationship between thought and reality but goes further and attempts a “comprehensive construction” of reality. It is perhaps this that distinguishes his work from that of Wittgenstein.
In any case, Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, all sought to lay out this relationship between language and reality by examining language itself and by exploring the idea that language itself has an essential nature that binds it necessarily to depicting reality. By analyzing language and bringing into light its essential qualities, it would be possible therefore, to show how it connects to reality and more so, to show what reality must necessarily be, to enable such a connection to occur.
Wittgenstein, in both the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, appears to want to treat the original source of the separation between thought and reality, which origin is in the disengagement of man from the world. Descartes, by his very method of philosophical inquiry had, in a sense, disengaged man from the world. Man, in Descartes’ paradigm, was faced with objects to which he was not connected in any pragmatic way, but only in so far as objects were to be questioned as to their existence. Stripped of all their pragmatic qualities, objects stood as mere existents.
It is in this stark intellectual landscape that the relationship between thought and reality weakens and fades away simply because the will and purposive action have been excluded. There is no purposive intention that connects man to objects in a way that makes their existence unproblematic and irrelevant. It is to regain this unproblematic relationship with reality that Wittgenstein addresses himself, both in the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. Thought becomes disconnected with reality because it is the will, or purpose and intention, that connects thought to reality unproblematically, and by excluding the pragmatic aspect of objects, will, purpose and intention are held in abeyance.
The philosophy of Darryl Naranjit 