“Okey doke”, someone said the other day, getting up to go, thereby inadvertently triggering a long train of thoughts that I want to share with you. And not just thoughts, but memories. In fact, the memories may be a better place to begin. They reach back to the 1970s when, for a few delirious months, I thought I was on the verge of understanding how language related to the world. This understanding was, of course, a misunderstanding and, as you might expect, based on a simplification. I was, after all, doing philosophy.

It was 1974 and I had been reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for the nth time. It is a very short book but, like a white dwarf star, it packs a lot into its small space. The part that had most engaged my dazzled attention was the section where Wittgenstein advanced his famous (or notorious) picture theory of propositions. This was his way of explaining how propositions, expressed for example in words, could be about states of affairs in the world: how chopped up, exhaled air or marks on a page could do what they did. Propositions, he said, were like pictures – or models of reality. A drawing can depict in pencil marks a reality that consists of quite other stuff because the disposition of the pencil marks on the page shares something with the disposition of the elements in the scene: they have a common spatial form.