Tractatus

1.21 “Each item [atomic fact] can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.”

5.1361 “We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.”?

Carnap – Meaning and Necessity

Carnap, p. 9. Gives the definition of a state-description:

A class of sentences in S which contains for every atomic sentence either this sentence or its negation, is called a state description in S, because it obviously gives a complete description of a possible state of the universe of individuals with respect to all properties and relations expressed by predicates of the system. Thus the state-descriptions represent Leibniz’ possible worlds or Wittgenstein’s possible states of affairs.”

Wittgenstein – Some Remarks on Logical Form

Philosophical Occasions, pp. 29-35.

On p.33 he says:

“I maintain that the statement which attributes a degree to a quality cannot further be analyzed, and, moreover, that the relation of difference of degree is an internal relation and that it is therefore represented by an internal relation between the statements which attribute the different degrees. That is to say, the atomic statement must have the same multiplicity as the degree which it attributes,
whence it follows that numbers must enter the forms of atomic propositions. The mutual exclusion lof unanalyzable statements of degree contradicts an opinion which was published by me several years ago which necessitated that atomic propositions could not exclude one another.”

On this view, some of Carnap’s state-descriptions, or Wittgenstein’s possible states of affairs (in the Tractatus) are not possible.

Wittgenstein – Zettel

Section 155

“A poet’s words can pierce us. And that is of course causally connected with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the way in which, conformably to this use, we let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words.”

Wittenstein – Philosophical Remarks

From sections 51-52

“51 If I compare the facts of immediate experience with the pictures on the screen and the facts of physics with pictures in the film strip, on the film strip there is a present picture and past and future pictures. But on the screen, there is only the present.

What is characteristic about this image is that in using it I regard the future as pre-formed.

There’s a point in future events are pre-formed if it belongs to the essence of time that it does not break off. For then we can say: something will happen, it’s only that I don’t know what. And in the world of physics we can say that.”

Russell – On the Notion of Cause

In Mysticism and Logic, pp. 207-208.

“We may now sum up our discussion of causality. We found first that the law of causality, as usually stated by philosophers, is false, and is not employed by science. We then considered the nature of scientific laws, and found that, instead of stating that one event A always followed by another event B, they stated functional relations between certain events at certain times, which we called determinants, and other events at earlier or later times or at the same time. We were unable to find any a priori category involved: the existence of scientific law appeared as purely empirical fact, not necessarily universal, except in trivial and scientifically useless form. We found that a system with one set of determinants, may very likely have other sets of a quite different kind, that for example, a mechanically determined system may also be teleologically or volitionally determined. Finally we considered the problem of free will: here we found that the reasons for supposing volitions to be determined are strong but not conclusive, and we decided that even if volitions are mechanically determined, that is no reason for denying freedom in the sense revealed by introspection, or for supposing that mechanical events are not determined by volitions. Thus the problem of free will versus determinism is therefore, if we are right, mainly illusory, but in part not yet capable of being decisively solved.