LANGUAGE When he wrote the Tractatus Wittgenstein believed that language disguised the structure of thought beyond recognition It was the task of philosophy to uncover, by analysis, the naked form of thought beneath the drapery of ordinary language Complex propositions were to be reduced to elementary propositions, and elementary propositions would be revealed as pictures of reality Wittgenstein recorded in his diary on 29 September 1914 how the idea first dawned on him that propositions were essentially pictorial in nature: The general concept of the proposition carries with it a quite general concept of the coordination of proposition and situation The solution to all my questions must be extremely simple In a proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally (As when in the law-court in Paris a motor-car accident is represented by means of dolls, etc.) This must yield the nature of truth straight away (NB 7) The thesis that a proposition is a picture is not so implausible when we realize that Wittgenstein counted as pictures not only paintings, drawings, and photographs, and not only three-dimensional models, but also such things as maps, musical scores, and gramophone records His picture theory is perhaps best regarded as a theory of representation in general In any representation there are two things to consider: (a) what it is a representation of; (b) whether it represents it correctly or incorrectly The distinction between these two features of a representation, in the case of a proposition, is the distinction between what the proposition means, and whether what it means is true or false—the distinction between sense and truth-value If, in a law court, a toy lorry and a toy pram are to represent a collision between a lorry and a pram, several things are necessary First, the toy lorry must go proxy for the real lorry, and the toy pram for the real pram: the elements of the model must stand in for the elements of the situation to be represented This is called by Wittgenstein the pictorial relationship that makes the picture a picture (TLP 2.1514) Second, the elements of the model must be related to each other in a particular way The positioning of the toy lorry and the toy pram represents the spatial relationship at the time of the accident, in a way in which it would not if the toys had simply been stowed away together in a cupboard This, for Wittgenstein, is the structure of the picture (TLP 2.15) Every picture, then, consists of structure plus pictorial relationship 133