An A-Z of medical philosophy: Language - Wittgenstein and representation

摘要

We cannot directly know the world as it is in itself, we only know our perception of it. This gap is one of the most important ideas of philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously opens his brief and enigmatic masterpiece the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the statement 'the world is the totality of facts, not of things'. He dismisses the very possibility of talking about the world as it is in itself. We can only talk of 'facts', that is, our own statements of how we find the world to be. Wittgenstein felt that he had solved the problems of philosophy by discovering that they were in fact just problems with the way we use language. He stated 'A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it.' So what did he mean?