 Wittgenstein was not suggesting that the correct way to establish that something is a Tractarian object is to gather evidence that its decomposition is physically impossible. That reading would only have a chance of being correct if Wittgenstein had taken metaphysical possibility to coincide with physical possibility, and that is evidently not  so.[8]  His meaning seems rather to be just that the objects must be discovered rather than postulated or otherwise specified in advance of investigation (cf. AM, 11). But since Wittgenstein was later to accuse his Tractarian self of having entertained the concept of a distinctive kind of philosophical discovery (see WVC 182, quoted below), we must not jump — as Malcolm appears to have done, to the conclusion that he conceived of the discovery in question as “empirical” in anything like the contemporary sense of the word. 