I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. I took an analytic philosophy course as an undergrad that featured

I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. I took an analytic philosophy course as an undergrad that featured Wittgenstein prominently, and that prof certainly did not regard it unseriously. Anyone whose job it is to uncover the truth ought to be ant least a little curious about what we know and how we know it, and perhaps more importantly, whether there are true things that we can never know. These are mostly not scientific questions, but thinking about them helps us understand why science settled on the particular set of axioms that it did (eg, that there really is a world that exists independently of humans and their conception of it).