Allow me to present my thoughts here.
I think it is important to make sure we get what he means by “the world”, and by “facts”. I’m relying heavily on Russell’s intro, as well. [I like this edition: http://people.umass.edu/klement/tlp/index.html]
How are we to make sense of this sentence “1.13 The facts in logical space are the world”? What is logical space? He certainly doesn’t mean the universe we live and breathe in, because that is not something one would call “logical space”. So the question arises, what is logical space? We know logical space is occupied by beings called “facts”, so that’s a clue, but what are facts?
Here is Russell:
The world consists of facts: facts cannot strictly speaking be defined, but we can explain what we mean by saying that facts are what makes propositions true, or false. Facts may contain parts which are facts or may contain no such parts; for example: “Socrates was a wise Athenian”, consists of the two facts, “Socrates was wise”, and “Socrates was an Athenian.”
Ok, so we have a few more clues. Socrates being wise is a fact. The assertion that he is wise is not a fact, that is what he calls a proposition [=simple declarative sentence]. The assertion that “Socrates is wise” is a true assertion because of the fact that Socrates was indeed wise.
Now the truth of Socrates being wise doesn’t live in the same universe as Socrates lived in. Socrates lived in a concrete physical world, and “truth” is not a concrete physical thing. So Witt decided to call the world where truth lives “logical space”. In this world there live truths, or facts. Truths, or facts are abstract, inanimate thingys which Russell tells us are undefined terms. All we know about them is that if the “truth” we shall call Socrates’ wisdom is alive in logical space, then the human being Socrates was a wise man, and the proposition or assertion that "Socrates is wise’ is a true assertion.
He now decides to call the set of all facts, or truths, by the curious name, "the world’. It should be clear by now that this “world” is not the world we live in.
Notice, also, that even if the concrete Universe we live and breathe in contained no humans or even living creatures at all, there would still be a concrete Universe, and there would also “exist” in some sense this “logical space” where facts or truths reside, [to the extent that an abstract theoretical thing exists at all].
However, if there were no living creatures or humans, there would be nobody to talk about the concrete Universe, or about “logical space” either, obviously. But there are humans, and they do talk, and sometimes they talk nonsense. Witt’s goal is to weed out one kind of talk that he considers nonsense. So he dives into a discussion of language. He says [2.1] that in some sense a language is a picture, or a model, of the facts.
OK, with all this background, we see the answer to Clayton’s q.Here’s what Clayton asked:
Ah, it’s 2.1 where he starts to lose me:
2.1 We make to ourselves pictures of facts.
I thought I knew what he meant by “facts” until I hit this, then it seems that what I was thinking he meant by facts he is describing as “pictures” yet I don’t see any justification for this extra level of complexity either prior to 2.1 or within it.