expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning
or what its meaning is--just as people speak without knowing how the
individual sounds are produced. Everyday language is a part of the human
organism and is no less complicated than it. It is not humanly possible to
gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language
disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing
it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the
outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the
body, but for entirely different purposes. The tacit conventions on which
the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.


4.003 Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical
works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer
to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are
nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise
from our failure to understand the logic of our language. (They belong to
the same class as the question whether the good is more or less identical
than the beautiful.) And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are
in fact not problems at all.


4.0031 All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's
sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the
apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.


4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of
reality as we imagine it.