That is the title of this beautiful paper by Susan G. Sterrett, who teaches philosophy of science at Wichita State University. (Although Professor Sterrett presented this paper as early as 2015 at a symposium on “Wittgenstein’s ’Picture Theory’’, it was posted on the Wittgenstein Initiative website a month ago on 5 September 2023.) Along with an extended excerpt from Professor Sterrett’s paper, pictured below is a reproduction of a sketch from her paper showing a lawyer using a model bus and dolls to depict a traffic accident, a sketch that was first published in a 1914 Paris magazine and that may have inspired Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language:

A great many people have written about Wittgenstein’s reading of the use of miniatures in the courtroom. According to von Wright’s memoirs, Wittgenstein mentioned it to many friends on many different occasions (von Wright, n.d. 20 fn 9); no one, so far as I am aware, has ever located the newspaper account or the court case about the traffic accident that occasioned his insight. My concern, however, has been, not that the newspaper account has so far not been located, but that these discussions have not put the use of miniatures in the courtroom in their historical context. The context of the history of science and technology is especially relevant here, for it reveals that there was a time when miniatures were not just toys, but scientific objects. As for the depiction of the use of models of a traffic accident in a magazine, I have, in spite of the expenditure of an inordinate amount of time on fruitless efforts to locate it, finally happened upon something close to it: a magazine account of the use of a miniature car and bus to depict a traffic accident, which was published in 1914. This is consistent with a report that Wittgenstein, much later, spoke of seeing ‘a newspaper notice which said that in Paris at a legal proceeding about a traffic accident, the accident was presented with dolls and a little bus.’ (Klagge 2016) The sketch of the lawyer using the miniatures is credited to a French publication published in Paris (L’Illustration). It is striking that the mention of dolls and a little bus match this illustration, too. I cannot be certain, in the sense historians demand, that it is the same depiction of what happened in the lawcourt or even that it depicts the same accident, but I think it is at least fair to say that the illustration and accompanying text depict the sort of use of miniatures in a courtroom that was a newsworthy practice in 1914.