_008 Wittgenstein & Picture Theory

Wittgenstein was a 20^th Century Austrian philosopher who attempted to distinguish between what can and what cannot be meaningfully spoken about. In other words, he wanted to know about the limits of what can be expressed through language. In his book, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” he ultimately concludes that we should abandon the act of philosophy altogether.

He asserted that for language to have any meaning, it must directly fit the world we live in. Language represents the world by depicting it. Therefore, a word must represent an object in the world. Any other words simply link these objects together. So a meaningful statement can be pictured in the real world.

Furthermore, the relationship between the words of a sentence must mirror the relationship between the objects in a fact. He was not necessarily referring to statements that we use in everyday conversation, but rather elementary propositions i.e. the simplest statements that exist. All regular statements can be broken down into these elementary ones.

A true statement is one whereby the arrangement of words is identical to the arrangement of objects.

“London is in England” is a true proposition because there is a city called London which is located in a country called England.

A false statement is one where the arrangement of objects simply describes a possible arrangement of objects.

“London is in South America” is a false proposition since it does not correlate with how things are in the real world. But it is possible, and therefore meaningful. It is conceivable that London could be in South America if the circumstances were different.

So then what is not meaningful? For Wittgenstein, it was philosophy. Judgements about ethics, beauty and religion, even though they were immensely important to him, were simply not accessible by means of language. We can never say anything meaningful about these things because they do not describe what is in the world. Instead they describe the world itself. He describes these as “transcendental”. There is no picture for them. Therefore, for him, all philosophical problems are actually just problems of language misuse.

Logic and mathematics were also, in a sense, without sense (kek). This is because logic tells us what the limits of sense are. Logic is itself the boundary of what can be express and thought. But it does not itself picture anything and thus have no sense (not to be confused with nonsense).

In this sense, Wittgenstein regards even the Tractatus as meaningless, that it should only be used as a ladder upon which to climb before discarding it completely. His own writing has gone beyond the limit of what can be expressed and thought, so it is ironically self-defeating.

Later in life, he refutes many of the arguments that he makes in the Tractatus, making him arguably the most famous philosopher to have admitted he was wrong. However, the Tractatus was a revolutionary work in the philosophy of language, which beforehand was a relatively dismissed section of philosophy.

Word Count: 494

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), 1922, C. K. Ogden (trans.), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Originally published as “Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung”, inAnnalen der Naturphilosophische, XIV (3/4), 1921.