Construction, Convention, and Subjectivity in the Early Wittgenstein

Some of Wittgenstein"s early remarks on the connection between logic and the world leave a highly anticonventionalist impression. For example, in the Tractatus, he says that the world is "in logical space� (TLP 1.13) and that logic "pervades the world� (TLP 5.61). At a first glance, this seems to imply that the rules of logic are determined by the way the world is. And this, in turn, seems to be something that is not dependent on convention. Consider, for example, a passage from the Notebooks 1914-16, where Wittgenstein says: And it keeps on forcing itself upon us that there is some simple indivisible, an element of being, in brief a thing … And it appears as if that were identical with the proposition that the world must be what it is, it must be definite. (NB, 62