Preconception

A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably.

Ludwig Wittgenstein • Philosophical Investigations §115

“But this is how it is — — —,” I say to myself over and over again. . . . One thinks that one is tracing nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein • Philosophical Investigations §§113–14