ABSTRACT
isaiah Berlin has recently discoursed on the proneness of philosophers to adopt as a paradigm one type of sentence-fact relation, and then Deflate other sentences to sentences of the chosen sort, or, alternatively, Inflate other facts to facts of the chosen sort. In his view, one of the causes of this persistent propensity is the Correspondence Theory of Language, ‘the assumption that words are names and that it is not truth, so much as meaning, that is a form of correspondence between symbols and things’ (P.A.S. 1949–50, p. 180). One form which the Correspondence view of meaning takes is the Picture Theory. I shall explore the logic of’ picture’, and of related notions like ‘map’, ‘reflection’ in the hope of showing what the Picture Theory is and why it must be a misdescription of ‘how words mean’. Some philosophers hold the Picture Theory outright. Others, although they do not say explicitly that names of things are like pictures of things, or that sentences picture facts, yet describe language in terms that properly describe not language but pictures. I shall mostly draw examples from three sources: Russell, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and Wisdom’s articles on ‘Logical Constructions’. For ease of statement and with no commitment to any use beyond that introduced, pictures, maps, sentences, etc., will be said to be signs that signify. A sign will be composed of elements. What the picture, etc., depicts, the signified, will also be said to be composed of elements.
