{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.030109489051094892, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.975476839237057, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The architecture of meaning: Wittgenstein's Tractatus and formal semantics

With a few notable exceptions formal semantics, as it originated from the seminal work of Richard Montague, Donald Davidson, Max Cresswell, David Lewis and others, in the late sixties and early seventies of the previous century, does not consider Wittgenstein as one of its ancestors. That honour is bestowed on Frege, Tarski, Carnap. And so it has been in later developments. Most introductions to the subject will refer to Frege and Tarski (Carnap less frequently) —in addition to the pioneers just mentioned, of course— , and discuss the main elements of their work that helped shape formal semantics in some detail. But Wittgenstein is conspicuously absent whenever the history of the subject is mentioned (usually briefly, if at all). Of course, if one thinks of Wittgenstein’s later work, this is obvious: nothing, it seems, could be more antithetic to what formal semantics aims for and to how it pursues those aims than the views on meaning and language that Wittgenstein expounds in, e.g., Philosophical Investigations, with its insistence on particularity and diversity, and its rejection of explanation and formal modelling. But what about his earlier work, the Tractatus (henceforth )? At first sight, that seems much more congenial, as it develops a conception of language and meaning that is both general and uniform, explanatory and formal. In view of that, the general lack of reference to  is curious. The central claim of the present paper is that, actually, this is an oversight. Perhaps Wittgenstein was no conscious influence on the minds of Montague c.s. at the time, but he did play a major role in establishing the fundamental principles and philosophical assumptions that helped shape formal semantics and make it such a successful enterprise, in linguistics and in philosophy. The actual channels through which this transmission of concepts and ideas has taken place is not what we will be focusing on here. That is another story, and a complicated one, which requires more historical knowledge and skills than we can muster. Rather, we will be content with discussing some systematic