Minima Visibilia, Single-Colored Patches, Points: Logical Analysis and its Visual Instances in Wittgenstein’s Early Notebooks

Abstract

One of the conundrums of Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘1914–1916 Notebooks’ concerns the role played by the visual instances of logical analysis. As a matter of fact , in discussing in that work the requirement that the logical analysis of meaningful sentences be complete, Wittgenstein often takes as examples statements about the colored parts of the subject's visual image (Gesichtsbild). In view of this, it might be thought that the requirement is not laid down in the Notebooks on logical grounds, but somehow on psychological or psychophysical ones. In this paper I argue this is not so and that the requirement is exemplified rather than justified by the analysis of statements about the products of the subject’s visual imagination. I also argue that, on Wittgenstein’s syntactic notion of a complete logical analysis, our unanalyzed statements embody as they are the requirement that their sense be fully determinate; which is just what is meant by the idea that the analysis must be complete.