2.171 A picture can picture every reality whose form it has.
A spatial picture [can represent] everything spatial, a color one everything colored, etc.
A spatial picture, I take it, need not itself be spatial. That is to say, we can represent three-dimensional space without building a three-dimensional model, just as we do not need to use colors to represent colors (we can use words, for instance, instead). But again I am talking here as if pictures were to be understood fairly literally. If they are propositions, then what is a spatial picture? A proposition to do with space? Perhaps a proposition belonging to the set of all (possible) propositions about space? And then 2.171 becomes obviously true.
2 comments:
I think a spatial picture must indeed be spatial. It need not be 3D, but it must represent by the spatial arrangement of its elements (and its method of projection). So for example, what represents in a painting of the Empire State Building is the spatial arrangement of the flecks of paint.
If we represented the Empire State Building with a series of sentences that described everything that the painting described, the series of sentences would not be a spatial picture, i.e., the sentences would not represent by the spatial arrangement of their letters or words. (There could, of course, be different spacing between the letters, or the sentences could be written at an angle, etc.; and such differences would not affect the sense of the senteces. Whereas, if the similar changes were made to the flecks of paint, it would affect the sense of the painting.) Instead, the sentences would represent by the syntactical and logical "arrangement" of their elements. The senteces, then, would be logical pictures.
A sentence or proposition, then, is not a spatial picture, but a logical one.
Thanks. That sounds right. Certainly a spatial picture must be spatial in some sense.
"2.17 What a picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to picture it in its way -- rightly or falsely -- is its form of representation."
A two-dimensional sentence can represent something three-dimensional. You would emphasize the words "in its way" then, right? A sentence's way of representing reality is logical, not spatial.
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