"Wittgenstein and P. Sraffa, a lecturer in economics at Cambridge, argued together a great deal over the ideas of the Tractatus. One day (they were riding, I think, on a train) when Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?' Sraffa's example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the insistence that a proposition and what it describes must have the same 'form'. This broke the hold on him of the conception that a proposition must literally be a 'picture' of the reality it describes." --Norman Malcolm (1966). Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. Oxford University Press: 69(I'm quoting second-hand.)
By the way, Pierangelo Garegnani has been permitting scholars to quote Sraffa's unpublished notes for a number of years. For example, Luigi Pasinetti has examined them and reported on them. Why shouldn't Sraffa have chosen a literary executor who is as slow to publish as he was? I am looking forward to their publication, though.
- Luigi L. Pasinetti (2001). "Continuity and Change in Sraffa's Thought: An Archival Excursus", in Piero Sraffa's Political Economy: A Centenary Estimate (edited by Terenzio Cozzi and Roberto Marchionatti), Routledge
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