Ludwig Wittgenstein opens his book, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus with the words: "The world is everything that is the case." Wittgenstein's epistemological attitude is unsettling at times, because he often seems to reduce all of reality into a heap of logical syllogisms. I am not far in this book to make too many judgments, and I have read and heard statements about Wittgenstein that seem largely up for controversy. Hence, I will steer clear from making too many critical statements as to the structure of the system he uses in this book. I can say I admire Wittgenstein for his criticism of ambiguous speech and the detriment this brings to philosophical discourse, however. For Wittgenstein, most, if not all, of the confusion in philosophy is due to statements which do not clearly paint a relatable picture of reality, and that is due to the syntactical equipment we use in explaining reality. Our grammatical structure, in other words, should translate the experience we receive in perception of an object as honestly and clearly as possible. We can, in this sense, see, experience, and sense the world in logical syllogisms, because logic makes the world relatable and, more appropriately, intelligible.
Many brands of subjectivist thinking have seeped through our daily decisions in inspiring us to make decisions based on the idea that the world is only intelligible in relation to our autonomous projection of it. We can project whatever we want on the world to make it our own personal work of art without any necessary regard for social norms. In other words, we've lost the rules. In the West, the understanding of a "personal goal" seems to be commonly accepted as a goal strictly associated with the individual making it, and the goal itself should be subject to the individual's boundless desires and dreams. Thus, "personal" becomes identical with "individual", and "individual" is fundamentally defined outside the boundaries or regulations of any society or context.
Clarity is a problem not only reserved for grammatical discussions for English students. Failure to be clear fosters a nest of disasters waiting to happen to just about every average Joe. One of the reasons why philosophers stress the need for being precise in our logic and the language we use within those logical systems is often because they foresee an ethical dilemma on the horizon (which I'll try to explain). And why do philosophers get into a tizzy about all these petty little abstract ideas that seem to have no relevance to everyday life? Because the ideas we are working with are linked to a chain of other ideas which, if not handled with the utmost delicacy and clarity, can have a domino effect on everyone else's daily decisions (e.g. fast food, how to spend money, where to enjoy family time). In an intermediate, nevertheless, essential way, philosophers have entire societies and individual lives in their hands. And that is not an overly dramatic statement to make. We think within rational terms, and philosophers, logic being their chief science, are concerned with being clear, precise, and, in the end, thinking rightly about the world. Precision in logic and language (which we use to translate logic) can contribute tremendously to our understanding of ourselves and our relations to others. Confusing language and sloppy logic fosters misunderstanding, misunderstanding often fosters aggravation, and aggravation fosters violence. Perhaps a stronger focus on clarity in language, mapping out contexts in which we can relate to each other intelligibly, is a good we can gather from many logical reductionists.
