Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus | Page 7

less complicated than it. It is not
humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of
language is. Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the
outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the
thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not
designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different
purposes. The tacit conventions on which the understanding of
everyday language depends are enormously complicated.
4.003 Most of the propositions and questions to be found in
philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we
cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out
that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of
philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our
language. (They belong to the same class as the question whether the

good is more or less identical than the beautiful.) And it is not
surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.
4.0031 All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in
Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of
showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its
real one.
4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of
reality as we imagine it.
4.011 At first sight a proposition--one set out on the printed page, for
example--does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is
concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a
picture of a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to
be a picture of our speech. And yet these sign-languages prove to be
pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent.
4.012 It is obvious that a proposition of the form 'aRb' strikes us as a
picture. In this case the sign is obviously a likeness of what is signified.
4.013 And if we penetrate to the essence of this pictorial character, we
see that it is not impaired by apparent irregularities (such as the use
[sharp] of and [flat] in musical notation). For even these irregularities
depict what they are intended to express; only they do it in a different
way.
4.014 A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and
the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation
of depicting that holds between language and the world. They are all
constructed according to a common logical pattern. (Like the two
youths in the fairy-tale, their two horses, and their lilies. They are all in
a certain sense one.)
4.0141 There is a general rule by means of which the musician can
obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to
derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and,
using the first rule, to derive the score again. That is what constitutes

the inner similarity between these things which seem to be constructed
in such entirely different ways. And that rule is the law of projection
which projects the symphony into the language of musical notation. It
is the rule for translating this language into the language of
gramophone records.
4.015 The possibility of all imagery, of all our pictorial modes of
expression, is contained in the logic of depiction.
4.016 In order to understand the essential nature of a proposition, we
should consider hieroglyphic script, which depicts the facts that it
describes. And alphabetic script developed out of it without losing what
was essential to depiction.
4.02 We can see this from the fact that we understand the sense of a
propositional sign without its having been explained to us.
4.021 A proposition is a picture of reality: for if I understand a
proposition, I know the situation that it represents. And I understand
the proposition without having had its sense explained to me.
4.022 A proposition shows its sense. A proposition shows how things
stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand.
4.023 A proposition must restrict reality to two alternatives: yes or no.
In order to do that, it must describe reality completely. A proposition is
a description of a state of affairs. Just as a description of an object
describes it by giving its external properties, so a proposition describes
reality by its internal properties. A proposition constructs a world with
the help of a logical scaffolding, so that one can actually see from the
proposition how everything stands logically if it is true. One can draw
inferences from a false proposition.
4.024 To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it
is true. (One can understand it, therefore, without knowing whether