METAPHYSICS another: from the existence or non-existence of one of them it is impossible to infer the existence or non-existence of another Since facts are the existence and non-existence of states of affairs, it follows that facts too are independent of each other The totality of facts is the world These dense pages of the Tractatus are difficult to understand No examples are given of objects that are the bedrock of the universe Commentators have offered widely varying interpretations: for some, objects are sense-data; for others, they are universals Possibly, both of these items would have been recognized by Wittgenstein as objects: after all, they are the same as the items that, according to Russell, were known to us by acquaintance But the lack of examples in the Tractatus is not accidental Wittgenstein believed in the existence of simple objects and atomic states of affairs not because he thought he could give instances of them, but because he thought that they must exist as the correlates in the world for the names and elementary propositions of a fully analysed language His reasoning to that conclusion is based on three premisses First, whether a sentence has meaning or not is a matter of logic Second, what particular things exist is a matter of experience Third, logic is prior to all experience Therefore, whether a sentence has meaning or not can never depend on whether particular things exists This conclusion lays down a condition that any system of logic must meet To meet it, Wittgenstein thought, one must lay down that names could signify only simple objects If ‘N’ is the name of a complex, then ‘N’ would have no meaning if the complex were broken up, and sentences containing it would be senseless So when any such sentence is fully analysed, the name ‘N’ must disappear and its place be taken by names that name simples (TLP 3.23, 3.24; PI i 39) Simple objects, in the world of the Tractatus, are concatenated into atomic states of affairs, which correspond to elementary propositions that are concatenations of names The world can be completely described by listing all elementary propositions, and listing which of them are true and which are false (TLP 4.26) For the true elementary propositions will record all the positive facts, and the false elementary propositions will correspond to all the negative facts, and the totality of facts is the world (TLP 2.06) 186