Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Under the Net" in English language version.
We should pause here perhaps over the work's title, which borrows and interrogates an image from Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Newtonian mechanics, the philosopher says, capture the world through the equivalent of a net, or many nets. The mesh may be fine or coarse, and its holes of different shapes, but it will always be regular, will always bring description 'to a unified form'. 'To the different networks correspond different systems of describing the world.' But, like Jake, we may need to be reminded that our descriptions are not the world, which may slip away, so to speak, under the net. 'Laws, like the law of causation etc, treat of the network and not of what the network describes.'
6.341. Newtonian mechanics, for example, brings the description of the universe to a unified form. Let us imagine a white surface with irregular black spots. We now say: Whatever kind of picture these make I can always get as near as I like to its description, if I cover the surface with a sufficiently fine square network and now say of every square that it is white or black. In this way I shall have brought the description of the surface to a unified form. This form is arbitrary, because I could have applied with equal success a net with a triangular or hexagonal mesh. It can happen that the description would have been simpler with the aid of a triangular mesh; that is to say we might have described the surface more accurately with a triangular, and coarser, than with the finer square mesh, or vice versa, and so on. To the different networks correspond different systems of describing the world. Mechanics determine a form of description by saying: All propositions in the description of the world must be obtained in a given way from a number of given propositions—the mechanical axioms. It thus provides the bricks for building the edifice of science, and says: Whatever building thou wouldst erect, thou shalt construct it in some manner with these bricks and these alone...
We should pause here perhaps over the work's title, which borrows and interrogates an image from Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Newtonian mechanics, the philosopher says, capture the world through the equivalent of a net, or many nets. The mesh may be fine or coarse, and its holes of different shapes, but it will always be regular, will always bring description 'to a unified form'. 'To the different networks correspond different systems of describing the world.' But, like Jake, we may need to be reminded that our descriptions are not the world, which may slip away, so to speak, under the net. 'Laws, like the law of causation etc, treat of the network and not of what the network describes.'
