Picture Theory of Meaning

The picture theory of meaning is the central doctrine of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): a proposition has meaning because it shares logical form with the state of affairs it represents, just as a picture shares spatial form with the scene it depicts. A meaningful proposition is a logical picture of a possible fact; its constituent names stand in for objects; its logical structure mirrors the possible arrangement of those objects in reality. The theory implies that the only genuinely meaningful propositions are those that can picture possible facts — that is, empirical propositions about how things are in the world. Ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical claims, which cannot picture facts, are technically nonsensical (not false, but without sense). The logical form that makes picturing possible cannot itself be pictured or stated — it can only be shown. This is why the Tractatus ends with the conclusion that its own propositions are nonsensical (they try to say what can only be shown) and must be discarded like a ladder once climbed. Wittgenstein later rejected the picture theory in the Philosophical Investigations, replacing it with the use theory of meaning: the meaning of an expression is its use in a language game, not its correspondence to a fact.