partial response to gary on wittgenstein

This is an excerpt from a much longer and rambling repsonse I posted to Gary's Norris' Dagzine, concerning his thoughts on Wittgenstein. I'm attempting to defend my position that Wittgenstein's project of refuting solipsism renders a metaphysical thought/language distinction untenable, unless thought is viewed as a sort of activity in which we picture the sense of propositions and infer new propositions. I posted it here because it's position I'd like to explore further and I think this is at least a start . . .

With the exception of a few instances (such as 3.1), the Tractatus presents “thought” as the activity of thinking the sense of propositions, of picturing the facts or states of affairs to which the propositions refer:

3 A logical picture of facts is a thought.

[ . . .]

3.11 We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written, etc.) as a projection of a possible situation. The method of projection is to think of the sense of the proposition.

[ . . .]

3.5 A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought.

4 A thought is a proposition with a sense.

Because the Tractatus is largely an elaboration of the picture theory/model of language, I propose that we subordinate other uses of the concept “thought” to this one. Wittgenstein would probably frown on us for trying to extract something like an “official definition”, but, given that refutation of solipsism is key to Wittgenstein’s project, I would rather assign dominance to this version of thought than risk conflating the “thought” that “finds an expression” in 3.1 with the “thought” that’s a “logical picture of facts.” (3). For, otherwise, I fear we run the risk of asserting the existence of a metaphysical entity which pictures states of affairs to itself and (then, having pictured) seeks to express what it pictures through means of language (in other words, we’ve just provided a model of solipsism).