As a follow-up to my previous post, I did some further digging and discovered that the toy cars and dolls used way back in 1914 in a Paris courtroom to re-enact a transit accident–i.e. the miniature model that influenced Wittgenstein’s work, especially his philosophy of language–has itself generated a substantial scholarly literature! In addition to Susan Sterrett’s beautiful paper “Pictures, Models, and Measures” (see my previous post), if you admire the enigmatic Ludwig Wittgenstein (pictured below) as much as I do, below are a few other relevant works in chronological order worth reading:

1. A fascinating 2000 talk by Professor Sterrett (the author of the paper that I feautured in my previous post) on “Physical pictures: engineering models circa 1914 and in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.”
2. This 45-page law review article from 2005 by Bruce A. Markell titled “Bewitched by language: Wittgenstein and the practice of law.”
3. A 2009 paper Lydia Patton titled “Signs, toy models, and the a priori: from Helmholtz to Wittgenstein.”
4. This review (circa 2010) of Denis McManus’s book The Enchantment of Words authored by Derek A. McDougall.
5. A blog post dated 2 July 2022 by Geoffrey Klempner on “The later Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘picture’.”