CONCEPT
Picture Theory of Meaning
The Tractarian thesis that a meaningful proposition pictures a possible state of affairs — the philosophical commitment that computing inherited wholesale and that the later Wittgenstein spent two decades dismantling.
The picture theory holds that a proposition is meaningful because its elements correspond to the elements of the fact it represents, and its structure mirrors the structure of that possible state of affairs. Truth consists in correspondence between picture and reality; meaning consists in the logical form the two share. Whatever cannot be pictured cannot be said. The theory gave the dream of perfect language its most rigorous form and supplied, by inheritance, the philosophical architecture of every programming language ever written. Its failure — the specific way it failed to account for ordinary speech — is what makes the AI language moment intelligible as a philosophical event rather than merely a technological one.
In The You On AI Field Guide
A proposition, on the picture theory, shares logical form with what it represents. The cat is on the mat is meaningful because its structure — predicate applied to subject, relation specified between objects — can be matched against a possible