“Facts Are Grasped by Us in Pictures (PT, 2.1). Remarks on Pictures and Facts in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Abstract

This paper proposes a (re)reading of the famous section in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, 2.1: “We picture facts to ourselves” and its relation to the similar section in the Prototractatus, 2.1: “Facts are grasped by us in images”. We reject the dominant solution that interprets the relation between facts and images as an isomorphic relation and propose that instead it is an internal relation: there are no facts that are not perceived through images. In other words: For us, linguistic animals, there is no world independent of language.