Abstract

This chapter discusses Wittgenstein's early account of intentionality in his Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus as a sophisticated attempt to avoid Sellars's dilemma for relationist theories of thought. Wittgenstein suggests that a picture also includes a “pictorial relationship” to what it depicts. This pictorial relationship “consists of the correlations of the picture's elements with things”. While the picture theory goes a long way towards providing a general account of intentionality in terms of linguistic representation and does so in a way that prima facie avoids both horns of Sellars's dilemma for relationist theories of thought, on closer scrutiny, the early Wittgenstein does not seem to be entirely successful at meeting either of these explanatory goals. The idea of a pictorial relationship between thought and language on the one hand and states of affairs on the other is an essential element of the Tractarian explanation of how thought and language reach “right out to reality”.