This log was inspired by "How to Read Wittgenstein" and "Ludwig Wittgenstein: the duty of genius" by Ray Monk. It is based on reading Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein translated by D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness (Routledge and Kegan Paul:1963)

Saturday, March 29, 2008

We imagine the facts.

The mental image that we conceive portrays a situation in logical space in which some matters of fact are the case and others not. That image is itself a fact. That figment of our imagination is a model of reality because the elements of it correspond to objects. What makes it an image is that its elements relate to each other in a specific way. That, in turn, presumes that the objects depicted relate so as well. Let us call this relationship between its elements the structure of the image and whatever the elements are made up of its form of representation. That the objects to relate to each other as the elements of the image do is made possible by the form of representation.

The image relates to reality in that the former extends to the latter. It is laid against reality like a ruler is. Only the end points of the graduating lines touch the object being measured. Viewed like this, the representational relation that makes it an image is also a property of the image. This relation is established by assigning elements of the image to objects. These relations are, as it were, the sensors of the elements of the image with which the image is in touch with reality.

A fact must, in order to be an image, have something in common with what is depicted. Something in the image and the imaged must be the same so that one can be image of the other. What the image must have in common with reality in order to depict it - properly or not - is its form of representation.

The image can depict every reality whose form it has. The spatial image all that is spatial, the colored image all that is colored, etc. An image cannot, however, represent its representational form; it embodies it. Because an image presents its object externally (its point of reference is its form of representation), it represents the object correctly or incorrectly. The image cannot, however, place itself outside its representational form.

What every image, in whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to depict it - correctly or incorrectly - is logical form, the form of reality. If the representational form is logical, then the image is called a logical image.

Whereas not every image is, for example, spatial, all images are also logical. Thus, a logical image can depict the world.

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