without having an idea how and what each word means—just as one speaks without knowing how the single sounds are produced.
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
