Wittgenstein's Thought in Transition

2. The Picture Theory of Meaning

CHAPTERI T W O The Picture Theory of Meaning Logical atomism explains meaning only if language and the world have the same logical structure. Wittgens'tein's conviction that there must be an exact parallelism, isomorphism, mirroring, picturing, or representing of the world in language at some level of analysis between any logically possible language and any logically possible world is the central thesis of the picture theory of meaning. Wittgenstein begins his exposition ofthe picture theory with the down-to-earth observation that 2.1 We make to ourselves pictures of facts. Why does Wittgenstein find it worthwhile to mention this obvious fact about human picture-making? Facts are pictured in photography and in historical and other kinds of representational painting, and even splatter art is a pictorial record of the artist's activity and aesthetic or random choices in shooting paint from squirt guns against a canvas. What relevance does any of this have for understanding language? To the claim that we make ordinary pictures and that ordinary pictures are pictures of ordinary facts, Wittgenstein further adds that any descriptive use oflanguage is a true or false picture that truly or falsely pictures the facts of the world. The picturing of facts is not as evident to casual inspection in the case of ordinary language propositions as in artworks. Wittgenstein distinguishes between the perceptible sign and imperceptible symbol that transcends concrete language use at the deepest level oflogical analysis. He maintains that the picturing offacts in language takes place where we cannot see it, beyond the logically arbitrary conventionality ofordinary language signs, in the transcendental order of imperceptible symbols. I 35 36 I C HAP T E R TWO The anthropological starting place for Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning is emphasized in the following passages. Wittgenstein again touches base with language use as a human activity , part of the same world about which language speaks and in which pictures of the world are made. But he admits that ordinary language in the conventionality of its sign systems does not reveal its underlying logical pictorial form: 4.002 Man possesses the capacity of constructing languages , in which every sense can be expressed, without having an idea how and what each word means-just as one speaks without knowing how the single sounds are produced. Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it. From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language. Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized. The sign-symbol distinction marks a difference between perceptible and imperceptible aspects of symbols. Wittgenstein introduces the distinction in terms of sense experience, defining signs as the perceptible guises of symbols. He first writes: 3.1 In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses. 3.11 We use the sensibly perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the proposition as a projection of the possible state of affairs. The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition. 3.32 The sign is the part of the symbol perceptible by the senses. 3.34 A proposition possesses essential and accidental features. Accidental are the features which are due to a particular way of producing the propositional sign. Essential are those which alone enable the proposition to express its sense. The symbols in any logically possible language have a perceptible and an imperceptible part. The perceptible part Wittgenstein calls the sign. Governed by the logically arbitrary conventions ofordinary language, signs are subject to the vicissitudes ofthe histori- 37 I The Picture Theory of Meaning cal development of natural languages, which conceals their real underlying logical structures. ,The picturjng,Qfthe world in language -language as a picture of the world-occurs in the transcendental order of the imperceptible aspect of symbols. The symbol transcends the perceptible sign in ordinary language, where it disguises and conceals a proposition's pictorial form. It is in the transcendental order of symbols, and not necessarily or even typically in the phenomenal empirical order of natural language signs as we perceive them, that we are to think oflanguage as picturing the world. Wittgenstein offers a practical analogy...