ABSTRACT
IN his exertions to make sense of the picture theory, in a simpleminded understanding of "picture", Stenius fails to see that what Wittgenstein meant by "Bild" had to be something very special. A Wittgensteinian picture is not the kind of thing which is put into a frame and hung upon the wall. The picture, for Wittgenstein, is the thought which may be expressed by hanging the picture upon the wall. The effect of Wittgenstein's theory is not so much to assimilate the expression of thought to the production of pictures as the reverse; "Jedes Bild is auch ein logisches" (Tractactus 2.182). Wittgenstein is more to be criticized for his linguistic theory of pictures than for his picture theory of language. The implication, in Stenius' terms, is that every picture is adequate. While Stenius sees clearly that the picture theory was meant as an alternative to those other theories which hold that in expressing a proposition we refer to or name something or other, and that the picture theory enables Wittgenstein to resolve traditional problems that are generated by the Name Theory of propositional meaning-problems over falsehood and negation and the unity of the proposition and how we understand new senses without new conventions-, he still does not see that a picture for Wittgenstein can be nothing at all like a name; it is not the kind of thing we use.
