The history of an intriguing idea

 One more note on Wittgenstein before I go back to the creek.

One of the central problems in the philosophy of language is how it is that language relates to the world it describes. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein provided one solution: the Picture Theory of language.

Wittgenstein held that the world is not made of things. It’s made of facts, that is, things that stand in relation to other things. The description of the world is possible because grammar — which shows the logical relationships among parts of a sentence — reflects the relationships among the facts.

The idea occurred to Wittgenstein when he was a young Austrian soldier on the Eastern Front in World War I. He read a magazine article about a lawsuit in Paris about a car wreck. A model was used in court to show how the accident happened — where buildings, cars and people were at the moment. The model gave a picture of the accident. 

Extending the analogy, Wittgenstein stated that a proposition is a model of a state of affairs: that is, it’s a model of the complex relationships among facts. Our language, if we pay careful attention to its logical grammar, will allow someone else to picture the state of affairs we’re describing.

Wittgenstein later saw problems with the theory. He amended the views of the Tractatus in his Philosophical Investigations. But the Picture Theory is a landmark in the philosophy of language, a milepost in the history of ideas.

One of the interesting things about the idea is that we can pinpoint it historically. The idea occurred to Wittgenstein in the fall of 1914, when he was a young soldier in the Austro-Hungarian First Army. The army and other forces of the empire were driven out of Galicia by the Russians. The fighting and long retreat covered parts of what are now Poland and Ukraine. It was, from the point of view of military history, one of the great disasters of the war.

In the middle a world-shaping disaster, there was a soldier who kept a notebook and had an inspiration. The empire is gone. The map has changed. The idea is still with us.