Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it.
From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language.
Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.
The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.
4.003
Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.
(They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)
And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems.
4.0031
All philosophy is “Critique of language” (but not at all in Mauthner’s sense). Russell’s merit is to have shown that the apparent logical form of the proposition need not be its real form.
4.01
The proposition is a picture of reality.
The proposition is a model of the reality as we think it is.
4.011
At the first glance the proposition—say as it stands printed on paper—does not seem to be a picture of the reality of which it treats. But nor does the musical score appear at first sight to be a picture of a musical piece; nor does our phonetic spelling (letters) seem to be a picture of our spoken language.
And yet these symbolisms prove to be pictures—even in the ordinary sense of the word—of what they represent.
4.012
It is obvious that we perceive a proposition of the form aRb as a picture. Here the sign is obviously a likeness of the signified.
4.013
And if we penetrate to the essence of this pictorial nature we see that this is not disturbed by apparent irregularities (like the use of ♯ and ♭ in the score).
For these irregularities also picture what they are to express; only in another way.
4.014
The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.
To all of them the logical structure is common.
(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.)