(They belong to
the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical
than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are
in fact not problems at all.
4.0031 All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's
sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the
apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.
4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of
reality as we imagine it.
4.011 At first sight a proposition--one set out on the printed page, for
example--does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is
concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a picture
of a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a
picture of our speech. And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures,
even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent.
4.012 It is obvious that a proposition of the form 'aRb' strikes us as a
picture. In this case the sign is obviously a likeness of what is
signified.
4.013 And if we penetrate to the essence of this pictorial character, we
see that it is not impaired by apparent irregularities (such as the use
[sharp] of and [flat] in musical notation). For even these irregularities
depict what they are intended to express; only they do it in a different
way.
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