[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me
- From: "Phil Enns" <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:53:35 +0700
Donal McEvoy wrote:
"Not quite:- 'What a picture represents' ie. its pictorial content, so
to speak - 'is its sense'. Its content is key to its sense which is
therefore not a mere matter of representational form. The 'form' W
speaks of here is the underlying logical 'form', which is the merely
the 'means' by which this content (or '[w]hat a picture represents) is
conveyed. That 'form' is not '[w]hat a picture represents'. So sense
does not lie in 'representational form' but in content ie. in '[w]hat
a picture represents'."
2.131 In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives
of objects.
2.14 What constitutes a picture is that its elements are related to
one another in a determinate way.
I don't see Wittgenstein making the form/content distinction Donal
suggests. The picture is constituted by the relations of objects, and
this representation of relations is the sense of the picture. A
picture is true if the picture's objects correlate to things and this
is possible only if the logical form of the picture is appropriate to
the form of reality. The logical form of the picture, for example,
being spatial, will correlate to the spatial form of reality. While
logical form makes depiction of the world possible, the sense of the
picture does not come from this logical form. The sense comes from
the relations between objects found in the picture.
Donal continues:
"it is false if it is taken to imply that a 'p' has sense merely
because of what 'lies in the representation' - for the possibility of
'p' having sense depends, for W in TLP, on its possible one-to-one
relationship with reality standing outside that "representation".
It is possible for a picture to have sense and be false because sense
arises from the relations of elements found within the picture. The
question of whether the picture is true or false is independent and
depends on how the elements in the picture correlate to reality. In
fact, Wittgenstein claims that the question of whether a picture is
true or not cannot be determined from the picture itself while
presumably the sense can.
Donal again:
"But the possibility of a proposition being true or false depends on
it having sense, and its having sense depends on its being able to be
broken down into 'atomic propositions'."
I don't know where Wittgenstein makes this claim. What I do know is
that in TLP, the sense of a picture represents a state of affairs and
this does not require elements of the picture being 'broken down'.
Certainly those elements are necessary to constitute the picture, but
the sense of the picture is found not in the elements but in their
relations.
Sincerely,
Phil Enns
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
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