After Frege, the next important philosophical move towards the atomistic theory of meaning was Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning. The basic assumption of picture theory of meaning confirms to the basic tenets of meaning atomism. The objective of this session is to argue that picture theory of meaning offers a perspective which suggests a new way of looking at meaning atomism, i.e., meaning being viewed as picture. But the question that arises here is: why is this perspective on meaning viewed as picture embraces atomism? Wittgenstein, while formulating picture theory of meaning does not deviate from Frege. His picture theory thus takes truth-value of a proposition central to its conception of meaning. The truth-value of a proposition is to be decided in relation to individual sentences in their capacity as pictures depicting the respective states of affairs. Thus, the structure of picture theory of meaning essentially retains the Fregean structure relating to the sense of a proposition with its truth-value. However, Wittgenstein goes beyond Frege and introduces the notion of picture while talking about the sense of a proposition. The reason is that, for Frege, all propositions have both sense and reference. It is the 'sense' which decides the reference of a sentence and states about how to obtain the states of affairs of the world. So for him, sense and reference are related with each other intrinsically, whereas Wittgenstein asserts that all propositions must have sense but they need not have references. It is because sense of a proposition lies in the possible description of reality. Thus for Wittgenstein, sense is logically embedded with a proposition. It is the intrinsic property of a proposition. If it were not, then it would not be possible for us to understand a proposition without knowing its truth-value. In this sense, the sense of a proposition is same as the picture of a proposition. A proposition acquires sense when it is a picture. The picture of a proposition depicts the state of affairs of the world. The notion of picture may be thus characterized to be more comprehensive than the notion of sense in its account of meaning.

In view of the above stated background, this session will focus on the picture theory of meaning with a view to arrive at Wittgenstein's exposition of meaning atomism. In order to undertake this, the issues that preeminently enter in to our discussion are: the structure of a proposition, logical picture of a proposition, sign and proposition, the notion of correspondence, atomic facts, elementary proposition, and isomorphic relation between the structure of a proposition and the structure of reality. In the following pages these issues have been discussed with a view to establish Wittgenstein's conception of meaning atomism as developed in his Tractatus.