Some Reflections about Wittgenstein´s Bezugssystem

Only a few months before his death, Wittgenstein invited us to imagine "that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid�; nevertheless he warned "this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid� (OC 96). Those hardened propositions provide a certainty which is "like a mighty force whose point of application does not move, and so no work is accomplished by it� (Z 402). There are many things that seem to be fixed, things which are removed from the traffic: they are "so to speak shunted onto an unused siding� (OC 210). Those things just give "our way of looking at things, and our researches, their form� (OC 211). Maybe they were once disputed; but perhaps, for unthinkable ages, they have belonged to the scaffolding of our thoughts