In this respect one may certainly see the ontologizing way of speaking as a provisional arrangement or a makeshift solution. An obvious question, going in part beyond the TLP, would be whether there is a substitute for it that could express the conditions of semantic-syntactic sense more neutrally. In my view an adequate substitute is to be found within the framework of a pragmatically oriented philosophy of language. Such an interpretation can even be confirmed (at least indirectly) by the text itself: for if one drops the assumption of the "ontological pre-givenness" of OBJECTS and asks instead about the kind of availability of OBJECTS (and some TLP propositions can indeed be interpreted as answers to this question), one arrives at an astonishing result: the ontologizing way of speaking proves irrelevant and functionless in the TLP (i.e. nothing changes whether one speaks of the givenness of OBJECTS or not); the concept of the OBJECT stands or falls not with its givenness but with its availability.

The question would therefore be: How is the availability of the OBJECT to be explained? A first clue is provided by TLP 2.0121: "...If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations." Behind the ontological façade of this proposition there are concealed, first, the principle of the priority of the proposition over its constituents and, second, the principle of the formalization of the proposition as the possibility of being able to dispose of the meaning of its constituents. The meaning of a name is available only as the possibility of its use in propositions – transposed ontologically: the OBJECT is available only as the possibility of its occurrence in states of affairs.