File:Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations illustration remark 48.svg

English: Illustration of the remark 48 of Ludwig Wittgenstein's book Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein introduces a language-game which is used to describe how coloured squares are ordered on a surface. The words of the language (that happen to be letters here) are: R=red, W=white, G=green and B=black. The description of this chart is ”RRBGGGRWW”. The numbers in the top corners of the squares indicate the order in which the words are applied to the chart and are thus not part of the color chart that is described here.
The remark is part of Wittgenstein's critique of the view that the world must be composed of absolutely simple constituent parts: it is most natural to consider the coloured squares as the simplest units in this language, but in other situations we could say that the simplest parts of the picture are e.g. rectangles that constitute squares or colour and shape of squares. That is, what we consider as the simplest parts of a complex always depends on the circumstances and our intentions.