From the processuality of the world to logical formalization: A critique of the ontology of simple objects and of Wittgenstein's truth-functions in light of Cognitive Psychiatry

Abstract

Objective: To propose a critique of the logical-ontological theory of the early Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which establishes a structural correspondence between world and language (the world as the totality of facts, facts as combinations of simple objects, and complex propositions as truth-functions of elementary propositions), from a processual, genetic and cognitive standpoint situated within Cognitive Psychiatry. Method: Critical-conceptual analysis of the Tractarian architecture, combined with a narrative review of the literature published between 2021 and 2026. Results: The article examines the problem of the simplicity of the object, the transcendentalization and reification of the subject, the status of falsity and truth, the limits of the distinction between simple and complex propositions, and the progressive abstraction that leads from concrete episodes to the formal category of "relation". The central critique distinguishes three levels that are frequently conflated: the real connection between processes in the world, the cognitive connection through which an organism apprehends or reconstructs processes, and the logical-formal connection between propositions, in which symbols can be combined independently of any causal or processual link between their contents, material implication being the extreme case of this autonomization. The literature review shows convergence with this thesis. Conclusion: Logical form is a late achievement of cognitive processuality rather than a condition prior to the lived world, which repositions the architecture of the Tractatus as a product of a cognitive genesis still to be explained, rather than as the founding structure that explains that genesis.