What did L.W. mean when he said, "If the true is what is grounded, then the grounds are neither true or false?

If the true is what is grounded, then for the grounded to also be true it would have to, like all true things, also be grounded. And if the grounded needed to be grounded then it wouldn't truly be the grounds in the first place. Therefore things that are really grounds are not something that the concept of true (or false) applies to, since then they wouldn't be grounds. W's point is that at some point proofs and explanations come to an end and you either see the obviousness of something or you don't: not everything can be proven; some things can only be shown. ("You don't agree with what I see? Then I guess we're different.") This is a limit of language, the only tool philosophy can use, and therefore a limit on philosophizing. In other words, philosophers need to know when to quit. Linguistic conventions such as "true" and "false" don't apply to everything and philosophers create problems that don't really exist when they attempt to use such conventions where they don't really apply.

O_O . . . This guy also said that if he was operated on he might not have a brain . . . I am inclined to believe he is correct, jkjk. It seems that he really just could have said, 'If the true is what is grounded than the ground is not false" and it would've been obvious but clear. Perhaps it's not translated well but I read a bit more about this guy and most of it appears like drivel. I'd be curious to know what he is actually driving at. I think he's saying - you don't know anything and you can't prove it, which would make sense with your question. He's saying there is no absolute certainty. Yeah. I think that's right.

Well he takes the word 'grounds' to mean an ultimate point of justification(precisely the antithesis of a certain 'void', i.e. one which begets infinite regression). So, and excuse me if I'm way off, this is indeed a hasty analysis, I think here he espouses a pragmatic conception of those alleged 'grounds'. He says that it is more so an act, a linguistic act, to fulfill the requisite criterion for such grounds than it is a matter of objectively existing truth. Something depends on such groundings, a truth, lest it succumb to infinite regress, and the affirmation of the justifiability of these 'grounds' is only false insofar as one has decided so.. I do find this odd, however, because if I can recollect with a tinge of accuracy, the result of OC was merely an explication of the principle of non-contradiction.. which is demonstrated in such propositions as 209.. verily, they run athwart, this and the pragmatic understanding.. so I probably am not getting this right... hm curious..

In logic, that which is 'grounded' is a 'valid' premise or conclusion that contains a fact of knowledge. It isn't necessarily a fact that will never be proved wrong. Galileo proved Aristotle wrong, but only centuries after the Church had reason to think Aristotle was grounded. Einstein seems to have 'ungrounded' some ideas; Locke ungrounded some concerning natural rights.

But the 205 statement proves Wittgenstein had a contradiction: His statement, whether it is true or false, invalidates itself. If it is true, then it cannot also be true that a grounded statement "is not true", and if it is false the falsification cannot be true.

But notice the semantic difference between that and the way you quoted it first. He didn't say "neither true or false". That's because 'not true, yet not false' means it is neither. He is saying a grounded statement is not true but is also not false. This cannot be. A thing cannot be one thing and another, both at the same time and in the same respect. That is the law of (non) contradiction.

"A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true."

http://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/

"Soundness [ ] is the property that any sentence that is provable in that deductive system is also true..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness#Soundness

"1. truth: a property of statements, i.e., that they are the case." http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/tvs.html "That they are the case.." means the thing in question is one thing, and in one respect that can be said to correspond to some fact of reality as we recognize it, otherwise known as truth.

"We return to the principal question, “What is truth?” Truth is presumably what valid reasoning preserves....Historically, the most popular theory of truth was the Correspondence Theory." http://www.iep.utm.edu/truth/#H3

"What valid reasoning preserves..." brings us back full circle to 'soundness' as derived from validity and a correspondence to some known fact.