Alexander asked:

According to Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus there are objects and facts.
Facts are "states of affairs" where objects relate to one another. Wittgenstein also states that there
are no objects just facts. If there are no objects then what is there to relate to one another?

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Wittgenstein says in the 'Tractatus' that 'The world is the totality of facts, not of things.' That is not
quite the same as saying that 'there are no objects'. Rather, there is no access to objects other than
through language, and the mode of access is the proposition. Names only have meaning in the
context of a proposition.

There is therefore nothing more to the 'properties of an object', according to Wittgenstein, than the
totality of true atomic propositions in which the object is referred to by name. It is important to grasp
that 'naming' is not a separate act from referring. There is no mechanism in the 'Tractatus' for giving
objects names. How language is first 'given' its meaning is a question Wittgenstein consigned to
psychology. It is not part of logic.

Few, if any, analytic philosophers would now wish to defend the metaphysics of the 'Tractatus',
according to which each 'simple object' exists in all logically possible worlds. However, many would
now agree with the claim that when you have stated all the truths there are to state - all the 'facts' -
you have accounted for every object in the world. There is nothing left over.

This is something I find deeply problematic. One consequence of this view that the meaning of any
statement is exhausted by its 'truth conditions' is that the terms 'now' and 'I' have a purely relative
meaning, defined by the context of their utterance. So when I say, 'I am GK' or 'The time is now 9.22
am on 12.8.99', the meaning is exactly the same for me or for anyone else, or now or at any time in
the past or future. In other words, there is no 'subject', and temporality is an illusion.

Geoffrey Klempner