An idea · Twentieth Century (to mid-century) · first attested 1921
Picture Theory of Language
A sentence is true if it pictures the world correctly.
The thesis of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Meaningful propositions are logical pictures of possible states of affairs; they are true if the world is as they picture it. What cannot be pictured (ethics, aesthetics, religion, the meaning of life) cannot be said — though, the Tractatus hints, it might be shown. Wittgenstein himself later rejected the picture theory.