Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/192

 order, but just Order in general. It is the kind of thing with which Logic is concerned, and we may, therefore, call it Logical Order, or simply Structure. One and the same fact may be expressed in a thousand different languages, and the thousand different propositions will all have the same structure, and the fact which they express will have the same structure, too, for it is just for this reason that all those propositions express just this particular fact. A language must, in principle, be able to express any facts by its propositions, anything that can possibly happen must be capable of being expressed by language. In order to describe the world we must be able to speak of all possible facts including those which do not exist at all, for language must be able to deny their existence.

One might think that in saying this we are making rather bold a priori statements about the world. For are we not implying that all possible things or events in the world must conform to certain conditions, must possess a certain kind of order which will enable us to grasp them by means of our expressions? And would this not mean a metaphysical presupposition which can never be justified?

It is of the highest importance to see that in maintaining that all facts must have a structure we are not making any presuppositions about the facts at all, we are saying only that facts are facts, which is, as will probably be admitted, saying nothing about them. Some philosophers have discussed the possibility of the world’s being “irrational”, which probably means that we could have no knowledge of it, form no true propositions about it.

These philosophers might object to my view by asking: How do you know that everything has a logical structure? is it not possible that the world or part of it may be entirely without order? I answer that this question is the result of a misunderstanding. The order of which I speak is of such a general nature that it would be meaningless to speak of anything as not possessing it. To say that a fact has a structure is to assert nothing of it; it is a mere tautological statement. This will become clearer as we proceed; but I think it will be admitted at the beginning that the possibility of describing or expressing a fact cannot be regarded as a genuine “property” of the fact which it may possess or not possess.

It seems impossible to speak of Form and of Structure without implying the existence of something that has the structure or form. It seems natural