David Peat

76 From Certainty to Uncertaintypopularize philosophy for the consumption of the general public—thekiss of death for many an academic in the Anglo-Saxon world at least.To his critics, this clarity of mind had a subtle drawback. Russell couldplunge to the heart of an argument with great confidence and presentits bare bones, but in so doing he was at risk of glossing over the innersubtleties of an issue.Wittgenstein, by contrast, would not let an argument sit; he wouldmull over it, revisit it, and tease out its subtleties. While Russell forgedahead with his logical atoms, Wittgenstein, in his self-imposed exile,wondered: How can I say anything? How can an utterance mean anything?What is the relationship of language to the world? What can besaid, or known, and what cannot be said? He wrote his deliberations innotebooks that he carried with him to the Eastern and Italian fronts.In 1914 Wittgenstein had a revelation about the nature of language.The story goes that he was reading about a court case involving a trafficaccident. To illustrate the case the court had been shown a model ofthe incident using miniature cars, roads, and houses. 4 It struckWittgenstein that the reason this model worked, and the way it representeda possible state of affairs in the world, was because each of theelements in the model—a car, a road, a house—corresponded to, orpointed to, something in the real world. It was not simply the correspondencebetween toy cars and real cars that struck him, but somethingmore general. It was that the arrangement of the toy cars andhouses corresponded to an arrangement of objects and events in thereal world.Wittgenstein immediately pounced on the idea that languageworks because it presents a picture of reality. If you make a statementsuch as “the cat is chasing the mouse” each of the words corresponds toan object in the world. But more than this, the arrangement of wordsin the statement corresponds to a particular state of affairs in the world.This is why, Wittgenstein argued, language has meaning and allows usto say things about the world.4Other versions of this story refer to Wittgenstein having seen a map of theaccident in a newspaper.