Later he became engrossed in a new problem. It was the question of the nature of the significant proposition. There is a story of how the idea of language as a picture of reality occurred to Wittgenstein. It was in the autumn of 1914 on the Eastern Front, Wittgenstein was reading, in a magazine about a lawsuit in Paris concerning an automobile accident. At the trial a miniature model of the accident was presented before the court. The model here served as a proposition, that is, as a description of a possible state of affairs. It has this function owing to a correspondence between the parts of the model (the miniature-houses, -cars, -people) and things (houses, cars, people) in reality. It now occurred to Wittgenstein that one might reverse the analogy and say that a proposition serves as a model or picture, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined – the structure of the proposition – depicts a possible combination oi elements in reality, a possible state of affairs.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus may be called a synthesis of the theory of truth-functions and the idea that language is a picture of reality.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, a Memoir, p.8)

In his Notebooks entry for September 30, 1914, he wrote

The general concept of the proposition carries with it a quite general concept of the co-ordination of proposition and situation: The solution to all my questions must be extremely simple.

In the 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.¹) [Cf. 4.031.]

This must yield the nature of truth straight away (if I were not blind).

Let us think of hieroglyphic writing in which each word is a representation of what it stands for. Let us think also of the fact that actual pictures of situations can be right and wrong. [Cf. 4.016.]

We can compare W's picture-writing Bilderschrift to Frege's concept-writing Begriffsschrift

" " : If the right-hand figure in this picture represents the man A, and the left-hand one stands for the man B, then the whole might assert, e.g.: "A is fencing with B". The proposition in picture-writing can be true and false. It has a sense independent of its truth or falsehood. It must be possible to demonstrate everything essential by considering this case.

It can be said that, while we are not certain of being able to turn all situations into pictures on paper, still we are certain that we can portray all logical properties of situations in a two-dimensional script.

This is still very much on the surface, but we are on good ground.

30.9.14.

It can be said that in our picture the right-hand figure is a representation of something and also the left-hand one, but even if this were not the case, their relative position could be a representation of something. (Namely a relation.)

2.10.14.

1. This remark refers to an incident, about which Wittgenstein later told several of his friends. (Cf. G. H. von Wright, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a Biographical Sketch in the Philosophical Review, Vol. LXIV, 1955, pp. 532—3 33.) To judge from the date of the present MS., however, this incident cannot very well have taken place in a trench on the East Front. (Edd.)

(Notebooks, 1914-1916, p.7)

Wittgenstein's was not the first claim that a set of true propositions can contain knowledge of the physical world, that words can describe objects, but his Tractatus was surely the boldest:

4.01 The proposition is a picture of reality.
        The proposition is a model of the reality as we think it is.

4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science
        (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences)

Although language is an excellent tool for human communication, its arbitrary and ambiguous nature makes it ill-suited to represent the world directly. What Wittgenstein saw in the miniature model of the accident at the Paris trial was a dynamic information structure that was partially isomorphic with the information structure of the original accident. Such a model is completely language independent!

It is sad that Wittgenstein proposed a picture theory of language, of language as a mirror of nature. As an excellent aeronautical engineer and architect, he knew that a working model is much more than a picture. He was very impressed by Heinrich Hertz's classic textbook The Principles of Mechanics, in which dynamical models played a large part.

Wittgenstein might have anticipated our information philosophy, which is a model theory of information structures. Today our best models are interactive dynamic computational models visualizable as 3-dimensional animations of physical objects and living beings.

4.04 In the proposition there must be exactly as many things distinguishable as there are in the state of affairs, which it represents.

They must both possess the same logical (mathematical) multiplicity (cf. Hertz's Mechanics, on Dynamic Models).

But there is no mapping, no isomorphism of information between words (propositions) and objects (states of affairs). The extraordinarily sophisticated connection between a word and object is made in human minds, mediated by the experience recorder and reproducer (ERR) in the mind/brain. Words stimulate some neurons to start firing and to play back relevant experiences including the object. By contrast, a dynamic information model of a part of the world is presented immediately to the mind as a look-alike and act-alike simulation.

Without relevant experience recorded in the mind's ERR, words are mere noise.

CAT

By comparison, a photograph or a moving picture with sound can be seen and mostly understood by any human being, independent of their native tongue. The core elements of our information philosophy, models of information structures, go far beyond logic and language as a representation of the fundamental nature of reality.

Computer simulations must of course incorporate all the laws of nature, from the differential equations of quantum physics to the myriad processes of biophysics. At their best, simulations are not only our most accurate knowledge of the world, they are the best teaching tools ever devised. We must use them to transfer that knowledge to the next generation and to most of the world's population via the Internet and our ubiquitous smartphones.

What is knowledge? A subset of the information in information structures.

How do we know it? Information is stored in our minds when our life experiences are recorded by the ERR.

Where is the best knowledge? It used to be in books and the minds of our best teachers. Now it is being spread around the world, accessible from any computer or smartphone. The I-Phi website is a modest contribution.

See more philosopher profiles at the Logic Gallery by David Marans

5.53 Identity of the object I express by identity of the sign and not by means of a sign of identity. Difference of the objects by difference of the signs.

5.5301 That identity is not a relation between objects is obvious. This becomes very clear if, for example, one considers the proposition "(x) : fx . HOOK . x=a". What this proposition says is simply that only a satisfies the function f, and not that only such things satisfy the function f which have a certain relation to a.

One could of course say that in fact only a has this relation to a, but in order to express this we should need the sign of identity itself.

5.5302 Russell's definition of "=" won't do; because according to it one cannot say that two objects have all their properties in common. (Even if this proposition is never true, it is nevertheless significant.)

5.5303 Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.

5.532 And analogously: not "( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y) . x=y", but "( EXISTS x) . f(x, x)"; and not
"( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y) . ~x=y", but "( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y)".

Therefore instead of Russell's "( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y)" : "( EXISTS x, y) . f(x, y) .v. ( EXISTS x) . f(x, x)".)

5.533 The identity sign is therefore not an essential constituent of logical notation.

5.534 And we see that the apparent propositions like: "a=a", "a=b . b=c . HOOK a=c", "(x) . x=x". "( EXISTS x) . x=a", etc. cannot be written in a correct logical notation at all.

5.535 So all problems disappear which are connected with such pseudo-propositions.

This is the place to solve all the problems with arise through Russell's "Axiom of Infinity".

What the axiom of infinity is meant to say would be expressed in language by the fact that there is an infinite number of names with different meanings.

See also our growing bilingual translation of the Tractatus with annotations.

But Wittgenstein is quite correct. That "divine" process is the source of all that is good in the universe.

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