IX--The Totality of Facts

Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus , conceives the world as ‘the totality of facts’. Type-stratification threatens that conception: the totality of facts is an obvious example of an illegitimate totality. Wittgenstein's notion of truth-operation evidently has some role to play in avoiding that threat, allowing propositions, and so facts, to constitute a single type. The paper seeks to explain that role in a way that integrates the ‘philosophical’ and ‘technical’ pressures on the notion of an operation.