PEIRCE TO STRAWSON Propositions are the perceptible expressions of thoughts, and thoughts are logical pictures of facts, and the world is the totality of facts An English sentence, such as ‘The London train leaves at 11.15’ or ‘Blood is thicker than water’, does not look like a picture But Wittgenstein believed that propositions and thoughts were pictures in a literal sense; if they did not look like pictures, that was because language throws a heavy disguise around thought But even in ordinary language, he insisted, there is a perceptibly pictorial element Take the sentence ‘My fork is to the left of my knife’ This says something quite different from another sentence containing exactly the same words, namely ‘My knife is to the left of my fork’ What makes the first sentence have the meaning it does is the fact that within it the words ‘my fork’ occur to the left of the words ‘my knife’, as they not in the second sentence So here a spatial relationship between words pictures a spatial relationship between things (TLP 4.102) Few cases are as simple as this If the sentence were spoken instead of written, it would be a temporal relation between sounds rather than a spatial relationship on the page that would represent the relationship between the items on the table But this in turn is because the spoken sequence and the spatial array have a certain abstract structure in common According to the Tractatus any picture must have something in common with what it depicts This shared minimum Wittgenstein calls its logical form Most propositions, unlike the untypical example above, not have spatial form in common with the situation they depict; but any proposition must have logical form in common with what it depicts To reveal the pictorial structure of thought behind the disguise of ordinary language, Wittgenstein believed, we have to proceed by logical analysis along the lines suggested by Russell In this analysis, he maintained, we will in the end come to symbols that denote entirely noncomplex objects A fully analysed proposition will consist of a combination of atomic propositions, each of which will contain names of simple objects, names related to each other in ways that will picture, truly or falsely, the relations between the objects they represent Such an analysis may be beyond human powers, but the thought the proposition expresses already, in the mind, has the complexity of the fully analysed proposition We express this thought in plain German or English by the unconscious operation of extremely complicated rules The connection between language and the world is made by the correlation between the ultimate 56