Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/197

 certain flavour as the sweetness of sugar, a certain colour as the green of a meadow, a certain sound as the sound produced by a tuning fork of a particular description, and so on.

In this way it becomes evident that propositions express facts in the world by speaking of objects and their external properties and relations. And it would be a serious misunderstanding of our statements if you believed that propositions could speak of logical structures or express them in the same sense in which we speak of objects and express facts. Strictly speaking none of our sentences about the green leaf expresses the internal structure of the green; nevertheless it is revealed by them in a certain way, or — to use Wittgenstein's term — it is shown forth by them. The structure of "green" shows itself in the various possibilities of using the word "green", it is revealed by its grammar. A language does not, of course, express its own grammar, but it shows itself in the use of the language.

All the statements that can be made in any language about the colour of our leaf speak only of its external properties and relations. They tell us where to find it (i.e. what position it occupies relatively to other things), how it is distinguished from the colour of other objects, under what circumstances it may be produced, and so forth — in other words, they express certain facts into which the green of the leaf enters as a part or element. And the way in which the word "green" occurs in these sentences reveals the internal structure of that part or element.

8. Inexpressibility of content.

If it is true that verbal sentences, the propositions of our spoken language, can communicate nothing but the logical structure of the green colour, ' then they seem to be unable to express the most important thing about it, namely that ineffable quality of greenness which appears to constitute its very nature, its true essence, in short, its Content. Obviously this content is accessible only to beings endowed with eyesight and power of colour perception, it could not possibly be conveyed to a person born blind. Shall we conclude that such a person could not understand any of our statements about the colour of the leaf, that they must be quite meaningless to him because he can never possess the content whose structure they reveal?