Wittgenstein's Picture Theory of Language Explained | Tractatus

The Vienna Circle (1920s-1930s) developed logical positivism, asserting only scientific discourse is meaningful. Building on Wittgenstein's work but rejecting its narrowness, they formulated the verification principle: a statement is meaningful only if empirically verifiable or logically necessary. This excluded metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics as non-statements—ethical claims became commands or exclamations, while metaphysical propositions were deemed entirely meaningless. Understanding meaning required knowing how to verify through sensory experience.

Instrumentalism became popular around the turn of the 20th century, followed by logical positivism defining the field for decades. Logical positivism accepts only testable statements as meaningful, rejects metaphysics, and embraces verificationism. The Berlin Circle and Vienna Circle propounded this in the late 1920s, interpreting Wittgenstein's philosophy to identify a verifiability principle. They sought reduction of mathematics to logic, embraced Mach's phenomenalism, and Percy Bridgman's operationalism. Only the verifiable was scientific and cognitively meaningful. With WW II's close, it became milder logical empiricism, led by Carl Hempel who expounded the covering law model of explanation without reference to causation. This established philosophy of science as a distinct subdiscipline.

The Vienna Circle, led by Moritz Schlick in the 1920s-30s, developed logical positivism as a revolutionary philosophical movement. They critiqued Wittgenstein's theory as too narrow and metaphysically contaminated. The Circle proposed that meaningful statements fall into two categories: those true/false by meaning alone (logic, mathematics), and those about the world requiring empirical verification. Their 1929 Manifesto declared only empirically verifiable or logically grounded statements are meaningful, dismissing metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics as emotive expressions rather than genuine discourse. This established the verification principle as the foundation of their philosophy.

Logical positivism, a revitalized form of positivism by the Vienna Circle, provides the intellectual link between the Vienna Circle and the school of linguistic philosophy. The Vienna Circle consisted of mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists in the 1920s-1930s, including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Victor Kraft, Herbert Feigl, and others. Ludwig Wittgenstein, associated with Oxford University, provided the intellectual link between the Vienna Circle and the school of linguistic philosophy that thrived at Oxford and other English universities in the early 20th century. Logical positivism rejects traditional metaphysics and its cognitive status. Scientific propositions in logical positivism are of two kinds: analytical and synthetic. Analytical statements are logical and mathematical in nature. Synthetic statements add something to the meaning of given terms. The criterion for synthetic statements is verifiability—statements must be capable of empirical verification to have meaning. Traditional political theory is rejected as unverifiable and meaningless.

In Norway during 1913-1914, Wittgenstein developed his revolutionary insight that logic cannot be expressed in words because logical form is inherent to language itself. He distinguished between what can be said (propositions that follow logical rules) and what must be shown (logical relationships that exist but cannot be put into words). This was originally applied to logic but later extended to ethics, aesthetics, religion, and the meaning of life. Wittgenstein compared this to trying to jump on one's own shadow - the logical form always moves away from any attempt to capture it in language. This insight formed the foundation of his later philosophy.

Vyggenstein's central insight in the Tractatus was establishing a strict boundary between what can be stated and what can only be shown. While we can state facts about the world (like 'The table is brown'), we cannot state the logical structure that makes such statements possible. This structure shows itself within the language itself, similar to how the rules of chess cannot be described while playing the game - they are self-evident in each move. Attempting to describe the logic of the world using language is like trying to illuminate a flashlight with its own beam - it's impossible because the logic is presupposed by any speech.

Wittgenstein argues that language can only represent facts in the world, not its own logical structure. Ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life fall beyond what can be meaningfully said—they can only be shown. He criticizes Frege and Russell for treating identity statements as meaningful, arguing they are tautologies providing no information about reality. Mathematical statements are rules of language, not facts about the world. Logic is the framework itself, not content about the world.

Wittgenstein's central philosophical project is to separate what can be meaningfully said from what cannot. He believed that in many areas, particularly ethics and aesthetics, most statements are meaningless. This is not because they are false but because they lack the logical structure to be true or false. The majority of people who discuss these topics are, in his view, confused. However, there are exceptions - some people have managed to say something meaningful about these topics. Wittgenstein's position is that we should be more silent about these matters.

The distinction between what can be said and what can be shown plays an important role throughout the Tractatus. What can be said clearly can be expressed, while what cannot be spoken about must be passed over in silence. This distinction between the sayable and the showable is central to Wittgenstein's philosophical position.

The orthodox view in philosophy and cognitive science combines the representational theory of mind (which holds that content, intentionality, and representation are essential features distinguishing mental from non-mental systems) with computational theory. On this view, cognitive agents are seen as semantic engines—automatic formal systems with unique privileged interpretations. Mental states are states about external objects, unlike mere state tables which lack attentional states.

The representational theory of mind is a philosophical framework that reduces cognitive activities to mental representations. Mental representation refers to any content or structure that conveys meaning about the world, such as sentences, maps, or pictures. A key feature of mental representation is truth conditions—the idea that representations can be true or false depending on whether they accurately represent reality. This theory, associated with cognitivism and computational approaches to mind, holds that all human cognitive activities (perception, memory, imagination, calculation, social interaction) should be explained through the lens of mental representations. This view has been dominant in analytic philosophy of mind and forms the foundation of much cognitive science research.

The representational framework faces challenges from emotions (love, ecstasy, fear, anxiety) and consciousness (qualia). These phenomena may not have cognitive objects or may be non-representational. The paper presupposes the computational theory of mind but acknowledges these as fundamental challenges. The authors are strong believers in subjective properties of experience (qualia) and think these may not be handled by representational theories. These challenges require accommodation in any successor paradigm. The framework is specifically about terrestrial cognition and may not apply to alien forms of cognition. The authors do not argue for the computational theory of mind but rather adopt it as a presupposition to structure the debate.

The computational-representational theory of mind, developed in the 1950s, proposes that cognition involves mental representations that encode information about the world. This theory assumes that mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions) can be decomposed into primitive components, and that cognitive processes can be modeled as algorithms that manipulate these representations. The theory treats the mind as an information processing system that represents the external world in neural structures. The sandwich model of cognition, associated with Noam Chomsky, positions cognition as an intermediary stage between perception and action, assuming that mental representations exist independently of other cognitive modules.

There is a fundamental tension between computationalism (the view that mental processes are computational) and representationalism (the view that mental states represent something). Some versions of computationalism require strong representational commitments, while others attempt to avoid them. This conflict creates a challenge for computational theories of mind, as they must explain how computational processes can have meaning or representational content without committing to specific representational theories.