Editing Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (section)

===Distinction between saying and showing===
According to traditional reading of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein's views about logic and language led him to believe that some features of language and reality cannot be expressed in senseful language but only "shown" by the form of certain expressions. Thus for example, according to the picture theory, when a proposition is thought or expressed, the proposition represents reality (truly or falsely) by virtue of sharing some features with that reality in common. However, those features themselves are something Wittgenstein claimed we could not ''say'' anything about, because we cannot describe the relationship that pictures bear to what they depict, but only ''show'' it via fact-stating propositions (TLP 4.121). Thus we cannot say ''that'' there is a correspondence between language and reality;  the correspondence itself can only be ''shown'',<ref name="Kenny2005" />{{rp|p56}} since our language is not capable of describing its own logical structure.<ref name="Stern1995" />{{rp|p47}}

However, on the more recent "resolute" interpretation of the Tractatus (see below), the remarks on "showing" were not in fact an attempt by Wittgenstein to gesture at the existence of some ineffable features of language or reality, but rather, as [[Cora Diamond]] and [[James F. Conant|James Conant]] have argued,<ref name=":4">{{Cite book|chapter-url=https://philpapers.org/rec/CONORT|title=Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance|last1=Conant|first1=James|last2=Diamond|first2=Cora|author2-link=Cora Diamond|date=2004|publisher=Routledge|editor-last=Kölbel|editor-first=Max|pages=65–67|chapter=On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely|editor-last2=Weiss|editor-first2=Bernhard|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151017005848/http://philpapers.org/rec/CONORT|archive-date=2015-10-17}}</ref> the distinction was meant to draw a sharp contrast between logic and descriptive discourse. On their reading, Wittgenstein indeed meant that some things are shown when we reflect on the logic of our language, but ''what'' is shown is not ''that'' something is the case, as if we could somehow think it (and thus understand what Wittgenstein tries to show us) but for some reason we just could not say it. As Diamond and Conant explain:<ref name=":4" />

{{quote|sign=|source=|Speaking and thinking are different from activities the practical mastery of which has no logical side; and they differ from activities like physics the practical mastery of which involves the mastery of content specific to the activity. On Wittgenstein's view ... linguistic mastery does not, as such, depend on even an inexplicit mastery of some sort of content. ... The logical articulation of the activity itself can be brought more clearly into view, without that involving our coming to awareness ''that'' anything. When we speak about the activity of philosophical clarification, grammar may impose on us the use of 'that'-clauses and 'what'-constructions in the descriptions we give of the results of the activity. But, one could say, the final 'throwing away of the ladder' involves the recognition that that grammar of 'what'-ness has been pervasively misleading us, even as we read through the Tractatus. To achieve the relevant sort of increasingly refined awareness of the logic of our language is not to grasp a content of any sort.}}

Similarly, Michael Kremer suggested that Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing could be compared with [[Gilbert Ryle]]'s famous distinction between "knowing that" and "knowing how".<ref>{{Cite book|chapter-url=https://philpapers.org/rec/KRETCP|title=Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond|last=Kremer|first=Michael|date=2007|publisher=MIT Press|editor-last=Crary|editor-first=Alice|pages=157–158|chapter=The Cardinal Problem of Philosophy|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160802003308/http://philpapers.org/rec/KRETCP|archive-date=2016-08-02}}</ref> Just as practical knowledge or skill (such as riding a bike) is not reducible to [[descriptive knowledge|propositional knowledge]] according to Ryle, Wittgenstein also thought that the mastery of the logic of our language is a unique practical skill that does not involve any sort of propositional "knowing that", but rather is reflected in our ability to operate with senseful sentences and grasping their internal logical relations.