, from which of course it results that nothing can be deduced from an atomic proposition. All the propositions of logic, he maintains, are tautologies, such, for example, as “ p or not p ”.

The fact that nothing can be deduced from an atomic proposition has interesting applications, for example, to causality. There cannot, in Wittgenstein’s logic, be any such thing as a causal nexus. “The events of the future,” he says, “ cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.” That the sun will rise tomorrow is a hypothesis. We do not in fact know whether it will rise, since there is no compulsion according to which one thing must happen because another happens.