Why was Wittgenstein's Tractatus flawed?

Answer 1

Put simply, the flaw was that the Tractatus was self-refuting. It set limits for meaningful use of language but did not itself stay within those limits. Wittgenstein admits this in the Tractatus but argues that it does not invalidate it.

The Logical Positivists (a group of scientist-philosophers) based their account of meaningful language on the Tractatus. They claimed that if a claim was neither one that can be verified by empirical evidence nor a logical truth then it was a meaningless claim. (This claim, if accepted, would make religion, ethics, and much of philosophy meaningless.) But in making that claim they were making a self-refuting claim (a claim that invalidates itself), because it was a claim that was itself neither empirically verifiable nor a logical truth.

Wittgenstein eventually came around to the general philosophical opinion that self-refutation does invalidate.

Answer 2

To cut a long story short, Wittgenstein had argued that everything that could be thought could be also be said and that the world consisted of "facts". This continued that language could only be used to picture facts or make logical statements, added to that any use of language other than that purpose was meaningless. Basically, if you've got nothing decent to say, don't. This by implication makes formalised language pretty impossible.

I think his quote was something like the limits of language are the limits of my reality.

He later (post Tracatus) changed his position to believing language was like a game to be learned in childhood...leaving Language Philosophy as a school of thought, as it were.

Answer 3

Its not really if you accept his arguments. One thing of note was that he did not attempt to justify his arguments. When he presented it as his PhD thesis there were no footnotes or bibliography etc.
This was a major flaw in some peoples minds.
Some people argue that the sentence constructions contained within the work do not conform to the rules he consructed regarding language. This however is a highly debated point.

Answer 4

reducing the world to PROPOSTIONAL phrases is ludicrous and missing 90% of the phenomena.

Answer 5

He didn't water it enough.