An open library of thought
Show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
A proposition represents a possible state of affairs by sharing a logical form with it; its sense is fixed before we know whether it is true or false.
A model of a road accident made with toy cars, used in a Paris court, can show how the vehicles stood.
Speaking is part of activities and forms of life; for a large class of cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language rather than an object it labels.
A builder calls “slab!” and an assistant brings a slab: in this game the word works as an order, not as a name.
A concept can hold together through overlapping and criss-crossing similarities, like those among members of a family, without one essence shared by all its instances.
Board games, ball games and solitaire share various features, yet no single feature belongs to every game.
Some propositions are held fast in practice and form the background against which doubt, evidence and justification make sense; they are not themselves conclusions.
For Wittgenstein, writing before space flight, “I have never been on the moon” was not a hypothesis to test but part of the frame of all testing.