Language serves to express thoughts and feelings, communicate information, and a means to call for action. Through narratives, commands, questions, and statements, it can sway people, making it also an art of persuasion. This is not new. After all, it was in Plato’s time that poets and sophists, by mastering rhetoric, established a tension between truth and appearance, or the intelligible and the sensible.

Yet, what is significantly different now is the manner in which this dynamic of language, i.e., the scale and force towards (in)action, is fed and maintained. In part, this might be attributed to technological advancements giving rise to the vast increase of connectivity and consumption of information. Yet, it falls short in addressing our simultaneous changing attitude towards language and accompanied questions to meaning. A certain erosion of language seems to occur where understanding each other is not of importance. The imperative, or rather, the prevailing disposition, seems more to move towards the situation where if individuals can persuade you to serve their interest, they will inevitably do so.

In a rather innocent way, we notice in situations where one interprets a message and stumbles upon miscommunication, where, for example, the speaker, without hesitation, says “Oh, no, I meant that” or “No, I mean this” at their after-the-fact convenience. Alternatively, in more formal settings, such as elections, we see the ease at which words in the form of false promises are chanted to influence citizens to get and keep their preferred candidates in office. For example, the ease at which the U.S. Counselor to the President coined “offering alternative facts” in 2017 as an euphemism for blatantly expressing falsehoods.

What it provokes is an atmosphere in which the meaning of propositions becomes cloudy and indistinct. The seek for appeal to the emotions of opinion rather than to clarity prevails. What is or is not the case is of secondary importance; hence the flourishing of terms such as post-truth, fake news, and misinformation. Language is weaponized and by it, people are reduced to agitated meaning-makers.

These examples and their context inspire me to explore the role of language in this issue. Rather than focusing on system analysis or problem description, I aim to explore an alternative perspective through Wittgenstein’s work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). I believe the TLP offers a modest answer to situate and ground our disposition in this context. By modest, I mean it cannot resolve or dissolve the issue entirely. My goal is to clarify my argument, not to impose a specific doctrine: Wittgenstein notes himself in both the TLP and Philosophical Investigations that philosophy elucidates and cannot dictate how things are. Thus, this grounding can only be a virtual ground—a point of departure or reference. To put it as a natural analogy: it’s like determining the voltage between two points in an electrical circuit; one needs a reference point or ground. If none exists, other points must serve as virtual grounds. Similarly, I explore the perspective of TLP acting as a virtual ground in the context of meaning and language erosion.

The backbone of the TLP lies in logic, and it is therefore relevant to specify what Wittgenstein writes and means by logic. For Wittgenstein, logic is not a body of doctrine but is inherent in reality. Logic is a precondition to all experiences and is about the fact of existence preceding any understanding of how things exist or behave. Logic arises from the world’s nature, and its necessity stems from the world’s structure, not from linguistic or mental conventions. There is no randomness or unpredictability in the world of logic, and it is not something that can be or not be. Logic is prior to answering how something is, but not what it is.

The relation of logic to language and thought is not yet clear. Why the above is the backbone to language and thought requires slightly more explanation. According to Wittgenstein, the world consists of facts, not things, and these facts signify the existence of certain situations or states of affairs. The entirety of all facts defines reality, what exists and indeed, what can exist; facts are about possibilities. They not only dictate what is true and what happens, but also what is false and does not happen. The relation to logic lies in that facts exist in a theoretical realm referred to as logical space. Logical space refers to all possible states or configurations of the world, where every state corresponds to a fact. The world, therefore, is the sum total of these facts as they exist in this logical space.

So, facts define the reality of a situation in a logical space, including both what exists and what does not exist. Important here is that facts can either be composed of other facts or not. The latter is what is called atomic facts (Sachverhalt). It is atomic, implying not consisting of any other facts, but is instead made of basic components known as simples or objects. Each atomic fact is a configuration of objects that stands in a particular relation to one another, representing the existence of a state of affairs. In other words, objects or things come together in different ways to create various situations or states of affairs. The possibility for this is called the form of an object and is carried within.

This implies that an imagined or hypothetical world, despite how different it might be from the actual world, must share a certain form with the real world; we cannot think illogically. Therefore, objects grant universality and constancy to the basic structure of the world across different possible realities.

With the above, the relation to humans is not yet clear. The capacity to create mental pictures of facts underpins this relation. A picture is a logical picture when its structure (pictorial form) aligns with the logical form of reality, enabling it to accurately represent or misrepresent reality. Such pictures are anchored within logical space, making it possible to mirror reality. Wittgenstein illustrates this idea by stating that it can be compared to putting up a picture against reality like a measuring tool. Because the pictorial form is not explicit, there are no pictures that can be considered true without any verification or comparison with reality.

This capacity to picture provides the bridge to the relationship of thought, language, and meaning. According to Wittgenstein, thoughts are considered logical pictures of facts, mirroring the structure of reality. Through language in a proposition, thoughts are made tangible and can be perceived by the senses; propositions are the means either written or spoken. It is the projection of a thought, mapping it onto a possible reality. In other words, a proposition articulates a thought in such a way that the elements of the proposition (words, symbols) correspond directly to the objects and the state of affairs that the thought aims to depict. Consequently, the structure of the proposition mirrors the structure of the thought, allowing it to convey the content. This accuracy in expression is underpinned by the sense of the proposition, which is the proposition’s capacity to represent a possible situation in reality. Hence, the meaning of a thought, as communicated through a proposition, is inherently linked to the proposition’s sense; meaning emerges from the manner in which words are ordered within the proposition to depict reality.

However, not all propositions necessarily convey content in the same way; some propositions may fail to correspond to any possible reality or do not convey any substantial information about the world (tautologies and contradictions). Because a proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it, a proposition provides insight into how we perceive and comprehend it. Wittgenstein writes that we often understand the sense of propositions intuitively, as they align with our logical and perceptual understanding of the world. This raises questions about its limits: what is sayable and what is unsayable.

According to Wittgenstein, the clarity of what can be said implicitly sets the boundaries of what remains unsayable. Propositions are capable of representing all aspects of reality, but they cannot represent or depict their own intrinsic logical form, which enables representation. To depict logical form, one has to position oneself outside logic, i.e., outside the confines of the world, which is not possible. From this, the limitation of language follows, or more specifically, our ability to speak of or represent reality. Logic permeates the world—the boundaries of the world coexist with the boundaries of logic. Thus, we cannot specify in logic that the world contains some things but not others, as this would imply excluding certain possibilities. Our thinking and expression are, then, bounded by what we can logically conceive; what is beyond our thinking capacity cannot be articulated either.

Language can only depict facts about the world. Truths about the structure of reality and our relationship to it are beyond direct linguistic expression. The world each of us knows is bound by the limits of our language. In this sense, language limits, or rather, frames our reality; the world we can articulate becomes a my world. This personal world manifests in how we use language and engage with reality. For Wittgenstein, the subject does not exist as an entity within the world but as a boundary that delineates the world; a condition that frames it. This makes the subject the boundary between what can be known and spoken of (the world of facts that can be described in language) and what lies beyond direct description.

This boundary is exactly what allows for a virtual ground. What can be meaningfully said and mere noise become blurred when we depart from using language as a means to represent the world and its state of affairs. The occurrence of events and the existence of states of affairs do not inherently carry purpose, meaning, or value. They simply are. The meaning or sense of the world must exist outside the world, essentially beyond empirical phenomena or facts. Personal desires, inclinations, or decisions do not change or determine the fundamental nature of reality. In the case that the exercise of our will changes the world, it would only do so at this boundary, not the facts within this world. Wittgenstein highlights, “the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” The facts of the world remain constant; our internal states (joy, suffering, contentment, despair) shape our interaction with these facts.

Recognizing that the world becomes a my world, bound by the limits of language, also implies that the manipulation through language limits our world, effectively shaping our reality. The proliferation of misinformation affects how we engage with the world, influencing our actions and attitudes, but it does not change the underlying facts. The challenge lies in distinguishing the alteration of our conceptual limits and the immutable nature of factual truth. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on logic and the limits of expression offers a counterpoint to the obscurity and emotional manipulation through language. It is from this point that the emergence of post-truth sentiment, the proliferation of alternative facts, and the spread of misinformation can be identified as an attempt to factualize the ethical, to bring what transcends down to the level of disputable content, thereby obscuring the important distinction. It offers a ground to diagnose the ills of a post-truth environment by providing a lens through which to view the manipulation of language.

For that reason, Wittgenstein’s theory of explicating the limits of language, on the basis of logic as the structure of reality, serves as a virtual ground. Logical necessity is the only form of necessity that truly exists, and logical impossibility is the only form of impossibility. In recognizing Wittgenstein’s framework and its implications, it can virtually ground our attitude to language. The TLP can serve as a reference point to understand the deviations in the use of language. It provides a base from which we can assess how far language has been stretched or manipulated away from its limits in depicting reality. It therefore provides a virtual ground, an alternative disposition to the cloudiness and manipulation characteristic of today’s public discourse.