Normativity in tractatus

Although the Tractatus is composed of meaningless sentences, as Wittgenstein himself acknowledges in the penultimate section, according to the traditional interpretation they are not just plain nonsense because they convey important truths about the common structure of language and reality. These truths cannot be said but can only be shown. Resolute readers claim that the notion of important or illuminating nonsense is inconsistent with the context principle, which Wittgenstein ascribed to in the Tractatus, and that most of its sentences are mere gibberish. In this paper I maintain that Wittgenstein thought there were meaningless sentences that show something, only what they show are not truths but rules. Such sentences, which comprise the Tractatus, are normative and do not represent any state-of affairs, therefore they cannot be meaningfully expressed in a purely descriptive language Wittgenstein considers in the Tractatus. His claim that there is something that cannot be said but can only be shown is the first version of the thesis of nonreducibility of normative sentences, which he later developed in the rule-following considerations.