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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Picture Theory of Language

Debunking Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of Language in Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth
century, and regarded by some as the most important since Immanuel Kant. His early
work was influenced by that of Arthur Schopenhauer and, especially, by his teacher
Bertrand Russell and by Gottlob Frege, who became something of a friend. This work
culminated in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophy book that
Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. It claimed to solve all the major problems of
philosophy and was held in especially high esteem by the anti-metaphysical logical
positivists. The Tractatus is based on the idea that philosophical problems arise from
misunderstandings of the logic of language, and it tries to show what this logic is.
Wittgenstein’s later work, principally his Philosophical Investigations, shares this
concern with logic and language, but takes a different, less technical, approach to
philosophical problems. This book helped to inspire so-called ordinary language
philosophy. This style of doing philosophy has fallen somewhat out of favor, but
Wittgenstein’s work on rule-following and private language is still considered important,
and his later philosophy is influential in a growing number of fields outside philosophy.
On the other hand, Wittgenstein created the picture theory of meaning in his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a way to look at how design and the mechanics of
artistic drawing are translated from an interaction with the physical world as well as to
expound on his interests in ethics and the mythical state of existence. This paper
explores Wittgenstein’s picture theory as it is explained within his work, Tractatus, in
order to understand the true dynamics of what he was trying to propose and how it is
still relevant today. Before delving into the obtuse philosophical ideas that Wittgenstein
puts forth in his first book, the Tractatus, it is important to take a moment to first get a
sense of why the book was written and why it seemed to be so difficult to digest. This
book was written while Wittgenstein was serving with the Austrian army during World
War I and whilst a prison of war in Italy (Jago 2006). The idea of the book sprung out of
his work related to the “analysis of complex sentences into symbolic components”
(Cashell 2005). His theory was that “if a proto-sign was discovered to represent the
universal form of the general proposition, then such a sign would somehow also
demonstrate the logical structure underlying language: that which enables language to
describe…a reality apparently indifferent to our description of it” (Cashell 2005). His
conclusion that “the relational form (logo) co-ordinating thought, language and the world
was pictorial in nature” (Cashell 2005), setting the foundation for the Tractatus.
Moreover, the book is written in a condensed writing style that reflects the depth
and complexity of what Wittgenstein was trying to express in as logical manner as
possible (Jago 2006). Wittgenstein divided the book up into a series of numbered
paragraphs that represented seven integer propositions and created an outline of the
book (Hauptli 2006). The Tractatus was the vehicle that Wittgenstein used to explain his
picture theory.
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Picture Theory of Language
Furthermore, the picture theory of language is a result of something called logical
atomism, which was expounded by Russell. Russell, being Wittgenstein’s teacher, had
a strong influence on the latter’s early works, and the picture theory of meaning is
Wittgenstein’s own idea of logical atomism. The first proposition of the Tractatus runs
like this: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” One of the sub-propositions is
that the existence of a fact is a state of affairs. The early-20th-century philosophy
speaks here sounds a little bizarre, and the picture theory of meaning is very much a
creature of its time period, but the meaning behind it is very simple. The idea is that, in
the world, you have objects, and the objects can be arranged and combined in different
ways, and the point of words is to describe the way the objects are combined. So if Bob
is sitting on a chair, the sentence “Bob is sitting on a chair” is true because it describes
the way things are with Bob and the chair: Bob is an object and the chair is an object,
and the relation between them is that Bob is sitting on the chair, and the point of
language is to describe this combination. It is important to note that the picture theory
did not just mean visual images. The theory also incorporated language, music, art, and
engineering. Primarily, Wittgenstein relied on engineering, or projection drawing, as the
basis for the picture theory because it seemed like the easiest way to explain his ideas
(Biggs 2000). His main objective in creating the Tractatus was to “determine the limit of
expression of thought” and “establish the notion of the projective form in his picture
theory” by making “a logical correspondence between the language and reality” (Actus
2007).
On the contrary, this all sounds very commonsensical and correct, and in a way, it
is. As Wittgenstein points out in the Philosophical Investigations, the picture theory of
meaning is quite correct, for some uses of language, but not all of them. If I say “Bring
me a glass of water,” that’s an imperative and I’m not describing a state of affairs, but
asking you to do something; the earlier philosophers, the logical atomists and people
who believed in the picture theory of meaning, including Wittgenstein himself, knew that
such sentences existed, but did not think they were important for understanding
language. Part of Wittgenstein’s whole project with the use theory of meaning is to re-
habilitate statements that aren’t factual declarative statements, to show them as
invaluable in understanding language, which turns the picture theory of meaning into a
sort of quaint and overcomplicated way of describing how declarative statements work,
instead of some grand theory of language. This comes with a shift in the focus of
philosophy of language in general, where we go from the strangely lifeless and narrow
focus of early 20th century work, looking only at “fact-stating” language, and instead
take language as it is, instead of trying to dissect out the important parts. Wittgenstein
often gets all the credit for this, but some of his contemporaries were doing the same
thing: for example, J.L. Austin apparently wrote something called How to Do Things with
Words, which expounds a use-theory similar to that of Wittgenstein, although I haven’t
read it.
In connection to that, after his death, his other book was published. Philosophical
Investigations expresses ideas he had in the later part of his life, often directly
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Picture Theory of Language
contradicting his early work. At one point in Investigations he even wrote “the author of
the Tractatus was mistaken,” as he had moved so far away from his original positions.In
Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that language is a series of games. When we are
speaking to somebody else we use particular words to convey a certain meaning. The
only way they can hope to understand us is if they understand what rules we are
currently playing by and exactly how the words are used in relation to those rules. For
example, if I write “He is a real chatterbox,” I could be speaking sarcastically, literally,
lying, or slightly exaggerating. You have to know what “game” we are playing to fully
understand me. This is a far cry from the picture theory of the Tractatus and his
denunciation of the earlier work discredited parts of logical positivism.

References
https://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H6
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#TracLogiPhil
Actus. (2007). Wittgenstein and his picture theory. Available
at: http://www.actus.org/witt.html.

Biggs, M.A.R. (2000). Visualisation and Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus.” Faculty of Art and

Design, University of Hertfordshire, 1-9.

Cashell, K. (2005). Attempt to understand Wittgenstein’s picture theory of the

proposition. Available at: http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol2/cashell.html.
Hauptli, B. W. (2006). Hauptli’s introduction to the Tractatus. Available at:
http://www.fiu.edu/~hauptili/IntroductiontoWittgenstein’sTractatus.html.
Jago, M. (2006). Pictures and nonsense. Philosophy Now. Available at:
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58jago.htm.
Mandik, P. (2003). Picturing, showing, and solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus. Available at: http://www.petemandik.com/philosophy/papers/witt.html.