A. C. Grayling

WITTGENSTEIN

A Very Short Introduction

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Preface

In this brief account of Wit genstein I aim to do two things. The first is to make

clear, for a non-specialist readership, the main outline of Wit genstein's thought.

The second is to describe the place of his thought in twentieth-century analytic

philosophy.

Neither of these aims is easy to fulfil in the confines of a short book. There are

a number of reasons for this. The main one is that Wit genstein's writings are

numerous, complicated, and obscure. As a result they invite competing

interpretations, and have received many. Ful justice to Wit genstein would

require a detailed and therefore lengthy examination of his own writings, together

with some account of the voluminous literature which has grown around his

work. Nothing of the kind can be of ered here. My aims, therefore, are modestly

conceived. By 'outline( I mean just that; and I assume no prior knowledge of

philosophy on the reader's part.

Fol owers of Wit genstein argue that it is a mistake to at empt short introductory

sketches of his views. One of Wit genstein's chief disciples, Norman Malcolm,

has writ en: 'An at empt to summarise [Wit genstein's work] would be neither

successful nor useful. Wit genstein compressed his thoughts to the point where

further compression is impossible. What is needed is that they be unfolded and

the connections between them traced out.( Wit genstein's fol owers

vi

add as a further reason the fact that summaries of philosophical views tend

natural y to take the form of a systematic account, in the sense of an orderly

set ing-out of theses point by point, whereas Wit genstein in his later philosophy

expressed an aversion to systematic philosophizing and refused to engage in it.

Therefore, brief sketches of Wit genstein's views, his fol owers say, seriously

misrepresent not just their content but their intention.

I am not convinced by these points. Wit genstein's writings seem to me not only

summarizable but in positive need of summary, especial y now that they run to a

large number of posthumously published volumes containing much overlap and

repetition. Nor is it true that Wit genstein's writings contain no systematical y

expressible theories, for indeed they do. It is the dif erence between what

Wit genstein says and the way he says it that is relevant here; the fact that his

later writings are unsystematic in style does not mean that they are unsystematic

in content. In both his $early% and $late% work, Wit genstein puts forward certain

key theses, with relations of logical dependence between them, which can be

discerned, stated, and explained just as with any philosophical theory. This &

briefly and in an introductory way & is what I set out to do here.

The wide latitude for competing interpretations of Wit genstein nevertheless

creates problems. Every commentator tries to give as accurate an account as he

can, only to find himself charged with distorting Wit genstein's views by those

who have a dif erent response to them. This might, dismayingly, seem to

suggest that there wil never be a consensus about what Wit genstein meant. I

do not, however, think such pessimism war anted, for it seems to me that the

literature on Wit genstein already contains substantial agreement about which

themes are most central to his work. This is not to deny that dif iculties remain;

but it does mean that one can identify with some confidence the aspects of

Wit genstein's work which should be discussed in an introduction like this. Like

anyone writing about Wit genstein, however,

vi i

I must, to be properly cautious, add that the views I atribute to him are what I interpret those views to be; the qualification as I read him, Wit genstein means

should therefore be understood throughout.

The second of the two aims mentioned above is less dif icult to at ain. It is to

situate Wit genstein's work in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. This is a

nar ow aim, for it is not at al the same thing as situating his work in twentieth-

century thought in general. To relate Wit genstein's ideas to cur ents in literature

and art, or to speculate whether, say, his early work is modernist and his late

work postmodernist, or to search for the wel springs of his philosophy in the

intel ectual ferment of pre-1914 Vienna ( this is not the task I set myself in what

fol ows. Such a task would be interesting and in many ways valuable, but here I

fasten upon what is immediately relevant only. Wit genstein's work, considered

strictly in its philosophical aspects, is in general taken to belong to the

mainstream of recent and contemporary analytic philosophy. It is in this set ing

that I discuss it.

It should, however, be mentioned that Wit genstein's name, and occasional y one

or other of his ideas, also appears in writings on anthropology, theology, literary

theory, and other subjects. Philosophers in continental Europe, whose recent

traditions of thought are rather dif erent from those in the English-speaking

analytic tradition, have likewise come to pay at ention to Wit genstein's work. A

detailed study might take these wider considerations into account. But here, as

remarked, I concentrate on Wit genstein's thought in its primary set ing. Judging

whether any value at aches to the use made of it in these other spheres in any

case depends on first understanding the ideas themselves. Nevertheless, here

and there I point out connections with other fields; this happens mainly in

discussion of Wit genstein's later views.

Exposition and explanation take more room than criticism in what fol ows. This is

because space is limited and my primary task is to make

ix

the main aspects of Witgenstein's thought accessible to nonphilosophers. It is, however, part of such a proceeding to indicate what critical responses have been

evoked by a thinker's views, and to provide some indication of the degree to

which those views are persuasive or otherwise, and why. Accordingly, I make

some brief and untechnical forays in this direction.

In discussing the relation between Wit genstein's work and other twentieth-

century analytic philosophy I of er minor revisions to the standard view, my

suggestion being that Wit genstein's place in recent philosophy in terms of his

actual ef ect upon its content and direction is not quite what it is usual y said to

be.

Introductory books should encourage their readers to investigate at first hand the

subjects with which they deal. In some cases, however, it is simply too ambitious

to expect non-specialist readers to do this without first acquiring a substantial

minimum of background knowledge. Wit genstein is such a case. Despite claims

by his fol owers to the contrary, he is very much a philosopher's philosopher. His

writings, like those of Aristotle, Kant, and certain others, cannot be read with

profit by someone who does not have at least a modest grounding in philosophy,

for their point would be whol y obscure to someone who did not recognize what

was being argued for and against. Since this account assumes no philosophical

training on the reader's part, I have tried to make it self-contained; the aim is to

give a sketch of Wit genstein's thought which wil be informative even to

someone who is not, and does not intend to become, a student of philosophy in

any systematic sense. Nevertheless, if what fol ows succeeds in prompting some

of its readers to tackle Wit genstein's own writings, and to do so with greater

understanding, that wil be a major gain.

My thanks go to Anthony Kenny, Anthony Quinton, Jim Hopkins, Dan Rashid,

Henry Hardy, and Keith Thomas for reading the entire manuscript and making

valuable comments and criticisms; and to

x

Carolyn Wilde and Norman Malcolm for helpful discussion of certain points in the Investigations. The usual constraints and exigencies dictated the outcome, but

these advisers ameliorated it, and I am grateful to them.

This is dedicated to Jenny !Invenio sine vertice aquas, sine murmure euntes,

perspicuas ad humurn."

xi

Contents

Note on references xiv

List of il ustrations xv

1 Life and character 1

2 The early philosophy 16

3 The later philosophy 73

4 Wit genstein and recent philosophy 126

Further reading 135

Index 139

xi i

Note on references

The most frequent references to Witgenstein's works are efected by the

fol owing abbreviations:

B The Blue and Brown Books

C On Certainty

P Philosophical Investigations

R Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics

T Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus

Z Zet el

Numbers folowing these abbreviations refer to paragraphs, except in the case of

B, for which page numbers are given. Al other references are explained in the

section on further reading.

xiv

List of illustrations

1. Wit genstein and his family 3

4. Wit genstein's truth tables 32

Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge

From Protractatus, an early version of

2. Wit genstein kite-flying 5

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by

Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge

Wittgenstein

3. Wit genstein in Swansea 13

5. Wit genstein near the end of

Photo: Ben Richards. Wittgenstein

his life 74

Archive, Cambridge

Professor K. E. Tranøj. Wittgenstein

Archive, Cambridge

xv

Chapter 1

Life and character

Ludwig Wit genstein was a philosopher. Philosophy in the twentieth century has

become a pursuit for specialists, and accordingly most philosophers who have

recently acquired reputations are famous only among their fel ows. Wit genstein,

however, is famous far beyond the boundaries of philosophy. Among non-

philosophers his name is mentioned surprisingly often and in a surprising variety

of connections. It seems that by many he is regarded as quintessential y

representative of twentieth-century philosophy, as if he exemplifies ! not just in

his work but in his personality ! what philosophy itself is like: dif icult and

profound. Perhaps for this reason his writings are plundered for aphorisms. They

lend themselves to that treatment because of their style and structure, and

because they seem to distil something of wisdom.

The layman's estimation of Wit genstein derives from the fact that many

contemporary philosophers think he is the twentieth century's greatest thinker.

Whether or not that is true remains for history to decide; the judgement of peers

is not infal ible. Whatever the decision is, however, it wil not alter the fact that

Wit genstein's life and thought were, at the very least, extraordinary.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wit genstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, the

youngest in a family of eight children. His father was an industrialist,

1

and one of the richest men in Austria; the Witgensteins' home was a centre of Viennese social and cultural life.

Wealth and culture had characterized both sides of Wit genstein's family for

several generations. His paternal grandfather was a wealthy Jewish wool-

merchant from Hesse who had converted to Protestant Christianity and mar ied

the daughter of a Viennese banker. Soon afterwards he transfer ed his business

headquarters to Vienna, where he and his wife established themselves as

patrons of the arts. They gave their son Karl, Ludwig Wit genstein's father, an

expensive classical education, but Karl rebel ed and at the age of 17 ran away to

America, where for two years he lived by working as a waiter and giving violin

and German lessons. On his return to Vienna he studied engineering. Within

decades he had added a fortune to his inheritance by successful involvement in

the iron and steel industry, establishing himself as one of the foremost

industrialists of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was able to retire in his early

fifties, and devoted part of his time thereafter to publishing articles on economics

in the Viennese press.

It was Wit genstein's mother Leopoldine who did most to encourage the family's

cultural and musical activities. She too was a banker's daughter, with

connections among the Styrian landed gentry. Her musical interests were

particularly strong. At her invitation Brahms and Mahler were regular visitors to

the house, and with her encouragement Wit genstein's brother Paul became a

concert pianist. Ravel and Strauss were among those who wrote one-handed

concertos for Paul after his loss of an arm in the 1914618 war. Wit genstein

himself was gifted with a fine musical sensibility. In adult life he taught himself to

play the clarinet, but his most striking musical talent was the ability to whistle

entire scores from memory.

Leopoldine Wit genstein was a Roman Catholic and Wit genstein was therefore

brought up in that persuasion. Religion remained a powerful theme throughout

his life; on several occasions he seriously

2

3

contemplated becoming a monk. His religious sentiments were unorthodox,

however, and he kept their exact nature a secret. Hints of them appear in his

writings.

Perhaps because of his own experiences Karl Wit genstein's views on education

were idiosyncratic. He had al his children taught at home, to a cur iculum of his

own devising, until they were 14 years old. The plan was not a success. When

the time came for Wit genstein to at end school he could not get into a

Gymnasium (the equivalent of a grammar school) or even a Realschule (the

equivalent of a secondary modern) in Vienna, because he had not at ained the

required standard. Eventual y he passed the entrance examinations for a

provincial Realschule, in Linz, where his exact contemporary Adolf Hitler was

also a pupil. He spent three unhappy years there, leaving in 1906 without the

qualifications for university entrance. This was a setback because he had

conceived an ambition to study physics with Boltzmann in Vienna. However, he

had always shown an aptitude for engineering, his father's profession; it is said

that he demonstrated this in childhood by constructing a working model of a

sewing-machine. His parents accordingly sent him to a technical col ege in

Berlin-Charlot enburg.

Wit genstein was not happy there either and left after three terms. He had,

however, developed an interest in aeronautical engineering, then the newest

branch of his prospective profession. He went to England in 1908 and spent the

summer flying experimental kites at the Upper Atmosphere Research Station

near Glossop in Derbyshire. In the autumn he entered as a student of

aeronautical engineering at Manchester University.

Wit genstein remained on the register at Manchester for two years, although for

most of that time he was in Europe. By the end of his stay he was working on

the design of a propel er with jet-reaction nozzles at the tips of its blades. He

became intrigued by the mathematics of the design, then by mathematics itself,

and final y by philosophical

4

5

questions about the foundations of mathematics. He asked acquaintances what

he could read on this subject, and was directed to Bertrand Russel 's Principles

of Mathematics. The impact of this book on Wit genstein was great. Hitherto his

philosophical reading had been limited; he had read some of Schopenhauer's

work but lit le besides. Russel 's book introduced him to the latest developments

in logic and philosophy, developments for which Russel himself and Got lob

Frege were responsible. Wit genstein was excited by these ideas and decided to

study them. In 1911 he contacted Frege at Jena University to show him an

essay he had writ en and to seek his guidance. Frege advised him to study with

Russel at Cambridge. Early in 1912, accordingly, Wit genstein ar ived in

Cambridge and registered as a student.

Wit genstein spent a mere five terms at Cambridge. Nevertheless it was an

immensely formative time for him. He discussed logic and philosophy with

Russel , who in a let er writ en at the time said of him 0[he is] the ablest person I

have come across since Moore4. The relationship between Wit genstein and

Russel quickly ceased to be that of pupil and teacher, and although

Wit genstein's friend David Pinsent remarked in his diary 0it is obvious that

Wit genstein is one of Russel 's disciples and owes enormously to him4, the

influence was not al onesided, as we shal later see.

Travel interested Wit genstein greatly. In 1913, with Pinsent, he visited first

Iceland and then Norway. He was at racted by Norway and returned later in

1913 on his own. In a remote corner of a farm near Skjolden he built himself a

hut, and remained there, apart from a short visit to Vienna for Christmas, until

the summer of 1914. He devoted his time to research in logic. G. E. Moore came

on a visit, and while there, took notes of some of Wit genstein's work. This work

represented the earliest phase of progress towards Wit genstein's first book, the

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

When war broke out in 1914 Wit genstein was at home in Vienna.

6

Within a few days he had enlisted in the Imperial Army. For most of the next two years he served as a mechanic with an artil ery workshop unit on the Eastern

Front, first in Cracow and then near Lwow. In 1916 he was sent to Olmütz for

of icer training. While there he met Paul Engelmann, and they discussed religion

together; Engelmann subsequently published a record of their friendship which

shows how much significance religious questions had for Wit genstein at that

time.

Wit genstein rejoined his regiment in 1917 and served as an artil ery observer.

Early in 1918 he was posted to a mountain artil ery regiment in the Tyrol on the

southern front. When in November the AustroHungarian war ef ort col apsed,

most of the Imperial Army in the south, Wit genstein included, was taken into

captivity by the Italians. Wit genstein remained a prisoner near Monte Cassino

until the later part of 1919.

The war had a significant ef ect on Wit genstein in at least two ways. One was

that it caused in him a profound change of personal outlook, particularly in

connection with possessions and manner of life. Before the war he had been left

a substantial fortune by his father. Prior to that he had lived as one might expect

a generous mil ionaire's son to live. For example, it is reported that when one

day he missed a train from Manchester to Liverpool he promptly set about trying

to hire a private train, at that time something one could do if rich enough. Again,

Pinsent records that on their trip to Iceland (for which Wit genstein paid) they

travel ed so royal y and with such a long train of at endants that they at racted

the sardonic notice of other tourists. And it seems that before the war

Wit genstein was scrupulous in his choice of neckties. Al this changed.

Wit genstein gave the whole of his fortune to his siblings 6 he took the view that

since they were already rich more money would not cor upt them 6 and

thenceforth lived with complete simplicity and lack of ornament, among other

things rarely, if ever again, wearing a necktie.

7

The reasons for the change are not wholy clear. Possibly they relate to the fact that on the eastern front, at some time during the first half of 1915, Wit genstein

acquired and read Tolstoy's account of the Gospels, The Gospels in Brief, and

was profoundly moved by it. (It seems that later, when he read the Gospels

themselves and found them to be somewhat dif erent, he had to be persuaded of

their superiority over the Tolstoy version.) Also it may have been that the

austerity and simplicity of army life proved congenial to him; he had shown

traces of ascetic inclination before the war, as his Norwegian solitude suggests,

and the experience of army ways may have confirmed that predilection. In any

case, Wit genstein's let ers and recorded conversations show that he had a dark

sense of what he took to be his own sinfulness, perhaps because of his

homosexuality, and in consequence he was given to selfmortification. Whatever

the reasons, when Wit genstein left the prisoner-of-war camp in 1919 he had

recognizably become the unusual, even eccentric, often prickly individual whose

later years are so wel described by the chief memoirists.

The second mat er of significance was that when Wit genstein was taken

prisoner, he had in his big knapsack the manuscript of his book, the Logische-

Philosophische Abhandlung, known to its English-language readers as the

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (a name suggested for it by Moore in imitation of

Spinoza's Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus). Wit genstein had been working on it

throughout the war years, and it came to completion in the Monte Cassino camp,

where by good fortune he met someone interested in logic with whom he could

discuss his ideas.

During the early part of 1919, Wit genstein managed to send let ers to Russel

from Italy, tel ing him of the Tractatus's existence and even, through the

influence of John Maynard Keynes, get ing a copy of the manuscript to him. After

his release Wit genstein made a number of at empts to have the book published,

al unsuccessful. In despair he left the mat er to Russel , who eventual y

ar anged publication by agreeing

8

to contribute an introduction. The Tractatus appeared in German in 1921 and in English translation in 1922. When Wit genstein saw Russel 's introduction he was

angry, complaining that even though he and Russel had discussed the book line

by line at a meeting in Hol and in late 1919, Russel had misunderstood his

views and misrepresented them.

The Tractatus was the only philosophical book Wit genstein published in his

lifetime. When it was finished he thought he had solved al the problems of

philosophy, and consistently with that view gave up philosophical work and

turned his at ention elsewhere. He had decided while imprisoned to become a

schoolteacher, and quickly put this decision into ef ect. He took a one-year

course in primary school teaching, graduating in July 1920. That autumn he

commenced as schoolmaster in Trat enbach, a vil age in the hil s south of

Vienna. He spent two increasingly unhappy years there before transfer ing to

Puchberg-am-Schneeberg. Here, as at his first post, friction arose between

Wit genstein and some of the parents of his pupils, and within two years he

transfer ed again, this time to Ot erthal. While there he wrote and published a

pronouncing dictionary for use in primary schools. Yet again trouble arose with

parents; it seems that Wit genstein's temper and the al eged severity of his

disciplinary methods caused complaints. In April 1926, before of icial action could

be taken over the complaints, Wit genstein resigned and returned to Vienna.

The failure of his schoolmastering career depressed Wit genstein intensely. He

took a job as a gardener at a monastery in Hüt eldorf outside Vienna, and for the

third time contemplated becoming a monk (the first was just before the Great

War, the second after his release from prison camp). He went so far as to make

enquiries about joining an order; at the interview he was advised that his motives

for wishing to become a monk were inappropriate ones, and that he would not

find in monastic life what he sought.

9

From this despairing state Witgenstein was rescued by two developments. One

was that he became increasingly involved in the design and construction of a

house for one of his sisters. At first he worked in col aboration with the architect,

who was his friend Paul Engelmann, but soon assumed ful control. Every detail

of the house received his painstaking at ention; heating radiators, for example,

had to be exactly positioned in order not to disturb the symmetry of the rooms.

From some the house has evoked high praise; in the opinion of G. H. von Wright

it has the same $static beauty% as the Tractatus. It is a building in an ornamented

modern style, influenced by the work of Adolf Loos whom Wit genstein admired.

The excursion into house building did much to restore Wit genstein after his

dif iculties, and it disposed him favourably to the second development, which

was that philosophers at Vienna University contacted him and invited him to

have discussions. Wit genstein agreed, and in consequence began slowly to

resume philosophical work. He had in fact been in touch with philosophy during

his schoolmastering years through the medium of a young English philosopher,

F. P. Ramsey, who had assisted in making the English translation of the

Tractatus, and who visited Wit genstein in Austria on a number of occasions. But

although Wit genstein discussed the Tractatus with Ramsey in some detail he

could not be persuaded by him to take up philosophy again. Now, however, he

was sought out by Moritz Schlick, professor at Vienna University and founder of

the $Vienna Circle%, an active group of philosophers and scientists who worked

closely together from 1925 onwards. Schlick did not succeed in drawing

Wit genstein into the Circle itself, but he and various of his col eagues met

Wit genstein on an occasional basis. As Wit genstein's philosophical interests

revived he saw that his Tractatus did not, after al , solve the problems of

philosophy. This was the stimulus to the development of his second and in many

ways quite dif erent phase of philosophical work.

10

An important result of Witgenstein's contacts with Schlick and others of the Circle was his return to Cambridge in 1929. He had discovered that he could

submit the Tractatus for the degree of Ph.D. after one further year's residence.

He duly registered, with Ramsey as his supervisor and Russel and Moore as his

examiners. Moore, who with others of the older generation disliked the Ph.D.

degree, then a new import from the United States, is said to have writ en in his

examiner's report: *The Tractatus is a work of genius, but it otherwise satisfies

the requirements for a Ph.D.- After the award of his degree, Wit genstein set

about securing a position at Cambridge. He applied for a five-year Fel owship at

Trinity Col ege, and with Russel 's generous help, given in a report to the col ege

on Wit genstein's research proposals, was awarded it in 1930. He now entered

upon his most fertile and productive philosophical phase, in which he wrote

copiously.

When his Fel owship was drawing to a close, Wit genstein decided to emigrate to

the Soviet Union, then enjoying a certain vogue in Cambridge circles. As a

passionate admirer of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky he had in any case long

nourished an admiration for Russia. Accordingly he learned Russian and in 1935

visited the USSR with a friend. It is not clear why he reversed his decision to

set le there, but after a year in his hut in Norway, he returned to Cambridge and

in 1939 succeeded Moore as Professor of Philosophy. Before he could begin his

professorial duties war broke out. Until 1944 Wit genstein worked as a porter first

at Guy's Hospital in London and then at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle

upon Tyne. He had taken British nationality and was therefore not subject to

internment.

In the two academic years 1945/46 and 1946/47 Wit genstein lectured in

Cambridge. Life as a don was highly distasteful to him, particularly in its detail;

he found, for example, High Table conversation so disagreeable that he avoided

dining there. At the end of 1947 he resigned his Chair and went to Ireland, living

for part of the time in a cabin on the Galway coast, and later in a Dublin hotel.

Here he

11

completed the major work of his later philosophy, the Philosophical

Investigations. His health was poor; after a short visit to the United States in

1949 he discovered that he had cancer. From then until his death in 1951 he

lived with various friends in Oxford and Cambridge. He continued to make notes

of his philosophical ideas, whenever his health permit ed, until close to the end.

There are vivid portraits of Wit genstein in memoirs and reminiscences. Most of

these were writ en by people much influenced by Wit genstein, and consequently

do not of er impartial views of him. Nevertheless, when taken together with the

few more objective depictions that exist, and Wit genstein's own let ers, they

provide a dramatic picture of the man and his character. In them Wit genstein

appears as a powerful, restless, dominant individual, an intense and complicated

man, to whom people responded either with adulation or aversion. The chief

memoirists came to know Wit genstein when they were young students and he

was nearing fifty years of age, which may in part explain their hero-worship.

They describe him as about five feet, six inches tal , with a transfixing gaze and

a fierce, uncompromising manner. Almost everyone who has left a record of

encounters with Wit genstein comments on the power of his personality, and

mentions the way people fel under his spel as if mesmerized by the intensity of

his expression and the striking gestures he made when discoursing.

Wit genstein taught by thinking aloud before a group of students in his rooms at

Trinity. They knew him to be famous because of the Tractatus, yet during those

seminars he was repudiating many of that book's central tenets and working out

a series of new philosophical ideas in their place. They therefore felt they were

witnesses to something important. And not just important but dramatic; it was

Wit genstein's style of teaching to struggle with his problems before them, at

times crying out 1I'm stupid today!3 and at other times sit ing in intense, prolonged

silences. Remarks from students, if they did not meet his

12

13

approval, evoked crushing replies. The ordeal of Witgenstein's classes did not suit everyone's taste, but so profound an impression did they leave on some that

they were unable to think of philosophy in any but Wit genstein's way thereafter.

The picture of Wit genstein which has him seated in a deckchair in his sparsely

furnished Trinity rooms, conducting his classes in the manner just described, is

in a way an unrepresentative one, for Wit genstein spent only a smal part of his

life teaching in Cambridge. He was, in truth, a nomad, a rootless wanderer,

trailing from one country to another and one place to another, varying longer

stays with many restless shorter travels, living alone except when visiting or

journeying with friends. His sojourns in one place rarely lasted more than a few

years. This was paral eled by the number of dif erent occupations which

circumstance or his own choice led him to take up: student, soldier, primary

school teacher, gardener, architect, gypsy, don " none of which appears to have

given him satisfaction. His was therefore a fragmented and displaced life, and, it

seems, not often or for long a happy one.

To some people Wit genstein showed kindness. Before the 1914"18 war he

made an anonymous and generous gift of money to two poets. He was capable

of close friendships, and although he was fiercely demanding as a friend, most

of those who had this relation to him became deeply at ached and loyal. He had

some particularly close relationships with several of his pupils. To others,

however, Wit genstein could be cruel and dismissive. Some memoirists " those

who were not disciples " speak of him as capable of ar ogance, intolerance, and

rudeness. He caused anxiety among the families of some of his pupils because

of the strength of his sway over them. He always sought to discourage people

from pursuing academic careers; several gifted pupils abandoned philosophy at

his insistence, one of them " to Wit genstein's satisfaction " spending the rest of his life employed in a canning factory.

14

One neglected consideration which may go towards an understanding both of

Wit genstein's character and of his philosophy is the nature of his formal

education. The sketch given of it above shows that after being taught at home

under his father's eccentric regime he had three years at school fol owed by

short stays at various institutions, ranging from a Berlin technical col ege to

Cambridge University. Apart from his teacher's certificate, Wit genstein's only

academic qualification was the Cambridge Ph.D., gained at the age of forty. He

was by no means a scholar; he did not study the classic philosophers careful y

(most of them he did not study at al ) and he actively discouraged his students

from doing so.

In contrast to this scat ered and piecemeal education, there is the fact that

Wit genstein's early years were spent in a highly cultured home. In addition to

musical interests he acquired several languages, and later added others,

including Latin, Norwegian, and Russian. Undoubtedly, he took an interest as a

young man in the flourishing intel ectual life of Vienna. An indication of this is

that he read some of Schopenhauer's philosophy, then fashionable among

Viennese intel ectuals and artists (one of Mahler's gifts to the young Bruno

Walter was a complete set of Schopenhauer's works). This mixture, with on the

one hand Wit genstein's fragmentary formal education and on the other his

cultured and patrician home background, may in some part explain the unusual

character of his mind and interests. Perhaps unorthodox educations foster

originality; or it may be that native originality is stifled by too much formal

schooling. Whatever the case, Wit genstein was not the product of a typical

education, and the character of his work bears testimony to that fact. It gives him

another distinction: he may wel be the last considerable figure in philosophy not

to have fol owed a strict and orthodox academic regime as a condition of being

taken seriously by the philosophical community.

15

Chapter 2

The early philosophy

In this chapter I discuss Wit genstein's early philosophical work, the Tractatus

Logico-Philosophicus. An appreciation of the main doctrines of this book makes

Wit genstein's later philosophy much easier to understand. Sections 2 and 3 are

devoted to the Tractatus itself. Section I contains an explanation of several

background mat ers which help to make the Tractatus more intel igible. The

chapter ends with some remarks on the influence of Wit genstein's early work on

other philosophers (section 4).

The scene-set ing in section 1, although intended to be a general preparation for

discussion of the Tractatus, is particularly addressed to those who are quite new

to philosophy. It contains an account of certain technical conceptions in logic and

philosophy which play an important part in Wit genstein's early thought. I have

set these out in a straightforward way.

Aims and background

Wit genstein's aim in the Tractatus is stated in its preface. It is to show that the

problems of philosophy can be solved by coming to a proper understanding of

how language works. He puts this by saying that we shal solve the problems of

philosophy when we understand *the logic of our language+ (T, pp. 3,4). This,

indeed, is the dominating thought in al

16

Witgenstein's philosophy, and it represents what is continuous between its

earlier and later phases. As we shal see, however, Wit genstein's views about

the logic of language dif er markedly in these two phases, with the later taking

as its basis a repudiation of some of the earlier phase's most central themes.

There are two aspects to Wit genstein's aim as just stated. His objective is to

solve the problems of philosophy, and he intends to do so by showing how

language works. Why an understanding of language should solve the problems

of philosophy is what the Tractatus sets out to demonstrate " as does, in its

dif erent way, his later philosophy also. We turn to that demonstration shortly.

First, it is necessary to see what is meant by the phrase the problems of

philosophy.

One can describe philosophy as the at empt to make clear, and if possible to

answer, a range of fundamental and puzzling questions which arise when, in a

general and inclusive way, we try to understand ourselves and the universe we

inhabit. Among many other things these questions concern existence and reality,

knowledge and belief, reason and reasoning, truth, meaning, and value both

ethical and aesthetic. The questions themselves are of the form: What is reality?

What kinds of things ultimately exist? What is knowledge, and how do we come

by it? How can we be sure that our claims to knowledge are not in some

systematic way mistaken? What are the canons of cor ect reasoning? What is

moral y the right way to live and act, and why?

Philosophical problems are not problems that can be solved by empirical means

" by looking through a telescope or microscope, or by conducting experiments in

a laboratory. They are conceptual and logical problems, requiring conceptual and

logical investigation. Over the mil ennia a great investment of genius has been

brought to the task of clarifying and answering the questions of philosophy.

Some philosophers have at empted to construct explanatory theories,

occasional y very elaborate and ambitious in scope; others have tried to

17

clarify and resolve particular questions by painstaking analysis and criticism.

Almost al those who have contributed to philosophy throughout its history have

agreed that the mat ers mentioned above existence, knowledge, truth, value

are deeply important; and it is upon this consensus that the philosophical debate,

which has gone on at least since classical antiquity, has been based.

Wit genstein runs against this cur ent. His view is that the proper task of

philosophy is not one of engagement with the issues mentioned, for in his

opinion they involve il usory problems which arise as a result of

misunderstandings about language. The proper task of philosophy, he says, is to

make the nature of our thought and talk clear, for then the traditional problems of

philosophy wil be recognized as spurious and wil accordingly vanish.

Wit genstein's work both his early work as embodied in the Tractatus and his

later work is dedicated to solving the traditional problems of philosophy in this

way.

What is fundamental to the Tractatus is the thought that language has an

underlying logical structure, an understanding of which shows the limits of what

can clearly and meaningful y be said. The importance of this, in Wit genstein's

view, is that what can be said is the same as what can be thought; so that once

one has grasped the nature of language, and therefore of what can clearly and

significantly be thought, one has shown the limit beyond which language and

thought become nonsense. It is in this realm, beyond the boundaries of sense,

where in Wit genstein's opinion traditional philosophical problems arise, and

where their arising is precisely the result of our trying to say what is unsayable

the same, in his view, as trying to think the unthinkable. He puts this point at

both the beginning and the end of the Tractatus in the now famous assertion that

%what can be said at al can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about, we

must consign to silence& (T, p. 3 and cf. T 7). Wit genstein gives the claim ful er

expression in a let er to Russel : %The main point [of the Tractatus] is the theory

of what can be expressed by propositions i.e. by language (and, which

comes to the

18

same thing, what can be thought), and what cannot be expressed by

propositions, but only shown; which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of

philosophy.

The issue of these claims for Wit genstein is that the proper task of philosophy is

!to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science "

i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy " and then, whenever

someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that

he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions (T 6.53). But

this negative result is not the whole story, for in Wit genstein's view such mat ers

as ethics and aesthetics, religion, and the !problems of life (T 6.52) are not

themselves ruled out as nonsensical; it is only the at empt to say anything about

them which is so: !There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They

make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical (T 6.522). Here !showing

rather than !saying is al that is possible. Sometimes Wit genstein speaks of the

!more important unwrit en second half of the Tractatus, meaning by this that the

truly significant issues are identified by what the Tractatus does not say, for the

Tractatus shows from within the limits of language what is important. In another

let er he says !For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book /

Al of what many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining

silent about it.

The task Wit genstein sets himself in the Tractatus is therefore to explain, with a

view to establishing the foregoing points, how language works. More specifical y,

his task is to reveal the nature of language and its relation to the world, which in

ef ect amounts to explaining how meaning at aches to the propositions we

assert. Accordingly, he devotes the major part of his at ention in the Tractatus to

describing what propositions are and in what their meaning consists. And this,

for Wit genstein, is as we have seen the same as identifying the limits of

thought; since the limits of language and thought are the same, an investigation

of the former constitutes an investigation of the lat er.

19

This feature of Witgenstein's project must be borne in mind throughout, for it is central.

Both Wit genstein's aim and the way he at empts to at ain it cannot be

understood properly unless one knows something of the philosophical

background to his work. This background consists in developments in logic and

philosophy, many of them owing to the writings of Frege and Russel , which had

appeared in the decades before the Tractatus was published, and which

Wit genstein had learned from Russel while studying with him at Cambridge. I

shal therefore begin by set ing out its relevant features.

One mat er it is convenient to deal with first concerns the notion of a proposition

in philosophy, for talk of propositions occurs often in what fol ows. Leaving aside

certain complications, we can say that a proposition is something asserted or

proposed for acceptance as true, for example, &the table is brown', &this book is

about Wit genstein', &it is raining'. But propositions are not to be confused with

the sentences used to express them. A sentence is a grammaticaly wel -formed

string of words in any language, writ en or spoken by someone at a certain time

and place. A sentence has only to obey the grammatical rules of the language to

which it belongs in order to be a sentence; it does not have in addition to be

&meaningful' + strings of words like &green ideas sleep furiously' qualify as

sentences despite being nonsensical. A proposition, on the other hand, is what is

asserted when a sentence (more accurately, a declarative sentence) is

meaningful y and non-idly used, and therefore propositions and sentences are

quite dif erent things. This dif erence can best be grasped by noting that dif erent

sentences, ut ered or inscribed by dif erent people at dif erent times and places,

may al say the same thing, that is, express the same proposition; and that the

same sentence, used on the same or dif erent occasions by dif erent people,

may say dif erent things, that is, express dif erent propositions. Here are some

examples: the sentences &it is raining', &il pleut', &es regnet', and &xia yu' drawn respectively from English, French, German,

20

and Chinese, al express the same proposition, namely that it is raining. This il ustrates the first case. Conversely, when I say, I have a headache, and you

say, I have a headache, two dif erent things are being said (two dif erent

propositions expressed) by dif erent uses of the same sentence. This il ustrates

the second case.

Some philosophers have suggested that we should think of a proposition as the

thought conveyed by a use of a sentence (or a set of synonymous sentences,

whether in the same or dif erent languages). Some, again, have talked of

propositions as the meaning of sentences, or as the objects which lie before the

mind when one knows, believes, remembers, or hopes that something is the

case. For example, if Jack believes that Jil loves Jim, then on this view the

object of Jack's act of believing is the proposition Jil loves Jim. These

proposals are not exclusive of one another; propositions might be al of these

things at once. These mat ers need not detain us now ( further and other

considerations about the nature of propositions appear later, and for the present

this sketch wil suf ice. What it is important to note now is that in Wit genstein's

theory a proposition is the ut ered or writ en expression of a thought; our interest

here, accordingly, does not concern particular sentences of English, German, or

Chinese, but the thoughts expressed when those sentences are used.

The important background mat ers relevant to an understanding of the Tractatus

are the developments in philosophy which resulted, as mentioned above, from

work by Frege and Russel . A fruitful way to begin an account of these

developments is to look at a problem dealt with by Russel in a celebrated piece

of logical analysis.

The problem in question concerns the fact that ordinary language is often

philosophical y misleading ( which is to say, is often misleading as to what we

can legitimately think about the world. The problem can be demonstrated in the

fol owing way. Consider the two propositions (1) the table is brown and (2) the

lateness of his ar ival was annoying.

21

The traditional theory of the structure of propositions treats them as having two components, namely a subject (the table, the lateness of his ar ival) and a

predicate (is brown, was annoying). The subject term refers to something, and

the predicate says of that something that it has a certain property or quality. So

in (1) the property of brownness is asserted of a given table; in (2) the property

of annoyingness is asserted of the lateness of someone's ar ival. Now this way

of thinking about the structure of propositions, and in particular about the work

done by their dif erent parts, leads straight to a dif iculty, which a contrast

between (1) and (2) brings out. Proposition (1) appears to be unproblematic,

because there are indeed tables in the world for the subject term to denote, and

we can assert of any suitable one of them that it is brown, which is what we use

the predicate term to say. But if we apply the same analysis to (2) then, on the

face of it, we seem to be saying that there are latenesses in the world, and this

should give us pause, for although people and things can indeed ar ive or be

late, we clearly do not think the world contains things cal ed latenesses, at the

very least in the same sense as we take it to contain tables. The point therefore

is that the surface forms of sentences in ordinary language can mask important

dif erences between what is real y being said, and therefore thought, in dif erent

cases; and this can, and often does, lead to philosophical problems and

misunderstandings.

Of course, proposition (2) does not present a genuine dif iculty, for we can easily

rear ange it in such a way that apparent reference to latenesses disappears.

We could say he ar ived annoyingly late, for example. And in order to avoid

mistakes in our thinking about the world some such paraphrase is appropriate.

This shows that, from a philosophical point of view, it is sometimes necessary to

take care with ordinary language in order to keep our thought clear, even to the

extent, as in the example just given, of having to recast what we say into a form

which avoids misleading implications. This is particularly so when we consider a

more serious way in which a proposition can be problematic: which is when, this

time, it has what appears to be an

22

unexceptionable subject term, in that, like the table but unlike the lateness of his ar ival, it appears to be a natural and proper expression for occupying the

subject place in propositions, in the sense that it appears to denote some

existing thing, but which nevertheless does not refer to anything. It is to this

more dif icult case that Russel 's famous analysis applies.

Consider the proposition the present king of France is wise. This is perfectly

meaningful, and because it is so it seems natural to ask whether it is true or

false. And to this there seems an equal y natural answer. There is no king of

France at present; the subject term fails to refer to anything. Therefore, it seems

that the proposition should be considered false. But there is a problem here,

concerning how to demonstrate why it is false. This is because if in normal

circumstances we say of something (cal it x) that x is wise, the proposition x is

wise wil be true if x is wise, and false if x is not wise. But what if there is no x?

How can we say of something that does not exist that it either is or is not wise?

Initial y Russel accepted a solution to this puzzle which had been proposed by

the nineteenth-century philosopher Alexius Meinong. This solution was to say

that every expression with a refer ing or denoting function in a sentence does

denote something, either an actual y existing item, as with the table in the table

is brown, or a subsisting item, where by subsistence is meant non-actual

existence / a kind of real but half or courtesy existence. On this view, the

universe contains everything that can be thought or talked about, including the

present king of France; but only some of what the universe contains is actual y

existent. Accordingly the descriptive phrase the present king of France does

indeed denote, and what it denotes is a subsistent / that is a real but non-actual

/ king of France.

Meinong's view is not as extravagant as it seems, for it is based on a

consideration which is both right and important. This is that thought is

23

intentional, that is, is directed towards or focused upon an object, where what is meant by an object is whatever is mentioned when one answers the question

what are you thinking about? Suppose someone asks me this question when I

am thinking about my table, and I therefore reply the table. The table is the

object intended by my thought: it is what my thought is about. Similarly, if I am

thinking about a dryad, the object or intention of my thought is a dryad. In the

first case what I am thinking about, the table, actual y exists in the world; in the

second case, the object of my thought has merely intentional existence, that is,

exists only as an object or intention of a thought. In either case the object

intended by the thought is whatever the thought is about or is directed towards.

So far, there is no dif iculty. But Meinong went further by arguing that since a

dryad can be intended by your thoughts as wel as mine, her existence as an

object of thought is in an important way independent of either of our acts of

thinking about her, and that therefore she has a real existence even although

she is not actual in the sense of being encounterable in the world in the same

way as the table. In Meinong's terminology, in short, the dryad subsists.

Russel could not rest content with this theory for long. The idea of subsisting

entities is obviously dif icult to swal ow, and Russel said of it that it soon came

to of end his vivid sense of reality. One quick way of showing why is to note

that if this theory were right, each of us would have infinite numbers of

subsistent but non-actual brothers and sisters; they, along with al the infinities of

other subsistent entities, together with al the actual y existing ones, would make

for an overcrowded universe indeed. Accordingly Russel set about finding an

analysis of propositions like the present king of France is wise which would

explain their meaningfulness and their falsity without having to invoke a notion of

subsistence. He did so by arguing that names and descriptive phrases occupying

grammatical subject place in sentences are not genuine refer ing expressions at

al , and that therefore sentences which contain them in grammatical subject

place are misleading as to the proper logical form of the propositions they

express. Thus the present

24

king of France is wise should corectly be seen as shorthand for a conjunction of three propositions asserting (1) that there is a king of France, (2) that there is

only one king of France (this takes care of the definite article, the, which implies

uniqueness), and (3) that whatever is king of France is wise. Since (1) is false,

the original proposition is false. Proper names like Henry are to be treated in

the same way, for they can be viewed as disguised descriptions; if we say

Henry is wise we are asserting (1) there is something which is Henry, (2) there

is, in the relevant context, only one such thing, and (3) that thing is wise. If al of

(1)-(3) are true, Henry is wise is true; if either (1) or (3) is false, Henry is wise

is false. What is happening here is that we are analysing the given propositions

into their logical form, represented by the conjunction of (1)-(3) in each case; and

this reveals what we are real y saying (and therefore thinking) in a quite

perspicuous way , a way which, moreover, involves no appeal to subsistent

entities and the like.

Russel 's Theory of Descriptions, as the foregoing analysis is cal ed, il ustrates

something central y important for an understanding of Wit genstein's Tractatus,

namely what is meant by talk of the logical structure or logical form which

underlies ordinary language, investigating which promises to tel us much of

philosophical significance about the nature of language and thought themselves.

And it is, as noted above, just such an investigation which constitutes the chief

task of the Tractatus. Wit genstein much admired Russel 's Theory of

Descriptions, which in his early period he took to be a paradigm of how

philosophical problems should be dealt with. He comments in the Tractatus: Al

philosophy is a 2critique of language3 4 It was Russel who performed the

service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its

real one (T 4.0031).

The concept of logical form involves more than has so far appeared, however, in

particular concerning the nature of the logic in terms of which that underlying

form is to be described. This too is important ,

25

indeed, essential for an understanding of the Tractatus, and accordingly

something must be said about it.

When Russel gave an analysis of the sentence the present king of France is

wise to reveal its logical form, he did not do so by using the three English

sentences numbered (1)-(3) above, for the reason that the risk of misleadingness

which at aches to the original sentence might wel reappear in the analysis

represented by (1)-(3), since (1)-(3) are themselves sentences of ordinary

language. Instead he used the language of logic, which he regarded as the

perfect language because of its precision and clarity. The at raction is obvious; if

one can translate or at least paraphrase sentences of ordinary language into a

whol y perspicuous formal language which reveals exactly what is being said

without risk of misunderstanding, then one can lay bare to one's view the

structure of legitimate thought about the world. Wit genstein later described this

as uncovering the hidden essence of thought. And this project becomes yet

more at ractive when one realizes that there are certain other features of the

perfect language which promise to help us understand the nature of thought.

One such, apart from the notion of logical form already encountered, is that of

truth-functionality. To explain this and other notions requires a brief account of

logic itself, as fol ows. (There are some simple technicalities in the next few

pages; the symbols used wil not reappear elsewhere in what fol ows, although

the ideas associated with them wil, which is why it is important that they be

explained.)

Modern treatments of logic begin with Got lob Frege, whose major works were

writ en in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Until Frege, logic had in

essentials retained the character given to it by Aristotle, who made the first

systematic investigation of the subject two and a half mil ennia ago. Logic was

indeed regarded as a completed science wel into the nineteenth century.

Frege's discoveries and innovations were revolutionary, rendering logic at once

simpler, more powerful, and more extensive than traditional logic. In important

part

26

this was because he invented a symbolic language, based on arithmetic, which enabled him to explore the subject with greater facility and depth than had

hitherto been possible. He cal ed his symbolic language a concept script, and

used it to construct a set of new and fundamental logical notions which are now

central to the subject. Wit genstein's argument in the Tractatus in part turns on

these notions, and develops certain of them in original ways. In order to explain

them I shal not use Frege's concept script but a common variant of the

symbolism invented by Russel and his col aborator A. N. Whitehead in Principia

Mathematica (1910)12). This symbolism has so many advantages over Frege's

pioneering at empts that it now constitutes the basis of standard logical

notations.

The primary concern in logic is to identify and classify valid forms of inference.

The notions of validity, form, and inference are the key ones. They can be

explained in the fol owing way. Consider these two arguments: (1) Either Tom

broke the clock or Har y did. Har y did not break the clock. Therefore Tom did.

(2) Either it rained on Tuesday or on Wednesday. But on Wednesday there was

no rain. Therefore it rained on Tuesday. Each of these arguments has two

premisses from which a conclusion, introduced by therefore, is drawn. The

premisses constitute the grounds for the conclusion. To draw a conclusion from

premisses is to infer it from them. If a conclusion can be infer ed validly from its

premisses, then we say that the premisses entail the conclusion or that the

conclusion fol ows from the premisses.

The briefest inspection shows that (1) and (2) have the same structure or form;

they each say either p or q; not q; therefore p. What the logician is interested in

is the question whether, leaving aside particularities of clocks or the weather,

arguments of this form are such that their conclusions always fol ow from their

premisses. More precisely, his interest is to identify those forms of argument

which are such that if their premisses are true, their conclusions are guaranteed

to be true also.

27

It is important to note that the logician's only interest concerns an argument's form, not the truth or falsity of its premisses and conclusion. When it happens

that the premisses of a given valid argument are in fact true, then such an

argument is said to be not just valid but sound, which is a further mat er. The

distinction between validity and soundness is a significant one, for many

arguments can be valid with respect to their form (formal y valid ) without being

sound, that is, without guaranteeing the truth of their conclusions, as in this case:

(3) either the moon is not made of green cheese or it orbits the earth. But the

moon does not orbit the earth. Therefore it is not made of green cheese. This

argument is valid, but unsound, for its second premiss is false. There are many

other ways in which arguments can be valid but unsound. This is why validity is

explained in terms of an important if : validity is the property an argument has

when its form is such that if the premisses are true, the truth of the conclusion is

guaranteed.

Given that it is validity and not soundness that constitutes the logician's primary

interest, it is unnecessary to take account of particular considerations about

clocks, the weather, the moon, or any other mat er of fact, but only the structure

or form of arguments. This permits a useful simplification; one can use symbols

to stand for propositions, as was done above in il ustrating the form shared by

(1) and (2), (and also (3) . The let ers p , q , and their successors in the

alphabet are standardly employed for this purpose. The let ers so used are of

course not themselves propositions; they are formulae which stand for

propositions in the literal sense that they occupy the places in the argument

where the proposition would occur if we were to write out in ful the sentences

which express them.

The next step is to look at the way propositions can be combined together to

make more complex ones. In (1) the first premiss, either Tom broke the clock or

Har y did , is a complex proposition made up of

28

two simple propositions, Tom broke the clock and Hary broke the clock,

connected by or. The form is p or q. The compound formula p or q is of

course a single formula; it dif ers from the uncompounded or atomic formulae,

namely p taken by itself and q taken by itself, only in being compound.

Compound formulae can themselves be elements of larger compounds. Suppose

we have p or q and another compound formula r or s. Then we can combine

them with or to yield the single formula (p or q) or (r or s), using the brackets

in an intuitive way to keep everything clear. This process of building up more

and more complex formulae can go on indefinitely.

Apart from or there are other connectives of great importance, namely and and

if & then &. These also join atomic formulae together to make compound

formulae. We can write such formulae p and q, if p then q respectively. To

simplify mat ers further, logicians use signs to stand for or, and, and if & then

& thus: the sign v serves for or (it is drawn from the Latin vel, or); the sign

& serves for and; and the ar ow [.ar owright] serves for if & then &. So we write pvq, p&q, p[.ar owright]q respectively.

How these connectives work is the real y important issue, both for an

understanding of logic and an appreciation of Wit genstein's early philosophy.

Indeed, the account now to be given of these connectives is drawn from a

treatment of them suggested by Wit genstein in the Tractatus. The central idea is

that the truth or falsity (for short, the truth-value) of a compound proposition

depends whol y upon the truth-values of its constituent atomic propositions. For

example, the truth value of a proposition symbolized as p&q depends upon the

truth-values of p and of q taken separately. This is expressed by saying that

compound propositions are truth-functions of their component atomic

propositions. A simple table il ustrates what is meant. Under the atomic formulae

p and q we write al the possible combinations of truth-values which they can

have between them, like this:

29

Here T stands for true and F for false. Next we show under what conditions

the compound formula p&q is true. What this asserts is that both p and q are

true. So we add a column under the heading p&q to show that the only case in

which p&q is true is when each of p and q is independently true:

This table, cal ed a truth table, is in ef ect a picture of how & works. The same

can be done for the other connectives. For example, understanding pvq to

mean either p or q or both, we write the truth table as fol ows:

30

This shows that pvq is true if at least one of p or q is true, and false only if

both p and q are false, just as we would expect. The important point is that the

truth-value of the compound formulae p&q, pvq is determined by that is, is a

function of the truth-values of their constituent atomic formulae and the way

these are combined. Accordingly the connectives &, v, [.ar owright] are cal ed

truth-functional connectives, or, more general y truth-functors.

There is another important logical word, namely not, which, although not a

connective (it does not join together propositions or the formulae which

symbolize them), is nevertheless a truth-functor. Logicians use the sign - to

serve for not, and write -p for not p. The way - works is described by its

simple truth table:

When p is true, -p is false; when p is false, -p is true. It fol ows that if a

compound formula, say pvq, is true, then its negation, writ en - (pvq), is false;

and vice versa. Note how the brackets are used to show that the negation sign

applies to the whole formula pvq; if we were to write -pvq we would be saying

something quite dif erent, namely not p, or q.

The let ers and truth-functors are the elements of a language which, together

with certain rules of inference taken as primitive or axiomatic, constitute what is

cal ed the propositional calculus. It al ows logicians to explore the logical

relations between whole propositions in a completely systematic way. The

addition of a few more symbols and rules enables logicians to get inside

propositions, as it were, in order to examine the nature of valid inference when

the internal structure of

31

4. Witgenstein's invention of truth tables, which became standard in logic, in an

early manuscript of the Tractatus.

32

propositions mat ers. For example, a proposition like the table is brown, which

would be represented by, say, p if a logician were concerned only to investigate

its relations to other whole propositions, can be symbolized for these more

detailed purposes as x is F, or, more succinctly, Fx, where x is an individual

variable (stands for individual things) and F is a predicate let er standing in this

case for is brown. Then we get formulae like Fx v Gx, pronounced x is F or x

is G. Note that the truth-functor v continues to function in accordance with its

truth table as demonstrated above.

A final step is to introduce ways of symbolizing propositions like al humans are

mortal and some humans are tal . These contain quantifier expressions, al

and some, indicating how many things have a certain property & in this case,

how many humans are mortal or tal . Logicians write (x) to symbolize al x or

every x; thus al humans are mortal is in symbolic form (x)

(Hx[.ar owright]Mx), pronounced for al x, if x is human then x is mortal. The

quantifier some can most useful y be expressed as at least one, and logicians

write ([.existential] x) to symbolize there is at least one x or more briefly there

is an x. Thus some humans are tal is symbolized ([.existential] x) (Hx & Tx),

pronounced there is an x such that x is human and x is tal . When these

notions are added to the propositional calculus the resulting language is cal ed

the predicate calculus; it is a simple but extremely powerful language which

equips logicians to explore the forms of valid inference, and which provides

philosophers with a tool for investigating the structure of language and thought.

This language, the language of the predicate calculus, is what Russel cal ed the

perfect language. In the case of the present king of France is wise, Russel

used it to give the ful analysis of that problematic sentence, that is, the complete

description of its logical form. The analysis is:

(Ex) (K(x) & (y)(K(y) -> x=y) & W(x)

33

where K stands for king of France and W for wise. The whole formula is pronounced there is something, cal it x, such that x is king of France; and for

anything else, cal it y, if y is king of France then y and x are identical (this

shows that there is only one king of France); and x is wise. This may look

somewhat complicated, but is not so; the chief point is that there is nothing

misleading about the logical formula into which the present king of France is

wise has been analysed, and hence, once the eye is accustomed to symbolism,

al is perspicuous # we know exactly what is being said and hence thought, for

the analysis brings its logical structure explicitly into view. Recal Wit genstein's

aim: it is to show that the problems of philosophy wil be solved once we grasp

how our language works. The workings of language depend upon its underlying

logical structure; therefore to solve the problems of philosophy we must, says

Wit genstein, make clear to ourselves the nature of that underlying logical

structure. This shows the importance of logic in Wit genstein's Tractatus.

A central notion in the foregoing account of logic is truth-functionality, explained,

as we have seen, in terms of the truth tables showing how the truth-values of

compound formulae depend upon the truth-values of their constituent atomic

formulae and the way they are combined. One more example wil help to fix this

idea clearly. Consider the complex formula (pvq) & (rvs). The truth-value of this

formula depends upon that of pvq and of rvs taken independently; and the

truthvalues of these two formulae, in their turn, depend upon the truthvalues of

their parts # in the case of pvq on the truth-values of p and of q taken

independently, and in the case of rvs on the truth-values of r and s taken

independently. So the whole complex formula (pvq) & (rvs) has a truth-value

which in the end depends on that of each of the simple or atomic formulae p,

q, r, s, which are its ultimate constituents or atoms; it is a truth-function of

those atoms and the way they are put together by means of the connectives v

and &. This idea plays a crucial role in the Tractatus.

34

The argument of the Tractatus

Armed with the foregoing sketch of background ideas we can now turn to

Wit genstein's Tractatus itself. A preliminary point to note concerns how the

Tractatus is structured. It was Wit genstein's method, one which he employed

throughout his life, to write down his ideas in the form of theses and remarks

upon these theses, subsequently ar anging them into an appropriate overal

order. In the Tractatus Wit genstein expresses his view in the form of seven

theses, and the bulk of the book consists in comments upon and expansions of

each of the first six, together with subordinate comments upon and expansions

of these higher-order remarks themselves. To keep the structure of the argument

clearly in view Wit genstein uses a system of decimal numbering. The system is

one which anyone familiar with business or of icial reports can quickly grasp;

chief points are marked with whole numbers (1, 2, etc.), comments subordinate

to these with a single decimal (1.1, 2.1, etc.), points subordinate to these lat er

with two decimals (1.11, 2.11, etc.), and so on in the standard way. The

Tractatus is rather elaborate structural y, yielding remark numbers with as many

as five decimals, for example 2.02331; but the principle of the ar angement is

straightforward, as described. References to the Tractatus are always ef ected

simply by quoting the relevant remark number.

A second point to note is that although the Tractatus is a short book, the range

of topics it covers is very wide. In the course of its main argument concerning

language, the world, and the relation between them, the Tractatus also deals

with the fol owing: the nature of logic and logical form; probability; the concept of

number; induction and causality; the purpose of philosophy; solipsism; and

questions about ethics, religion, and life. The treatment accorded most of these

topics is very brief, and in consequence the Tractatus's comments upon them

seem aphoristic and obscure. But Wit genstein's views on these mat ers are

either consequences or corol aries of his main argument, to which al these

topics are intimately linked, and accordingly a grasp of that argument

35

makes his meaning in these respects fairly clear, as we shal see when we

consider some of them.

I shal begin by set ing out the main argument of the Tractatus in summary form,

afterwards returning to explain each of its main themes in more detail. Both

language and the world, Wit genstein says, have a structure. Language consists

in propositions, and these are compounds made up of what he cal s elementary

propositions, which in turn are combinations of names. Names are the ultimate

constituents of language. Cor espondingly, the world consists in the totality of

facts, and facts are compounded out of states of af airs , which in turn are

compounded out of objects. Each level of structure in language matches a level

of structure in the world. The objects, which are the ultimate constituents of the

world, are denoted by the ultimate constituents of language, the names; names

combine to form elementary propositions, which cor espond to states of af airs;

and each of these further combine to form, respectively, propositions and the

facts which, in a sense to be explained, those propositions picture . Here, in a

crude preliminary form, is a representation of the two paral el structures:

proposition

facts

|

|

elementary proposition

states-of-affairs

|

|

names

objects

This representation is crude because it does not show how the vertical and

horizontal relationships between the two sets of levels work; but it is a useful

preliminary sketch.

36

The cor espondence between elementary propositions and states of af airs is

constituted by the fact that the names out of which elementary propositions are

built denote the objects out of which their cor espondent states of af airs are

built; the ar angement of the names logical y mir ors or pictures the ar angement

of the objects in states of af airs. It is in virtue of this picturing relation that the

propositions compounded out of elementary propositions have sense. This is the

picture theory of meaning which lies at the heart of the Tractatus, constituting

the explanation of how language and the world are connected, and therefore of

how meaning at aches to what we say when we use language cor ectly. Much

more wil be said of this below.

The elementary propositions are logical y independent of each other. Because

this is so, we need to say which of them are true and which false in order to give

a complete account of reality. This is equivalent to saying that reality consists of

al possible states of af airs, whether existing or non-existing. In other words,

how everything actual y is in reality depends upon what is and what is not the

case; and that is why we need to know which elementary propositions are true

and which false, for only then can we specify how things actual y stand in reality.

Propositions are formed out of elementary propositions by the truthfunctional

connectives (more exactly, by a single truth-functional connective in terms of

which al the others can be defined). They are therefore truth-functions of

elementary propositions. Because they depend for their own truth-value on the

truth-values of the elementary propositions which constitute them, propositions

wil be true or false according to the distribution of the truth-values among the

elementary propositions. But there are two important cases where this is not so:

one in which a proposition is true no mat er what its constituents' truthvalues,

and the other in which a proposition is false no mat er what its constituents'

truth-values. In the first case the proposition is a tautology, always true; in the

second it is a contradiction, always false. The true propositions of logic are

tautologies, and the true propositions of

37

mathematics may be considered so too. Neither logical nor mathematical

propositions say anything about the world, however, because in virtue of their

always being true they are consistent with any way the world could happen to be

(with the existence or non-existence of any state of af airs).

When a sign or string of signs fails to express a proposition it is nonsense. It is

not that such a sign or string of signs says something false; it is that it says

nothing at al , for it fails to picture anything in the world and hence has no

connection with the world. Wit genstein includes most of the propositions of

philosophy! in this class. Because this is so, he says at the end of the Tractatus:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the fol owing way: anyone who

understands me eventual y recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used

them & as steps & to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away

the ladder after he has climbed up it.)! (T 6.54; the image of the discardable

ladder comes from Schopenhauer.) The limits of what can significantly be said,

and therefore thought, thus turn out to be imposed by the structure of both

language and the world, and by the way they connect with each other through

the picturing! relation. Only when such a connection obtains do our signs (the

expressions of our language) have sense. And because the content of ethics,

religion, and the problems of life! lie outside the world & outside the realm of

facts and their constituent states of af airs & nothing can be said about them. To

try to say anything about them is, given the way language works, to fal into

nonsense. This does not, as mentioned, mean that ethics and the rest are

themselves nonsense. It is only the at empt to talk about them which is so. In

Wit genstein's view, mat ers of ethical and religious significance show

themselves; they cannot be stated. Wit genstein considered this to be a crucial y

important point, and was careful to indicate that the ultimate aim of the Tractatus

is indeed to reveal, via the argument about language (thought) and the manner

of its connection with the world, just what the status of ethical and religious

values is.

38

This summary of the Tractatus's argument is very compressed. Making it clearer requires going through its main points step by step, adding some of the detail

which explains Wit genstein's intentions more ful y. The first step is to grasp

more clearly Wit genstein's views about each of the levels of structure in

language and the world; the second step is to understand his !picture theory" of

how language and world are linked.

What Wit genstein says about the structure of language and the world is very

abstract. He does not, when talking of how the world is, give examples of facts,

states of af airs, and objects; nor does he give examples, in describing the

structure of language, of propositions, elementary propositions, and names. This

is deliberate. He relies on an undefined and perhaps intuitive grasp of what

!propositions" and !facts" are, and then specifies their respective finer structures in terms of what these structures must be like in order for it to be possible that

language should (as it manifestly does) succeed in connecting with the world. In

Wit genstein's view it is the task of an empirical enquiry, specifical y psychology,

to determine the practical question of how we link language to the world in our

experience and activity, just as it is the task of natural science to describe the

structure and properties of physical things. The task in philosophy, in

Wit genstein's view, is by contrast the whol y conceptual one of identifying the

logical conditions which must obtain for there to be a link between world and

language.

A comparison with Russel 's views is informative here. Working from some of the

same basic ideas (because of his early col aboration with Wit genstein) but with

empirical considerations expressly in view, Russel likewise argues that the

relation between language and world depends upon the fact that the simplest

elements of each are directly linked. But in Russel 's theory the mechanism is

somewhat dif erent. The link between language and the world is, for Russel as

for Wit genstein, the relation of denotation. But for Russel the !atoms" of

language are the demonstrative pronouns !this" and !that", and the atoms of the

world are !sense-data", that is, bits of information (for

39

example, colour-patches, sensations of touch, sounds) gathered by our five

senses. The link is forged by the use we make of the demonstrative pronouns to

refer directly to sense-data. So in Russel 's view language connects with the

world because at this most basic level we !name", by means of the

demonstratives, the items of sensory information that constitute our immediate

experiential contact with the world. It is interesting to observe that in his

notebooks Wit genstein shows that he began by thinking much along the same

lines as Russel . Nevertheless he decided to restrict at ention to the logical basis

of the issues, and therefore did not investigate their !psychological" aspects as

Russel had done. It is this which gives the Tractatus its highly abstract

character.

Wit genstein's account of the world's structure occurs at the beginning of the

Tractatus. It is useful to look at the way he sets out his principal theses before

embarking on a discussion of them. From the sketch given above it wil be

remembered that the chief elements of that structure are facts, which are

composed of states of af airs, which are in turn composed of objects.

Wit genstein states this as fol ows:

1

The world is everything that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

2 What is the case * a fact * is the existence of states of af airs.

2.01 An atomic fact is a combination of objects

2.02 The object is simple.

This is the basic structure. After set ing it out Wit genstein adds some remarks

on the nature of the relation between the levels:

40

2.0271 Objects are what is unalterable and subsistent; their configuration

is what is changing and unstable.

2.032 The determinate way in which objects are connected in states of

af airs is the structure of the af airs.

2.04

The totality of existing states of af airs is the world.

2.05

The totality of existing states of af airs also determines which

states of af airs do not exist.

2.06

The existence and non-existence of states of af airs is reality.

Each of these theses car ies a heavy load of significance and requires

explanation. The first (thesis 1) states that the world is everything that is. Since,

as we shal see, Wit genstein goes on to argue that the world is represented by

propositions, and that propositions are true or false according to whether they

represent or fail to represent what is the case, it fol ows that the world is

everything that is represented by the totality of true propositions. This conception

is fundamental to Wit genstein's claims about what can legitimately be said, and

what therefore cannot be said but only shown. Coming to a conclusion on these

mat ers is the Tractatus's aim; Wit genstein's central concerns are therefore

present from the outset.

The second and subsequent theses concern the world's structure itself. Thesis

1.1 says that the world is not to be identified with the sum of things which exist

in it / it is not a col ection of objects like, say, stones, teacups, subatomic

particles, or whatever empirical science says 1objects2 are, but rather is the

totality of facts. Examples of 1facts2 might

41

roughly be that I am writing these words at a certain time and place, that Everest is the highest mountain on this planet, that our solar system is located in a spiral

galaxy, and so on. Wit genstein himself does not give such examples, but

proceeds directly to an abstract specification of facts as the existence of states

of af airs. The notion of states of af airs is dif icult to explain other than

intuitively. For the sake merely of il ustration, we might say that my sit ing at a

desk holding a pen, my doing so in Oxford in the springtime, and so on, are

among the states of af airs # the ways things are, the situations that exist #

which together constitute the fact that I am writing these words at a certain time

and place. Again, Wit genstein expressly avoids giving such examples. He

defines a state of af airs in an austerely abstract fashion as a combination of

objects, meaning by this that a state of af airs is such that one can break it down

(analyse it) into component parts; the component parts, together with their

ar angements, are the ultimate building blocks of the state of af airs. These

building blocks are objects, and objects are simple in the sense of being

uncompounded, that is, having no structure. They therefore cannot be broken

down or analysed into something more fundamental than themselves. They

constitute the primitive elements out of which the world is constituted. Moreover,

it is essential to objects, Wit genstein says, that they be possible constituents of

states of af airs; the thought of an object which could exist outside any possible

combination of objects (any state of af airs) is an empty thought. Since this is so,

if we had a complete inventory of al the objects there are, we would know al the

states of af airs there could possibly be, because knowing anything about a

given object involves knowing what combinations it is its essential nature to

belong to # and this is just to know what states of af airs are possible.

The fact that they are simple means that objects do not change. It is their

combinations and ar angements that do so. But when objects are in combination,

thus constituting a state of af airs, there is nothing indeterminate about their

ar angement: each such combination has a definite character. This

determinateness of ar angement is the structure

42

of a state of afairs. The structure of facts, likewise, is determined by the structure of the states of af airs constituting them. Accordingly a complete

analysis of a fact has as its termination a specification of a determinate

combination of objects. And this means that each fact has only one cor ect

analysis, because each fact ultimately consists in a particular and definite

combination of the members of a particular and definite set of objects.

The last two theses noted above 2.05 and 2.06 add a further important

consideration. It is that the states of af airs which exist set le which states of

af airs do not exist. For example, mat ers are such that I am holding a pen, and

this excludes the state of af airs consisting in my being empty-handed. Since in

this way how things are determines how they are not, reality as a whole is the

totality of existing states of af airs together with everything their existence

excludes as non-existent.

Wit genstein's account of the world's structure is almost as brief as it is abstract;

it occupies the first four pages of the Tractatus only. Immediately after stating it

he turns his at ention to the *picture+ theory and language. But an understanding

of these lat er turns crucialy on the account he gives of the world's structure,

which is why the Tractatus begins with it. When it comes to the structure of

language, as we shal now see, Wit genstein relies on the above account to

explain the nature and role of the dif erent levels of language themselves.

It is useful, as before, to begin by set ing out Wit genstein's main theses

concerning the *propositions-elementary propositions-names+ structure of

language. As one reads through them one should keep in mind two mat ers: first,

the foregoing account of the world's structure, and secondly, the thesis to be

explained more ful y below that language connects with the world by means of

a *picturing+ relation. It is necessary to anticipate one point about the picture

theory at this juncture, however: it is that, for Wit genstein, when one thinks

about something in the world, a fact, one's thought is a logical picture of that

43

fact, and that since propositions are expressions of thoughts, propositions are therefore themselves pictures of facts. This comes out clearly in the theses on

language structure. The theses are these:

3.

A logical picture of facts is thought.

3.1

In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the

senses.

3.2

In propositions thoughts can be so expressed that to the objects of

the thoughts cor espond the elements of the propositional sign.

3.201 These elements I cal "simple signs# and the proposition "completely

analyzed.#

3.203 The name means the object. The object is its meaning.

3.25 There is one and only one complete analysis of the proposition.

3.22 In a proposition a name is a representative of an object.

3.26 A name cannot be dissected further by means of a definition: it is a

primitive sign.

Remark 3.25 paral els the thesis discussed above, that each fact has a particular

and definite structure, so that an analysis of that fact, which is the same thing as

an analysis of the proposition cor esponding to it, wil result in a description of a

particular and definite combination of objects. The objects are denoted by the

names, the *simple signs+ which are the *elements+ (the ultimate building blocks)

of propositions; this is made clear by the last three remarks above. Wit genstein

goes on:

4.001 The totality of propositions is the language.

44

4.11 The totality of true propositions is the total natural science (or the totality of the natural sciences).

These two theses are direct corol aries of what Wit genstein says about the

respective structures of language and the world and the way they connect

through the picturing relation. In them lies the substance of his claim that only

factual discourse is possible: he puts the same point more explicitly later by

saying !nothing " can be said [except] the propositions of natural science% (T

6.53). And from this it immediately fol ows that we cannot say anything about

what fal s outside the domain of facts as described by science, namely, mat ers

of value, that is, ethics and religion. The two theses just quoted, 4.001 and 4.11,

are therefore central; it is typical of the Tractatus's elaborately ar anged and

compressed argument that they appear before the whole of that argument has

been given. Nor do they appear together, as I have given them here; their

decimal numbers show that they are separated by discussion of several

important subsidiary issues, including these:

4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality.

4.022 A proposition shows its sense. A proposition shows how things

stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand.

4.023 A proposition must restrict reality to two alternatives: yes or no. In

order to do that, it must describe reality completely.

The picture theory of the language-world relationship is inseparable from

Wit genstein's account of propositions. In 4.01 the claim that propositions are

pictures is expressly made. We shal shortly investigate how the picturing relation

works. It is essential for Wit genstein's conception of propositions as pictures of

reality that propositions should be determinate in truth-value; they are true or

they are false, and which they are depends on whether they fit the facts or fail to

do so.

45

There is no question of a partial or fuzzy corespondence between propositions and facts: the only alternatives are yes and no either a proposition is a

picture of a fact, or it is not. And this has to be the case, Wit genstein says,

because, once more, of the structure of propositions, namely that propositions

are truth-functions of elementary propositions, which are themselves structures of

names: 5 A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.

4.21 The simplest kind of proposition, an elementary proposition,

asserts the existence of a state of af airs.

4.25 If an elementary proposition is true, the state of afairs exists; if an

elementary proposition is false, the state of af airs does not exist.

4.22 An elementary proposition consists of names. It is a nexus, a

concatenation of names.

4.24 Names are the simple symbols.

Set ing al these theses alongside those about the world makes Wit genstein's

conception of both quite clear. From the basis of the paral el structures upwards,

the relations between them are as fol ows: names denote objects, and like

objects they are simple and unanalysable; elementary propositions are

concatenations of names and they assert the existence of states of af airs,

which are concatenations of objects; and propositions, the perceptible

expressions of thoughts (perceptible because one can read or hear the

propositional signs used to express them), are truth-functions of elementary

propositions. This account is whol y formal: Wit genstein does not, as noted, give

examples of names and elementary propositions or of what they cor espond to in

the world; his account is

46

devoted solely to saying that it is necessary, in order for there to be a language-

world link, that the structures of both must be like this, whatever as a mat er of

fact plays the role of the names, objects, and the rest, as specified in that

account.

The austerely formal nature of the account, together with the paucity of concrete

examples, might seem puzzling until one recal s that Wit genstein's interest lies

solely in the logical character which world and language must possess in order

for connections between them to be possible. Think of the logician's interest in

discovering the nature of valid argument forms, as described in the preceding

section: it is unnecessary to bother with particular propositions " expressed by

sentences of one or another natural language " concerned with particular things

like clocks, the moon, or anything else, but only with the form of the argument,

using a symbolism ($p%, $q%, $&%, $v%, and so on) to make that form explicit. This is

what Wit genstein is doing in the Tractatus. It is enough for his purposes to say

something like this: the proposition $p&q% is a truth-function of the elementary

propositions $p% and $q%; $p% is a concatenation of names $w% and $x%, and $q% is a

concatenation of names $y% and $z%; and each of these levels of structure mir ors

a concomitant level of structure in the world. (Wit genstein does not put mat ers

quite like this in the Tractatus, but it serves as an il ustration; see T 4.24.) It is in

this way that Wit genstein's account is a purely formal or structural one. And it

explains why he thought, unlike Russel , that $psychological% questions "

questions about what objects are, and how we come to denote them by the

names which are the primitive elements of language " were no part of his

enterprise.

Now that the paral el language-world structures have been described, it is

possible to set out the crucial mat er of the $picturing% relation in which

Wit genstein says their connection with each other consists. This is the key to

the argument so far, and this time Wit genstein provides plenty of examples to

show what he means.

47

The idea of the picture theory was suggested to Witgenstein, as he reports in his Notebooks, by reading a newspaper description of how toy motor cars and

dol s were used in a Paris courtroom to depict the facts of something then

relatively new in the world, a motor-accident. The models pictured reality by

being ar anged in a way exactly cor esponding to the disposition of the real

people and vehicles at the time of the accident. This raises a question: what is it

for something to be a picture of something else? What is it about the miniature

streetscene in the Paris courtroom which makes it a picture of reality?

Wit genstein begins by of ering an answer to this question.

2.12 A picture is a model of reality.

2.131 In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of

objects.

2. 14 What constitutes a picture it that its elements are related to one

another in a determinate way.

2.15 The fact that the elements of a picture are related to one another

in a determinate way represents that things are related to one

another in the same way.

So much is obvious. Wit genstein then says that the possibility that things in

reality can be represented by pictures + that is, can have their ar angement

displayed by the ar angement of a picture's elements + rests on the fact that

pictures have something in common with the reality they depict; and what they

have in common is of course their structure. Take a straightforward case:

suppose you are painting a stil life of a hat standing to the left of a pair of boots

on a chair. If your painting is to depict that col ection of objects just as it is, its

structure must accord with that of the objects' ar angement; the hat must stand

to the left of the boots in the picture. This shared structure Wit genstein cal s

pictorial form:

48

2.161 There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts,

to enable one to be a picture of the other at al .

2.17 What a picture must have in common with reality in order to be

able to depict itcor ectly or incor ectlyin the way it does, is

pictorial form.

It is pictorial form, therefore, understood as the possibility of identity of structure

between a picture and what it depicts, which makes the picturing relationship

possible. But there is a further point: the structure shared between picture and

reality is a structure of elements, the elements of the picture and the elements of

the depicted reality. The link between a particular picture and reality is a link

between their respective elements:

2.1514 The pictorial relationship consists of the cor elations of the

picture&s elements with things.

2.1511 That is how a picture is at ached to reality; it reaches right out to

it.

2.1512 It is laid against reality like a ruler.

Al these theses are the answer to the question about what constitutes a picture.

The transition to the crucial thesis that propositions are pictures, in just this

sense, is ef ected by Wit genstein in two brief steps. The first consists in his

stating that every picture is a logical picture (T 2.182). What this means can be

put as fol ows. Pictures are not al of the same

49

kind not al pictures are, say, spatial ones; if a monotone picture depicts things as coloured, it cannot use colour to do so; and so on but every picture has

pictorial form, that is, the essential possibility of possessing a community of

structure with what it depicts, and only if something satisfies this minimum

requirement can it be a picture. The point here therefore concerns the logical

condition for a picture to be a picture. The condition is a logical one because it

turns solely on considerations about the form or structure which, when the

picturing relation obtains, must of necessity be shared by the picture and what it

depicts so that the picturing relation can obtain between them. Therefore,

Wit genstein says, pictorial form is logical form (T 2.181 and 2.182 again). And

this means that anything possessing a logical form is a picture.

Wit genstein's second step concerns truth and falsity. He says: (A picture agrees

with reality or fails to agree; it is cor ect or incor ect, true or false) (T 2.21). The

point is intended to be intuitive. If a picture successfuly shows how things are in

reality, it (agrees) with that reality, and we therefore say that it is a cor ect

depiction. Where the picture in question is a thought or proposition, we cal its

agreement with reality (truth) and the converse (falsity). The division between

(agreement) and (disagreement) is absolute one recal s Wit genstein's saying at

4.023 that the only alternatives are yes and no.

The ground is now prepared for the picture theory of the proposition itself. Thesis

4.01, already quoted, asserts (A proposition is a picture of reality), and the main

steps by which Wit genstein ar ives at it consist in the two theses, also already

quoted, that (A logical picture of facts is a thought) (T 3) and a proposition is an

expression of a thought (T 3.1). Wit genstein now gives an account of what 4.01

means.

At first sight, he says, propositions do not seem to be pictures at al ; but then at

first sight musical notation does not appear to be a picture of music, and the

alphabet does not seem to be a picture of speech; (and

50

yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent (T 4.011). The musical analogy particularly wel expresses

Wit genstein's point:

4.014 A gramophone record, the musical idea, the writ en notes, and the

sound waves, al stand to one another in the same relation of

depicting that holds between language and the world.

To al of them the logical structure is common.

That this is so can be seen by noting that there are rules which enable a

musician to translate a musical score into movements of his fingers on the

keyboard, and thence, by means of the piano's mechanism, into sounds.

Similarly, the structure of the grooves on a gramophone record are precisely

cor elative with the sounds which are produced when the record is played; and

someone suitably trained could listen to the record and transcribe the music

back into notation. The grooves, the sounds, the notation al have the same

logical form. There is an essential connection between them, and that connection

is their shared logical form. Wit genstein says that just in the way a musical

score depicts the sounds heard when it is played, so a proposition is a picture of

reality in virtue of the same internal relation of shared logical form.

4.021 A proposition is a picture of reality: for if I understand a

proposition, I know the situation that it represents.

4.03 A proposition communicates a situation to us, therefore it must be

essential y connected with the situation.

And the connection is precisely that it is its logical picture.

This explains what Wit genstein meant by saying, in 4.022 quoted earlier, .A

proposition shows its sense. The concept or sense is what would col oquial y be

explained as .meaning: the sense (meaning) of a proposition is the fact it

pictures:

51

4.031 Instead of This proposition has such and such sense, we can

simply say This proposition represents such and such a situation.

And what is meant by represents here is straightforward. In talking of pictures

representing reality Wit genstein earlier says: What a picture represents

[portrays, depicts, shows] is its sense; thus, the sense of a proposition is the

situation in reality which it depicts.

The final step in this account consists in Wit genstein's tying together his theses

about the structure of language, the structure of the world, and the picture

theory:

4.0311 One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and

they are combined with one another. In this way the whole

group)like a tableau vivant)presents a state of af airs.

4.0312 The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that

objects have signs as their representatives.

From what has gone before, the import of these remarks is clear; it establishes

the link between the elements . names and objects . on which the picturing

relation ultimately rests.

That, then, is the central argument of the Tractatus. Upon it rest the theses

which it is Wit genstein's overal aim to establish. These, it wil be remembered,

are that the only significant propositions (and hence thoughts) are those which

are pictures of reality . that is, which are pictures of how things are in the world.

And this in turn is to say that the only significant discourse is factual discourse

(the propositions of natural science). This has to be so, on Wit genstein's

theory, because if sense (col oquial y, meaning) at aches to propositions only in

virtue of

52

their being pictures of reality and reality is the sum of facts, that is, the existing states of af airs (whose existence determines what is not the case too, so that

reality is complete and determinate) then at empts to talk and think about what

does not fal within the realm of facts literal y has no sense, because such

thought and talk does not picture anything: there is nothing for them to picture.

The most significant consequence of this a point familiar by now is that

nothing can be said about ethics, religion, and the problems of life; but before

examining this consequence it is important to note another, namely the position

in which Wit genstein's theory leaves philosophy and logic.

The problem here is this. Because only factual discourse has sense, and

because the propositions of philosophy and logic are not factual propositions, it

fol ows that the propositions of philosophy and logic which Wit genstein uses to

state his theory are themselves senseless. His theory therefore appears

paradoxical. But Wit genstein is aware of this, and in response gives an account

of what philosophy is and, separately, an account of the status of logic.

Concerning philosophy he says:

4.111 Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.

4.112 Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

A philosophical work consists essential y of elucidations.

Philosophy does not result in ,philosophical propositions-, but

rather in the clarification of propositions.

Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct:

its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

4.114 It must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what

cannot be thought.

53

4.115 It wil signify what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can

be said.

The task Wit genstein al ots to philosophy therefore is elucidation, which is the

process of clarifying our thought and talk. And, consistently, this is just what the

Tractatus aims to do; in the last two quoted theses it could just as wel refer to

the Tractatus itself as to philosophy. In 4.114 Wit genstem adds: [Philosophy]

must set limits to thought by working outwards through what can be thought.

This process of working outwards by means of elucidations or clarifications

results, in Wit genstein's view, in the at ainment of a point of vantage from which

one can survey the limits of meaningful discourse, and from which we can

therefore recognize, for exactly what they are, the steps which brought us there:

6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the fol owing way: anyone

who understands me eventual y recognizes them as nonsensical,

when he has used them/as steps/to climb up beyond them. (He

must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up

it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he wil see the

world aright.

Logic is in a dif erent case. It wil be remembered that the truth-values of

ordinary propositions depend upon those of their constituent elementary

propositions, in just the way described by means of truth tables in the preceding

section. Accordingly, ordinary propositions wil sometimes be true and sometimes

false depending upon how things stand in the world. But the true propositions of

logic are always true, no mat er what the distribution of truth-values among their

constituents; and propositions which are logical y false are always false, no

mat er what the truth-values of their constituents. The former are tautologies, the

lat er contradictions (T 4.46). Accordingly, the truth-value of logical propositions

is independent of how things

54

are in the world: in Witgenstein's characterization they say nothing (T 6.11).

It does not fol ow that logic is vacuous. On the contrary, it has an important role

as the instrument used in describing the fundamental structure of world and

language, which Wit genstein describes by saying the propositions of logic

describe the scaf olding of the world; and they do this by showing what has to

be the case for language to have sense (T 6.124). Al that logic presupposes is

that names denote objects and propositions have sense (ibid.); otherwise logic

has nothing to do with [questions about what] our world real y is like (T 6.1233).

But although the task performed by logic is the whol y general and formal one of

showing what the structures of world and language have to be in order for them

to connect, it is crucial; for it thereby shows what the limits of meaningful

discourse are.

Since, as we have seen, those limits enclose factual discourse only, everything

to do with value and religion fal s outside them. Accordingly, nothing can be said

about these mat ers. But they are what is truly important; Wit genstein describes

them as what is higher (T 6.42), and both in the Tractatus and in several let ers

he emphasizes the point that they are what the Tractatus is, in the end, real y

about 2 even though this is shown by the Tractatus's being (almost) silent about

them. To understand this one must grasp a point which Wit genstein emphasizes

in connection with his main argument and his view of philosophy as elucidation.

This is that one cannot properly use langauge to talk about language; one

cannot properly say that propositions have a certain structure the elements of

which are linked, through the picturing relation, with elements of the world. Of

course, this is exactly what the Tractatus is largely about; but the propositions of

the Tractatus, which are philosophical and therefore elucidatory propositions, are

steps of a discardable ladder, as we have just seen. Strictly, the logical

structures of language, world, and their relation show themselves or make

themselves manifest when one sees them aright. Wit genstein

55

puts this by saying: Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. (T 4.121)

Now, in just the same way, one cannot say things of an ethical or religious

nature, for these mat ers lie outside the limits of language and therefore there is

nothing for propositions about them to picture % which means that such

propositions cannot have sense. Rather, the ethical and religious show

themselves: There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make

themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (T 6.522)

One possible explanation of Wit genstein's intentions here is that he is seeking to

protect mat ers of value from the debunking encroachments of science. Science

deals with the world, the realm of facts, and how things are in the world is

contingent, that is, accidental; things happen to be the way they are in the world,

and might wel have been otherwise (T 6.41). But mat ers of value cannot be

accidental, Wit genstein says; they are too important (ibid.). Since the realms of

fact and value are ut erly distinct, the propositions of the former cannot be used

to describe or explain anything to do with the lat er. The lat er transcend, that is

lie beyond the limits of, the world.

Wit genstein does not, however, restrict himself to these negative points. In a

few brief and unsystematic remarks occupying the last four pages of the

Tractatus he indicates what he thinks the ethical and religious show of

themselves. He says that good or bad acts of the wil make no dif erence to the

world, in the sense that they do not change any facts about how things are in

the world, but rather that they alter the limits of the world (T 6.43), that is, they

af ect how the world as a whole appears to the moral agent. Accordingly, to the

good-wil ed agent the world appears altogether dif erent from the world of the

bad-wil ed agent (ibid.). Wit genstein then says: The world of the happy man is a

dif erent one from that of the unhappy man (ibid.). This suggests either that

good-wil ing produces or is at ended by happiness for the good-wil ed agent, and

the opposite for the bad-wil ed agent; or

56

that the fundamental moral good is happiness itself. The later interpretation has commended itself to some commentators, but the former appears to be bet er

supported by what Wit genstein says in the accompanying discussion: in a

remark shortly preceding T 6.43 he says that ethical reward and punishment

must reside in actions themselves, and are not to be thought of in association

with their consequences in the realm of facts, which is the !usual sense" of the

terms !punishment" and !reward" (T 6.422). The thought therefore seems to be

that goodwil ing contains its own reward & happiness & and bad-wil ing the

converse.

Wit genstein's view that mat ers of value concern the world as a whole, and not

mat ers of fact within it, is reinforced by his remarks about death and God. At my

death, he says, the world does not change for me, but ends (T 6.431); therefore

my own death is not an event in my life & !we do not live to experience death" & and in a sense therefore !Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has

no limits" (T 6.4311). Again, concerning God, he says !How things are in the

world is a mat er of complete indif erence to what is higher. God does not reveal

himself in the world" (T 6.432). This remark says that considerations about God,

as perhaps the source or focus of value, are solely related to the world as a

whole, just as with mat ers of value themselves. Two propositions bear this out:

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it

exists.

6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole2a

limited whole.

Feeling the world as a limited whole2it is this that is mystical.

These remarks lead up to the famous last sentence of the Tractatus & !Whereof

we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent" (T 7) & and Wit genstein asserts this

for the now familiar reason that since ethical

57

and religious maters lie outside the world, nothing can be said about them. This, Wit genstein says in his let ers, is the real point of his argument, ar ived at by

means of a logical investigation into the nature of language, world, and their

connection.

Some comments and questions

The Tractatus has had a curious fate. It is treated as a work of historical interest

rather than as an argument requiring the chal enge and testing which

philosophical theses usual y receive. It is often expounded, explained, and

interpreted, but it is rarely criticized in a serious way. For this there are good

reasons. The chief of them has to do with the Tractatus's place in Wit genstein's

philosophical development: it is an early work, and it was in ef ect repudiated by

its author # indeed Wit genstein came to make a rejection of its central doctrines

the very cornerstone of his later philosophy. Few of its ideas, accordingly, are

treated as genuine candidates for adoption or rejection. And this is why

commentators, although they recognize a need to explain the Tractatus, very

rarely of er a critical assessment of it. In certain respects the Tractatus is like the

game of chess. One cannot imagine thinking that the Tractatus might be true

any more than one can imagine thinking that a game of chess might be true.

This is because the Tractatus is an uninterpreted calculus. The key notions

'object(, 'name(, and so on are formal devices like the pieces in chess: the

'queen( in chess is not in any sense a queen, even a toy one, but is a purely

formal entity defined by its permit ed moves alone. This is what the 'objects( and

'names( of the Tractatus are; they are elements of abstract paral el structures,

defined only by their roles and mutual relations. The 'names( and 'objects( of the

Tractatus are very remote from being names (like 'Tom() and objects (like

teacups) # as remote as a chess queen is from being a queen.

When, however, one turns to giving a critical assessment of the Tractatus, as

Wit genstein himself did, it quickly becomes apparent that

58

there are many reasons for caling its doctrines into question. Some, briefly, are as fol ows.

The first is a criticism which Wit genstein himself came to level at the Tractatus

and which prompted him to take a quite dif erent approach in his major later

work, the Philosophical Investigations. It is this: the Tractatus has a symmetry,

neatness, and apparent rigour of just the kind which makes, say, an elegant

proof in mathematics so pleasing to the intel ect. But it has this character at too

high a cost, for what its symmetry and appearance of rigour result in is a huge

oversimplification of the issues with which it deals. This comes out in a number

of ways.

First, Wit genstein assumed in the Tractatus that language has a single essence

which he could specify by unearthing its logical structure. The tendentious

concepts are those of the essence and of the logical form of language. The idea

that language has a unitary nature which can be captured in a single formula,

identifying which provides at a stroke solutions to al philosophical problems

about thought, the world, value, religion, truth, and more, is an extraordinarily

ambitious one, but it is what the early Wit genstein asks us to accept. In the

Philosophical Investigations Wit genstein rejects this oversimplification and

argues the opposite $ that language is a vast col ection of dif erent activities

each with its own logic. What the theory of the Tractatus of ers in ef ect is a

badly distorted view of language. Wit genstein is there commit ed to saying that

language is the sum total of propositions, where by %propositions& he means what

is asserted by declarative sentences like %the table is brown&, %it is raining&, that is statements of fact. But to think that language is employed exclusively to make

statements is to ignore a host of other uses of language, such as questioning,

commanding, exhorting, warning, promising, and much else besides. None of

these uses can be explained in terms of the Tractatus's account of language

structure and the way sense at aches to propositions by means of the picturing

relation. On the Tractatus's principles, because questions,

59

commands, promises, and the rest are not propositions, and hence not pictures of facts, they are senseless. But since these large areas of language are far

from being senseless, a theory is needed which wil take them properly into

account.

In short, the Tractatus whol y neglects the great variety of language upon which

Wit genstein, in his later philosophy, insists; and this makes it possible to accept

the theory of the Tractatus for a smal fragment of language only. But even in the

case of that fragment the propositions expressed by declarative sentences

Wit genstein came to reject his Tractatus view, for this was that the ultimate

word-world link is the relation of denotation, the claim being that the meaning of

a name is the object it denotes. Such a view wil not bear scrutiny either, for

reasons to be discussed later; Wit genstein indeed opens the Philosophical

Investigations with a lengthy refutation of it. And so the Tractatus's theory of

language, as Wit genstein himself came to argue, is simplistic and distorting, and

has therefore to be rejected.

It might fairly be asked why Wit genstein and others, Russel among them

did not see this at the time the Tractatus was writ en. The answer is that

Wit genstein like those others was beguiled into thinking about language and

the world in terms of a particular model. This was the atomistic model.

Wit genstein's thesis rests on the assumption that language and the world are

complex and hence structured, and that therefore their structures can be

analysed into their simplest and most basic elements (or at least into simpler and

more basic ones). He also assumes that logic is tailor-made for describing and

analysing these structures. With these assumptions go others; for example, that

language can be treated as a truth-functional structure, and it is easy to live with

this particular assumption only if one thinks that al language consists in

proposition-asserting declarative sentences (or at least, that al sentences can be

turned into them).

These and al ied assumptions raise a number of important questions. Is

60

it clear that the logic of Frege and Russel is peculiarly the right one for

analysing language and the world? Other candidates for the logic of natural

language have been proposed. This prompts doubts of the kind Wit genstein

himself later felt about what if anything is meant by talk of the logical form of

language. In any case, do language and the world have underlying structures

which are dif erent from their surface structures? If so, is it clear that these

underlying structures are anything like they are said to be in the Tractatus? Why

indeed should we accept Wit genstein's pronouncements on this mat er in the

Tractatus's early part? $ for he gives no argument there to show that this view of

language and the world is cor ect.

In the Tractatus Wit genstein of ers no account or defence of any of his basic

assumptions, almost al of which, as we see from these examples, very much

require both. The concepts of analysis, logical form, Frege-Russel logic $ al

these and more hang together in a pat ern which makes doctrines like those of

the Tractatus and Russel 's Logical Atomism inevitable as an outcome if one

accepts and works with them. The application of these concepts in Russel 's

work, given his interest in how they connect with the everyday mat ers of

perceiving, judging, knowing, determining truth, and so on, results in a more

concrete (although, in the end, no more acceptable) theory than Wit genstein

of ers; it is Wit genstein's whol y abstract use of them which issues in the chess-

like character of the Tractatus theory. But the most important point is the one

selected by Wit genstein himself for particular at ack when he came to work out

his later philosophy, namely the fact that the Tractatus oversimplifies and distorts

language. And it does this by claiming that language is the sum of propositions,

that it has a single essence, that this essence is describable in terms of

predicate logic, that language and world have paral el structures which connect

by means of the picturing relationship, and that sense at aches to what we say

(and therefore think) only if what we say is a picture of a fact. Wit genstein came

to reject al this.

61

Even were we to ignore the foregoing remarks, however, we would find other

dif iculties in the theory of the Tractatus. It is as we have seen a theory about

the connection of language and the world; but, as we have also seen, in set ing

it out Wit genstein refuses to specify what he means by names, objects,

elementary propositions, and states of af airs and we can now look at a

simple but important reason why it mat ers that these notions have been left

unexplained.

On the Tractatus view, a proposition is true if it pictures or cor esponds to what

is the case. As it stands this seems to be an unexceptionable characterization of

what it is for a proposition to be true; but a lit le probing reveals trouble. Leaving

the Tractatus aside for a moment, suppose we consider the proposition the cat

is on the mat, asserted when a given real cat is on a real mat. What is the

structure of the proposition? What is the structure of the fact? How exactly do

they cor espond? We might set ing aside problems about denotation itself

be tempted to analyse the proposition into two denoting terms and a relational

expression, or even into three denoting terms with is on denoting a relation and

not a thing; but there is no such apparently ready way with the fact, since there

are only two things present, the cat and the mat, and it is hard to see how the

relation between them is a constituent of the fact in the same way that the cat

and the mat are, for these lat er are concrete entities whereas relations are

abstract. At the very outset, then, facts and their cor espondent propositions are

awkward to analyse into their constituents because it is unclear what is to count

as a constituent. In the case of a proposition like the car is blue the problem

comes into even sharper focus, for here on the face of it there are two

propositional constituents, namely, a subject and a predicate, but just one blue

car unless one chooses to think that the fact in which the existence of a blue

car consists is somehow composed of a car and a blueness, a thing and a

property. But this wil not do; why not say that the fact is composed of a car, a

blueness, and four tyrenesses, or any other combination of items and properties

one cares to think of?

62

These remarks are cursory, but they are enough to show that when one reflects on the theory of the Tractatus it becomes extraordinarily hard to see what the

psychological enquiry left aside by Wit genstein could yield in the way of

candidates for objects, names, and the rest. One example shows why. In the

cat-on-the-mat case, the thought was that the word cat might denote an object,

namely the cat. But the word cat cannot serve as a name in the Tractatus's

sense, nor a cat as an object, for cats are complex, analysable things & they

are, as it were, states of af airs & whereas objects are simple, unchanging, and

unanalysable. Since cats are not objects, cat cannot on the Tractatus theory be

a name. But then & and here is our chess dif iculty concerning the Tractatus &

what are the names and objects? In the absence of any indication it is

impossible to know whether the picture theory of the relation between language

and the world is even half-way plausible: yet this is the centrepiece of the

Tractatus theory. This is not a minor cavil. It says that when one stays within the

circle of Wit genstein's key concepts, an impression of informativeness subsists &

but any probing, or any at empt to relate them to more concrete mat ers, seems

to leave one with a piece of useless conceptual apparatus.

Part of the problem here is connected with a more general one, which is that the

Tractatus contains few arguments. Its theses are asserted, and the support or

supplement they get is various: sometimes an il ustration, sometimes an

expansion or a definition, often a metaphor or simile. These occur much more

frequently than do arguments or proofs of the kind standardly employed in

philosophical discussion. At crucial points the only explanation of ered for

important theses is a figure of speech, as with the key remarks about the

picturing relation & That is how a picture is at ached to reality: it reaches right

out to it (T 2.1511); It is laid against reality like a ruler (T 2.1512); These

cor elations are, as it were, the feelers of the picture's elements with which the

picture touches reality (T 2.1515). It is of course true that in Wit genstein's view

philosophy consists in giving elucidations, and

63

does not consist in propositions in the Tractatus's sense; but a reader might

have grounds for thinking that nothing has been elucidated if the most important

concepts deployed as with names and objects have been left

uninterpreted, so that he cannot grasp what moves have been made by their

employment; or if talk of crucial aspects of the theory, as with picturing ,

proceeds in terms of metaphors in which pictures have feelers , or similes in

which a picture is like a ruler laid against reality . These considerations are

important for an assessment of the Tractatus. In connection with the theses

about language and its picturing relation to the world, the consequence is that

once one has stepped back from the architectonic issues, and begun to try to

make working sense of the theory (to see the world aright in Wit genstein's

words), the project turns out to be unfeasible: for, quite literal y, one does not

know what Wit genstein takes himself to be talking about.

Something like this dif iculty infects Wit genstein's closing remarks about mat ers

of value also. Ramsey remarked that to describe ethics as nonsense but

important nonsense is too like having one's cake and eating it. His comment

touches a nerve. Wit genstein accords to value a transcendent and detached

character which fits il with the fact that ethical concerns are anything but thus

detached: moral y problematic situations arise every day, and the sense in which

they are problematic is in important part a mat er of what the facts are in those

situations. For example, our judging that it is immoral to inflict gratuitous pain

upon animals rests in important part on facts about the capacity of animals to

feel pain (there is nothing immoral, by contrast, about kicking a stone); so here

the contingent facts about how things are in the world make a dif erence to our

actions in the af airs of daily life. Moreover, if it were true that value somehow

just manifested itself , as Wit genstein says it does, it would be puzzling why

conflicts and disagreements should arise over ethical questions, or why people

can passionately and sincerely hold views which are quite opposite to those held

with equal passion and sincerity by others.

64

There are other more detailed criticisms one might urge against the Tractatus were there space to pursue them. A point which should be stressed, however, is

that although Wit genstein was unsparing of his earlier self in rejecting or

amending that self's commitments, this does not mean that his later outlook is

entirely opposed to his earlier one; there are continuities as wel as changes

between the two phases of his thought, as we shal see.

The influence of the early philosophy

On the standard view of Wit genstein's early philosophical influence it is held that

the Tractatus constituted a major source of inspiration for !Logical Positivism$, the

theory developed by the Vienna Circle. In line with this view a writer on the

recent history of philosophy, J. O. Urmson, is able to say, without feeling the

need to qualify, that some of the Circle's views were !based largely on

Wit genstein's Tractatus, by which they had been profoundly influenced$. There

are many similar statements in other writings about the period. In addition, the

standard view has it that the influence was a one-way af air; commentators on

Wit genstein's later philosophy make lit le of the supposition that the changes

which occur ed in his thought during the 1920s and especial y 1930s, many of

them radical, resulted in any way from his contacts with the Circle and its ideas.

More recent studies suggest that the relationship between Wit genstein's early

work and that of the Circle was by no means so straightforward. That there was

a connection is not in doubt; but it seems that Wit genstein's influence was much

less than has been supposed, being exercised in the main on just two of the

Circle's members, who, however, did not as a result come to disagree with the

rest of the Circle (except on certain points largely independent of Wit genstein's

theories).

These mat ers wil be discussed shortly. First, it is important to note a

65

much earlier efect of Witgenstein's work, one which manifested itself years

before the Tractatus was published. This was Wit genstein's influence on

Russel . Wit genstein was led to study under Russel as a result of reading

Russel 's Principles of Mathematics. That book, and the Principia Mathematica

which Russel wrote with Whitehead, had an enormous ef ect on Wit genstein;

the Tractatus indeed owes its existence and many of its ideas to them. But in

working with Russel at Cambridge during 1912$13, Wit genstein quickly ceased

to be a pupil, and the discussions between them resulted in their each

developing views which, although rather dif erent in completed form (the

Tractatus and Russel 's Lectures on Logical Atomism of 1918), share certain

fundamentals and a common starting point in the conception of logic as

revealing the structure of language and the world. So far as the fundamentals

and the starting point are concerned, Russel is the main source. (Those who

have some knowledge of philosophy would recognize that Russel had himself

been influenced by his first-hand study of Frege and Leibniz; and to these

influences, which give rise to the logical and metaphysical aspects of Russel 's

work, must be added that of Hume, from whom Russel 's epistemology in large

part derives. Wit genstein accordingly inherits these influences through Russel .

His other influences are Schopenhauer and, through him, Kant.) But

Wit genstein's responses to what he learned from Russel in their turn influenced

the development of the lat er's thought, and it is this reciprocity which makes for

the points of similarity between their views in the next several years. When

Russel published his Lectures on Logical Atomism he described the theses they

contain as having been 2learned from my friend Wit genstein3, a characteristical y

generous remark which in fact overstates the debt, since most of what is

essential to Russel 's views in the Lectures is already to be found in work

published before he met Wit genstein.

One major result of Wit genstein's influence was that Russel left unpublished a

book he was writing when Wit genstein first came to Cambridge. It was to have

been cal ed Theory of Knowledge. Only its first

66

six chapters saw light of day, in the form of articles; Russel abandoned the rest as a result of Wit genstein's hostility to it. In a let er to a friend, writ en in 1913,

Russel reported what had happened: "We were both cross from the heat. I

showed [Wit genstein] a crucial part of what I had been writing. He said it was al

wrong, not realising the dif iculties & that he had tried my view and knew it

wouldn't work. I couldn't understand his objection & in fact he was very

inarticulate & but I feel in my bones that he must be right, and he has seen

something that I have missed*. (It appears from memoirs of Wit genstein that this

procedure of demolishing someone's views, and confidence, more by the manner

than the content of his opposition was characteristic of him throughout his life.)

The relinquishing of so substantial a project by Russel testifies to his estimation

of Wit genstein at the time and the nature of the intel ectual relations between

them. The forfeiture of Russel 's book must count as Wit genstein's first ef ect on

philosophy.

As indicated, the question of Wit genstein's relations with the Vienna Circle are

less straightforward to describe. The Circle in great measure owed its existence

to Moritz Schlick, who ar ived in Vienna in 1922 as Professor in the philosophy

of inductive science. What began as a discussion group became in due course

more organized, with a programme of research and a journal, Erkenntnis, to

publish its results. The Circle had among its members a number of extremely

able people; apart from Schlick himself there were, for example, Rudolf Carnap,

Ot o Neurath, and Hans Reichenbach. The group met for over ten years from the

mid-1920s onwards, and broke up as a result of its members being driven into

exile by Fascism.

Central to the doctrine propounded by members of the Circle, "Logical

Positivism*, is the requirement that a line of demarcation be drawn between

science and what the Circle's members, giving the word a pejorative connotation,

label ed "metaphysics* (in their usage a synonym for "nonsense*). They did this

by saying that only propositions concerned with mat ers of fact or with logical

relations between

67

concepts are meaningful. Propositions not faling into either of these two classes

the propositions of ethics and religion, for example they regarded as

expressions having emotional or exhortatory but not cognitive content; strictly,

they lack sense. Factual propositions, they said, are based upon experience, and

are significant because they can be verified or falsified by experience. The other

class of significant propositions those concerning logical relations between

concepts they cal ed analytic! propositions, and defined them as those whose

truth-value can be determined simply by inspecting the meaning of the words (or

symbols) in which they consist. These include the propositions of logic and

mathematics. And the Positivists held that the purpose of philosophy is to clarify

the propositions of empirical science by means of logical analysis of meaning,

with philosophy so conceived counting as part of science and not as an

independent discipline.

On the face of it there is much common ground between these views and what

is said in the Tractatus. Wit genstein talks of propositions as pictures of facts; of

logic as tautological or analytic!; of philosophy's role being confined to

elucidations!; and of the nonsensicality of al propositions other than those of

natural science, logic, and mathematics. These apparent similarities led the

Circle's members to study the Tractatus careful y at their meetings in 1925 and

1926, and prompted Schlick to ar ange discussions with Wit genstein. Schlick's

wife has left a record of the excitement her husband felt after his first encounter

with Wit genstein in 1927. For a time Wit genstein had talks with other members

of the Circle also, among them Carnap and Feigl; but soon his regular contacts

were limited to Schlick and an associate of Schlick's cal ed Friedrich Waismann.

Although Wit genstein left Vienna for Cambridge in 1929 he frequently returned

for visits, and on these occasions as wel as by let er his relations with Schlick

and Waismann were maintained. This lasted until Schlick was murdered by a

student (probably for political reasons) on the steps of Vienna University in 1936.

68

Witgenstein's contacts with Schlick and Waismann were therefore considerable.

The lat er kept a record of their discussions with Wit genstein in the years 1929

31 which has been published. Schlick encouraged Wit genstein to col aborate

with Waismann on a book explaining the Tractatus's doctrines together with the

developments in Wit genstein's thought since its publication. Waismann was to

write it under Wit genstein's guidance. When by the early 1930s it became clear

that Wit genstein's thought had changed too much for that project to be

worthwhile, Schlick kept the plan alive by persuading Wit genstein to let

Waismann present his new views instead. Waismann laboured under

Wit genstein's changes of mind throughout these years, rarely to the lat er's

satisfaction; the resultant book was published under Waismann's own name

much later, in 1967, six years after its author's death. During the period of

col aboration between Wit genstein and Waismann, however, Waismann

published aspects of Wit genstein's newly emerging views in several lectures and

articles.

Although Wit genstein's contacts with these two members of the Circle were

extensive, they did not have much ef ect on Schlick's Positivism. As with others

of the Circle, Schlick's views were established before he met Wit genstein; their

sources lay in Hume, Ernst Mach, and the empiricist tradition of philosophy,

together with the logic of Russel and Frege (the Circle's other leader, Carnap,

had studied with Frege at Jena in the years 191014). By the time the Circle

was established as a group with a definite identity and research programme,

therefore, its basic Positivist tenets were wel entrenched. Moreover, a number of

the Circle's members, particularly Carnap and Reichenbach, have left accounts

of Wit genstein's ef ect on the Circle which show that the Tractatus's impact was

minor and even, in some ways, negative. At the 192526 meetings when the

Tractatus was being discussed, Neurath constantly interjected 9Metaphysics!;

as noted, a Positivist term of abuse and in a let er to Waismann some years

later Neurath wrote: 9The Wit genstein period took you (and to some extent

Schlick as wel ) away from our common task.; Carnap wrote in his intel ectual

69

autobiography: I had eroneously believed that [Witgenstein's] atitude to

metaphysics was similar to ours. I had not paid suf icient at ention to the

statements in his book, because his feelings and thoughts in this area were too

divergent from mine.!

The most tel ing evidence for determining the extent of Wit genstein's ef ect on

the Vienna Circle lies not so much in the reports and recol ections of its

members as in their publications and the doctrines advanced in them. The books

and papers which flowed from the Circle reveal not just that Wit genstein's

influence was minimal but that it could not have been otherwise, for there are

many deep dif erences between the theses of the Tractatus and those of Logical

Positivism. The chief of these is evident, first, in the Positivists' view that the

foundations of factual knowledge lie in empirical observation (later modified by

Neurath and Carnap, in opposition to the others, into a form of coherence!

theory in which the basic propositions are determined by theoretical needs rather

than by raw observation!; secondly, in the Positivists' theories of probability and

induction, to which they accorded great importance; thirdly, in the marginal

position accorded by Positivism to mat ers of value and religion , most of the

Positivists were scornful of religion, regarding it as primitive superstition, whereas

Wit genstein throughout his life retained the deepest respect for it; fourthly, in the

Positivists' belief in the unity of science!, which, as Waismann's records show,

Wit genstein found conceptual y unat ractive; and in a number of other, detailed

respects besides.

What, indeed, the evidence suggests is that it was Wit genstein who was

influenced by the Circle's ideas rather more than the converse , not in the sense

that he came to be, except rather briefly, something of a Positivist himself, but

negatively, in that he came to put progressively greater distance between himself

and those tenets in the Tractatus which were, however superficial y, similar to

the Positivists' outlook, as if a greater realization of its Positivistic elements

persuaded him that the

70

Tractatus was in important respects mistaken. Writing to Schlick in 1932

Wit genstein says: There are many, many formulations in that book [the

Tractatus] that I am no longer in agreement with$, and this sentiment is

emphasized in Waismann's record of Wit genstein's conversations. At least part

of the impetus to Wit genstein's later philosophy is accordingly the result of his

learning from the Positivists what he could no longer agree with in his own

earlier work.

One of the things which may have led commentators to overstate Wit genstein's

ef ect on the Circle is that in his conversations with Schlick and Waismann in the

late 1920s, when Wit genstein himself was in his most Positivist phase as a

result of Schlick's influence on him, he gave neat formulation to a principle

already espoused by the Positivists, namely that the meaning of a statement is

its method of verification$, which is to say that a statement's sense consists in

the methods employed to determine whether it is true or false. This idea, on an

interpretation which Wit genstein was then prepared to give of the Tractatus's

doctrines, accords with his view that propositions are true or false depending

upon whether or not they cor ectly picture the facts. Schlick made much of

Wit genstein's way of stating the principle; when A. J. Ayer publicized the Circle's

ideas in English in his Language, Truth and Logic (1936) the verification principle

occupied pride of place and excited much debate. But it was the form of words

rather than the conception which Wit genstein contributed; and he did not share

the verificationist outlook, at least in its blunt Positivistic version, for long.

For the foregoing among other reasons, it is no longer possible to think of the

Tractatus as having inspired a philosophical movement, as most earlier

commentators claimed. This does not, however, mean that the Tractatus is a

negligible work historical y. It has interest because it is an uncompromising,

indeed an extreme, example of Logical Atomism$, and therefore shows with

some vividness what that species of view can

71

involve. But its chief importance resides in its being the source, in part positively and in larger part negatively, for Wit genstein's own later philosophy, developed

from the early 1930s onwards. To this we now turn.

72

Chapter 3

The later philosophy

The topic of this chapter is Wit genstein's mature work, contained in his writings

from the mid-1930s until his death in 1951. In the half-decade prior to this,

however, Wit genstein's thought went through a period of transition in which the

themes of the later philosophy emerged from his reconsideration of the

Tractatus. I begin by sketching this transition briefly.

In the fol owing sections most of what is central to Wit genstein's later philosophy

is canvassed. I have, however, omit ed specific consideration of his philosophy

of mathematics and the shorter posthumously published writings; Wit genstein's

position is essential y the same in these as in the chief works considered below,

which are the Philosophical Investigations, Zet el, and On Certainty.

The transitional period

Part of the story about the development of Wit genstein's later philosophy is told

in the last section, dealing with the contacts between Wit genstein and the

Vienna Circle. As suggested there, in the years during which he had discussions

with members of the Circle, Wit genstein began by maintaining his early views,

went through a phase of giving them a Positivistic interpretation, and then in the

early 1930s came to think them wrong in a number of important respects.

73

5. One of the last photographs of Wit genstein, in the garden at the von

Wrights' home in Cambridge with a bedsheet draped behind him for a

background.

74

After his return to Cambridge in 1929 Witgenstein embarked upon a period of

intense intel ectual activity during which he wrote a great deal. This transitional

phase lasted approximately until 1935, by which time many of the ideas to be

met with in the Philosophical Investigations and others of the late works had

made their appearance in his manuscripts.

The writings of the transitional period are genuinely transitional, containing

elements both of the early and the later views. One major theme in them

concerns the philosophy of mathematics; specificaly, questions about what

status the propositions of mathematics have. Are mathematical propositions

necessary truths? Can they be explained whol y in terms of logic? If not, what

account is to be given of them? Together with and related to this issue there are

long exploratory investigations of language and meaning, psychological

concepts, and the concept of knowledge. These lat er constitute the central

themes of the later philosophy itself. For Wit genstein scholars the transitional

writings are a rich source of material, since they foreshadow and prepare the

way for the later philosophy, and display a development of thought which

contains much of interest.

Fol owing the award of his Ph.D. degree in 1929 Wit genstein applied for a five-

year Fel owship at Trinity Col ege, Cambridge. In support of his candidature he

had to submit an extended sample of his cur ent research in philosophy, and

duly did so. The work was a manuscript constituting much of what has since

been published (1975) in an English translation entitled Philosophical Remarks,

but bet er known in the German original as Philosophische Bemerkungen, under

which title it was published in 1964. It is evident from the fact that Wit genstein

wrote a preface to the work that he intended to publish it. (Indeed, at various

times throughout the remaining two decades of his life Wit genstein had plans,

and made ar angements, to publish various of his writings; let ers between him

and the Syndics of Cambridge University Press show that some of the plans

came close to fulfilment. In the event none

75

of Witgenstein's writings were published until after his death, and the reason is that he was never quite content with how he had stated his views or ordered the

remarks in which they were expressed.)

The Philosophische Bemerkungen was writ en in the period up to 1932, and it

displays many signs of Wit genstein's contacts with the Positivists and their

influence upon him, particularly in the emphasis it places upon verification. It

defends some of the Tractatus's theses & for an important example, the picture

theory & but new elements appear in its doing so, the chief of which anticipate

concerns that were to occupy progressively more of Wit genstein's at ention as

the years passed. One of the most important was the emphasis he placed on a

conception of (meaning as use), to be discussed in some detail below.

Between 1932 and 1934 Wit genstein continued to write copiously, producing a

large manuscript which was eventual y published in 1969 as Philosophische

Grammatik and in English in 1974 as Philosophical Grammar. The work has two

parts, the titles of which & (The Proposition and its Sense) and (On Logic and

Mathematics) respectively & display its content. While revising the work in 1933&

34 Wit genstein dictated notes to his students which subsequently circulated in

typescript form under the title The Blue Book, so cal ed because of the colour of

its binding. There is a great similarity between this samizdat publication and the

first part of the Philosophical Grammar.

The importance of the Grammar resides in the fact that it contains, sometimes in

preliminary form and sometimes in ful , material which later appears in the

Philosophical Investigations. The central question addressed in Part One of the

Grammar concerns how it is that we at ach meaning to the ut ered sounds and

inscribed marks which constitute language. In brief Wit genstein's argument here

is as fol ows.

A natural view is to say that understanding language is a mental process which

at ends our linguistic activities. On such a view, when I speak,

76

hear, or read, something goes on in my mind which constitutes grasping the

meaning of the signs being used. Wit genstein argues against this view; he says

that understanding language is not a process but an ability. One il ustration he

gives of this thesis concerns the mat er of knowing how to play chess. If

knowing how to play chess were a process that is, something going on in

one's head then it would be appropriate to ask: When do you know how to

play chess? Al the time? Or just while you are making the move? (Phil. Gram.

§50). But these questions are manifestly odd; their unnatural character shows

that it is a mistake to think of understanding and knowing as events in the mind.

Wit genstein says that we should think of them instead as capacities, as

something we have a practical ability to do. In any case, he says, the notion of

mental processes is itself confused and liable to create misunderstandings a

claim which Wit genstein regarded as very important and which therefore plays,

as we shal see, a dominating role in the philosophical psychology of the later

works.

Wit genstein goes on in the Grammar to investigate the crucial notions of

thinking and understanding themselves, doing so in ways which closely

anticipate the Investigations, particularly in his arguing that there are many

dif erent kinds of understanding, linked not by their common possession of a set

of essential or defining characteristics but by a general relationship of similarity

which he cal s family resemblance. This concept also plays an important role in

the Investigations. It appears first in the Grammar, and then more explicitly in

The Blue Book. In this lat er there is another significant development for the later

philosophy and in particular the theory of meaning as use: Wit genstein says that

instead of asking, What is the meaning of a word? we should ask, What is it to

explain the meaning of a word? How is the use of a word learned? And his

response to the problem with which both The Blue Book and Part One of the

Grammar deal, namely, what is it that gives life (gives meaning) to the sounds

and marks constituting language, is

77

accordingly this: if we had to name anything as the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use (The Blue Book p. 4).

In 1934"35 Wit genstein dictated to two of his pupils a manuscript which, like

The Blue Book, had a samizdat circulation at Cambridge and beyond. Again the

colour of its binding determined its title, this time The Brown Book. In content it is

very close to the Investigations; it is indeed a virtual draft of the lat er work. Its

appearance marks the end of the transitional phase in Wit genstein's thought;

thereafter the writings which develop the ideas of the Grammar and Blue and

Brown Books constitute true drafts of the Investigations, as G. H. von Wright has

shown in his reconstruction of the steps by which that book emerged. A striking

feature of the transitional works is that the topics they address are very much

those of the Tractatus, the proposition and its sense foremost among them, and

this remains true throughout the later work; but increasingly there appears,

together with these concerns and as a necessary adjunct of Wit genstein's new

way of dealing with them, discussion of psychological concepts such as

understanding, intending, experiencing, and others. The reasons why wil

become apparent shortly.

In contemplating the publication of his chef-d'oeuvre, the Investigations,

Wit genstein came to the view that it would be bet er understood if the Tractatus

were published along with it. His reason was that the Investigations is in many

important ways a reaction to the Tractatus, so that a comparison of the two

forceful y il ustrates what the Investigations has to say. The discussion of the

later philosophy to which we now turn shows in what sense this is so.

Method, meaning, and use

In the Tractatus Wit genstein's position was that language has a unique

discoverable essence, a single underlying logic, which can be explained by

means of a structure-revealing analysis of language and the world

78

and a description of the relation the picturing relation between them. The picturing relation itself rests, at bot om, on a denotative link between names and

objects; names mean objects. The argument of the Investigations is based on

an explicit rejection of this view. Here Wit genstein says that there is not one

logic of language, but many; language has no single essence, but is a vast

col ection of dif erent practices each with its own logic. Meaning does not consist

in the denoting relation between words and things or in a picturing relation

between propositions and facts; rather, the meaning of an expression is its use

in the multiplicity of practices which go to make up language. Moreover,

language is not something complete and autonomous which can be investigated

independently of other considerations, for language is woven into al human

activities and behaviour, and accordingly our many dif erent uses of it are given

content and significance by our practical af airs, our work, our dealings with one

another and with the world we inhabit a language, in short, is part of the fabric

of an inclusive form of life.

It is important to notice that in his transitional period Wit genstein had come to a

view of the nature of philosophical method which, while retaining central features

of his Tractatus view of philosophy, dif ers from it in a crucial respect.

Understanding Wit genstein's position on this mat er does much to il uminate his

later philosophical commitments.

As noted earlier, Wit genstein's Tractatus view was that philosophical problems

arise because we misunderstand the logic of our language. This conviction

remained with Wit genstein throughout his philosophical work. What changed, as

we have just seen, is his view about what is meant by the logic of language.

But there was another change also. Wit genstein had come to think that the

problems which arise because of our misunderstandings of language cannot be

solved by constructing a systematic philosophical theory, as he had tried to do in

the Tractatus. Instead of devising theories to deal with philosophical

79

problems, he says, we should dissolve those problems by removing the

misunderstandings which cause them in the first place. We are thus to conceive

of philosophy as a therapeutic enterprise in a quite literal sense: The

philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an il ness (P 255).

In the transitional and later works, accordingly, Wit genstein abandons the

rigorously systematic method of the Tractatus and adopts instead a piecemeal

approach explicitly designed not to result in a structured theory. It is this which

gives the later works their curiously disjointed and rambling appearance in

contrast to the Tractatus's austere architecture.

Wit genstein's later view of the proper method and aims of philosophy is set out

in the Investigations. Puzzles arise, Wit genstein says, because of misuse of

language or misconceptions about its nature. If we have an incor ect view of the

way language works we shal be liable to confusions; for example, we shal

assimilate the use of one kind of expression to that of quite a dif erent kind, or

we shal mistakenly try to understand an expression in isolation from the

contexts in which it normal y does its work. The confusions which occupy us,

Wit genstein says, arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is

doing work (P 132); Philosophical problems arise when language goes on

holiday (P 38). The remedy is to look at how language actual y works:

[Philosophical problems] are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved,

rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as

to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand

them (P 109).

On this view philosophical problems wil vanish when the workings of language

are properly grasped. Until philosophers apply the remedy of looking into those

workings they are like flies trapped in a bot le, helplessly buzzing about.

Wit genstein remarks, What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way

out of the fly-bot le. And what is needed for this is a grasp of the dif erence

between what Wit genstein cal s surface grammar and depth grammar. By

grammar he does

80

not mean what is ordinarily understood by this term; rather, he means logic, more precisely the logic of a given linguistic activity. There are many dif erent

kinds of linguistic activity; therefore there are many dif erent ways in which the

grammar of language works. Philosophers become trapped in the fly-bot le, in

Wit genstein's view, as a result of noticing only surface grammar: In the use of

words one might distinguish $surface grammar% from $depth grammar% &

compare the depth grammar, say, of the word $to mean%, with what its surface

grammar would lead us to suspect. No wonder we find it dif icult to know our

way about (P 664). Accordingly Wit genstein cal s the Investigations a

grammatical enquiry: Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such an

investigation sheds light on our problems by clearing misunderstandings away

(P 90). This harks back to the Tractatus's description of philosophy as

elucidation 2 another case of continuity between Wit genstein's early and later

outlooks 2 but in the Investigations the method is intimately connected with the

views advanced, in that the content of those views just is, in a sense, that

method at work: for what Wit genstein's remarks about method come down to is

the claim that in philosophy we should not seek to explain but only to describe

(explaining amounts to constructing further theories), for we are not trying to

discover new information but, quite dif erently, to organize properly 2 and by so

doing to make ourselves understand properly 2 what we already know about our

language and thought.

What Wit genstein says about method informs his entire approach in the later

philosophy. The ef ect of that method's application becomes clear as one goes

through the main ideas of the Investigations, as we shal now see.

The first step towards a grasp of the workings of language is taken, in

Wit genstein's Investigations view, by freeing ourselves from the beguiling but

mistaken assumption that a unitary account of language can be given 2 that is,

an account which explains the whole working of

81

language in terms of a single theoretical model. His target here is of course the Tractatus; by at acking it he is able to present, in response, the Investigations

view of language as a multiplicity of dif erent activities. The at ack on the

Tractatus view of language is signal ed in the preface to the Investigations:

[Recently] I had occasion to re-read my first book " It suddenly seemed to me

that I should publish these old thoughts and the new ones together: that the

lat er could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the

background of my old way of thinking. For since beginning to occupy myself with

philosophy again " I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I

wrote in that first book.&

Wit genstein il ustrates the grave mistakes& by reference not to the Tractatus

itself but to St Augustine's account of language-learning in the Confessions. After

quoting a number of lines from Augustine's text, among which occurs the

sentence When my elders named some object " I grasped that the thing was

cal ed by the sound they ut ered&, Wit genstein says: These words, it seems to

me, give us a particular picture of human language. It is this: the individual

words in language name objects . sentences are combinations of such names. .

In this picture of language we find the roots of the fol owing idea: Every word has

a meaning. The meaning is cor elated with the word. It is the object for which the

word stands& (P 1). The theory just sketched is, of course, the Tractatus theory,

but Wit genstein uses Augustine's account to show that the conception of

language at issue is both ancient and widespread. Moreover, this conception of

language leads us, Wit genstein says, to investigate language in the wrong way;

we ask the wrong questions, specifical y questions as to the essence of

language, of propositions, of thought&, and this mistakenly suggests that the

essence& of language is not something that already lies open to view and that

becomes surveyable by a rear angement, but something that lies beneath the

surface " 6the essence is hidden from us7: this is the form our problem "

assumes& (P 92); and therefore We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena&

(P 90). And this in turn prompts

82

commitment to the misleading model of language which Witgenstein says St

Augustine and the Tractatus share, for it come[s] to look as if [we should search

for] something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single

completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of

expression were, essential y, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in

them that had to be brought to light# (P 91). Wit genstein's response to this

picture is unequivocal: it is to deny that there is any need to analyse, to discover

the essence# lying hidden in discourse. Philosophy simply puts everything before

us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. , Since everything lies open to

view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest

to us# (P 126). The key lies in a remark just quoted from P 92: the way language

works is, Wit genstein holds, something that already lies open to view, and that

becomes surveyable by a rear angement#.

What lies open to view#, Wit genstein says, is the fact that language is not one

uniform thing but a host of dif erent activities. We use language to describe,

report, inform, af irm, deny, speculate, give orders, ask questions, tel stories,

playact, sing, guess riddles, make jokes, solve problems, translate, request,

thank, greet, curse, pray, warn, reminisce, express emotions, and much else

besides (compare especial y P 23 and, for example, P 27, 180, 288, 654). Al

these dif erent activities Wit genstein cal s language-games#. Earlier, in The

Brown Book, he had used this notion to mean a simplified fragment of language,

inspection of which tel s us something about the nature of language proper. In

the Investigations the label takes on a more general signification; it means any of

the many and various language-using activities we engage in: the term

:language-game; is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of

language is part of an activity, or of a form of life# (P 23). Wit genstein talks of

the multiplicity of language-games#, and in P 23, directly after giving a list of

language-games (much as set out above), says: It is interesting to compare the

multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity

of kinds of words and sentences, with what logicians have said about the

structure

83

of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.) The comparison is one to be drawn between the great diversity of language-games

and the false view of the logicians and the Tractatus's author that language has

a single underlying logical structure.

Wit genstein's use of the term game is not intended to suggest that the dif erent

linguistic activities of reporting, describing, asking, and the rest are in some way

frivolous or unimportant. They are, of course, earnest. His reason for employing

the notion is given in this passage:

Consider & the proceedings we cal games. I mean board-games,

cardgames, bal games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to

them al ? ) Don't say: There must be something common or they would

not al be cal ed +games, but look and see whether there is something

common to al , for if you look at them you wil not see something that is in

common to al , but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at

that & And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network

of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing & I can think of no bet er

expression to characterize these similarities than family resemblances; for

the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features,

colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc., overlap and criss-cross in the

same way. ) And I shal say: games form a family. (P 66)7)

The point Wit genstein is urging in saying that language is a col ection of

language-games is, as we have seen, precisely that language has no single

essence which can be unearthed and stated in terms of a unitary theory. To

understand the workings of language we must first therefore recognize its variety

and multiplicity ) Instead of producing something common to al that we cal

language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common

which makes us use the same word for al , ) but that they are related to one

another in many dif erent ways (P 65). Once this is clear, in Wit genstein's view,

we see why it is wrong to think of meaning as he had thought of it in the

Tractatus: there the

84

claim was that the meaning of a word is the object it denotes; here, in the

Investigations, it is that the meaning of an expression is the use to which it can

be put in one or another of the many and various language games constituting

language: the meaning of a word is its use in the language (P 43).

In the early sections of the Investigations, fol owing his quotation from Augustine,

Wit genstein shows why the denotative theory of meaning adopted in the

Tractatus is intrinsicaly flawed. His argument is, in outline, that if the meanings

of words consisted in a denotative link with objects, then that link would have to

be set up by ostensive definition, that is, by indicating an object * typical y, by

pointing one's finger at it * and ut ering its name. This is the view Wit genstein

takes Augustine to hold. But ostension cannot serve as the foundation for

language learning because in order to understand that an object is being named

the learner would have to be in command of at least part of language already *

namely, the language-game of naming objects. The point can be explained like

this: suppose you are teaching a non-English speaker the word table, and that

you do so by ut ering the word while ostending (pointing at) a table. Why should

he take it that you are naming the object rather than, say, describing its colour,

its function, or the polish of its surface, or even ordering him to crawl under it?

Of course the language-learner in this example, since he already has command

of his own language, may wel take it that the language game in question is that

of naming objects; but for a first-time learner no such knowledge is available.

How then could language begin to be learned if meaning is denoting and thus

dependent on ostensive definitions?

What Wit genstein wishes us to see as a result of his critique of ostensive

definition are the fol owing implications: first, that naming is not, contrary to the

Tractatus theory, the basis of meaning, and secondly that the naming relation

itself is not simply a mat er of ostensively established cor elations between

sounds (or marks) and

85

objects, but has to be understood in terms of the way names and naming enter into our linguistic activities. The first point is a cautionary one, for in the

Tractatus al language had been explained in terms of the denotative model, and

now in the Investigations Wit genstein is showing that this model simply cannot

serve as the paradigm for explaining how the whole of language works that,

indeed, it is a source of er or and perplexity to try to make it so serve. The

second point connects with the concept of meaning as use; this is a central

feature of the Investigations and what it involves requires explanation.

There is, deliberately, no systematic !use theory of meaning" in the

Investigations. Wit genstein's appeal to the concept of use is intentional y broad

for the reason that uses of expressions are as various as the language-games in

which they occur, and therefore no single formula can capture their variety.

Indeed, there is nothing sacrosanct about the term !use" itself; Wit genstein, in

addition, talks of the functions of words and sentences (P 11, 17, 274, 556, 559),

of their aims and purposes (for example, P 5, 6, 8, 348), their of ices (P 402),

and of their roles and employments (for example, P 66 f .), intending by these

dif erent locutions to capture a general notion of the part expressions play in

language, the central idea being that mastery of a language consists in being

able to employ its expressions in the many dif erent language-games to which

they belong. In view of the multiplicity of language-games it is inevitable that the

concept of use should in this way be a broad one and that therefore no single

formula can be found to encapsulate it. Nor, indeed, should it be treated as a

formula itself; the slogan !meaning is use" is not, for Wit genstein, a definition of

meaning. To grasp its ful purport one has to understand something more of

Wit genstein's discussion in the Investigations, specifical y in connection with his

views about the relation between meaning and understanding and his argument

that understanding is not an inner mental state or process but !mastery of a

technique" (P 199); and that the technique in question consists in fol owing the

rules for the use of expressions.

86

One of these maters was mentioned in the preceding section in connection with Wit genstein's transitional period. This is that Wit genstein came to reject the

idea that one's understanding something by an expression consists in one's

going through an inner mental process. Wit genstein is particularly concerned to

reject the notion that in grasping meaning there is something lying before one's

mind a picture or image, as the Tractatus suggests; for understanding a word

is not an experience like seeing red or feeling a pain (P 140, 154, 21718). This

is not to deny that there might be experiences accompanying understanding a

certain word might evoke an image or, because of memory associations, say, a

pleasant feeling but these do not constitute the word's meaning or one's

understanding of it. Wit genstein is here rejecting the empiricist view that

meaning is grounded in sensory experience; and for Wit genstein the

consequence of his rejecting this view is that two theses fol ow; first, that one

does not teach the meaning of words by set ing up an association in the

learner's mind between the word and an experience of some object or situation,

and secondly that our at aching meaning to an expression on dif erent occasions

of using it does not consist in having the same experience or going through the

same mental process each time.

Wit genstein gives several reasons for rejecting the inner state/process view of

understanding. One is that the logic (the grammar, as he puts it) of the

concepts of meaning and understanding dif ers from that of experiential

concepts. Consider pain: this is an experience, and we can talk of pain lasting

for a long or a short time, of being in one's toe or in one's head, of being intense

or dul . We cannot say any of these things about understanding an expression;

we do not understand an expression for a long time, or in our toes, or intensely.

Another reason is that dif erent people associate dif erent images with, or have

dif erent reactions to, the same expression; accordingly the meaning of the

expression cannot consist in these mental accompaniments, nor can one's

understanding of the expression do so (cf. P 1378). A third reason, and

perhaps the most important, is that it is not enough for an

87

understanding of an expression that a particular inner mental process should be going on. To il ustrate what he means by this Wit genstein gives the example of

one's using the word cube, and says that it is a mistake to think that having a

mental picture of a cube before one's mind is what one's understanding the

word consists in, because the mental picture does not and cannot by itself tel

one what the word cube means. The mental image of a cube could indeed be

associated with any number of expressions box, sugar, geometry, whisky

on the rocks and therefore it does not dictate how the word cube is to be

cor ectly understood (P 139 40); we cannot, that is to say, read of from any of

the associable images what the word's meaning is.

These considerations give rise to another, more general, mat er. This is that

some philosophers, recognizing the kind of dif iculty Wit genstein is here pointing

out, and therefore finding it dif icult to identify understanding with particular

mental processes, have been tempted to think that there is a special kind of

underlying (and therefore hidden) mental process which constitutes grasping the

meaning of an expression that is, a process which takes al the pictures or

associations (or a focal subset of them) which go to make up the meaning of

that expression, and combines them, in some way, into something which it is

dif icult to specify and which, therefore, can only be elicited and inspected by a

penetrative philosophical analysis. Wit genstein rejects this outright; indeed the

main target of his at ack on the inner state/process conception is the view that

understanding is something hidden, is not just inner (in the mind) but deep in

the mind.

Having said what meaning and understanding are not, Wit genstein proceeds to

give a positive account of what they are. Here the concept of understanding is

central. Wit genstein says: To understand a sentence means to understand a

language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique (P

199). This says that understanding is knowing how to do something; in the case

of language, understanding language means knowing how to use it. Thus

88

the connection between understanding, meaning, and use is an intimate one.

Two immediate implications are these: first, another reason for Wit genstein's

rejection of the inner process conception becomes apparent it is that this

conception of ers nothing to explain how we are able to use expressions. By

contrast the notion of understanding as something we do an ability we

exercise, a technique we employ is directly associated with the notion of use,

given that using is itself an activity. The second implication is that understanding,

as a practical capacity, is something that is recognized and measured by

outward criteria by the activity people engage in, by how they behave and

therefore, far from being inner or private to the mental life of an individual, it is

something which exists out in the open, in the public domain. This has important

corol aries, as we shal now see.

Understanding and rule-following

Wit genstein's account of language-understanding, where understanding is

mastery of a technique or practice in the way just explained, turns on the notion

of fol owing a rule, the idea being that the practice in which understanding the

meaning of expressions consists is that of observing the rules for their use in the

dif erent language-games they belong to (note that talk of rules is natural y and

intentional y al ied to that of games). Wit genstein's discussion of rulefol owing

occurs mainly in P 143242. It is not a straightforward mat er, and is accordingly

the subject of much debate; the fol owing account of it should be read with this in

mind.

One way of approaching Wit genstein's discussion of rule-fol owing is, once

again, to recal that part of the Investigations' purpose is the negative one of

repudiating philosophical at itudes of the kind exemplified in the Tractatus. Now,

language-use is clearly a rule-governed activity, a normative activity, as

philosophers say. The model adopted by Wit genstein in the Tractatus to

describe the normative

89

character of language was that of a calculus, that is, a structured system of strictly defined rules (the rules of logic) which function automatical y. Such a

calculus is like a machine which, fed with certain raw materials, manufactures a

determinate product in an exact, orderly, and unvarying manner. In the same

way, the rules of logic and therefore, on the Tractatus view, the rules of

language have a strict application which determines outcome. In the case of

language the outcome is meaning: one understands the meaning of an

expression when one has mastery of the rules for its use. This conception

Wit genstein does not deny in the Investigations, of course, for the later

philosophy turns on it; what he denies is that the rules in question form a single,

rigid underlying system and, even more importantly, that they are in some way

independent of us, as the Tractatus had implied. In other words, Wit genstein

rejects the notion of a calculus and replaces it with that of a language-game: in

the Tractatus there is a single, strictly uniform calculus underlying the whole of

language; in the Investigations there are many dif erent language-games whose

&grammars' lie open to inspection.

In the Tractatus, and in the &Augustinian' view of language general y, the idea is

that the rules for the cor ect use of a word are in some way determined by the

nature of the object denoted by that word, for it is only in this way that the

meaning of the word (the denoted object) can govern that word's use.

Wit genstein rejects the denotative theory; this leaves the meaning of the word

solely a mat er of the rules for its use. But now that there is only the word and

its use-rules at stake, it is important not to be misled by the notion of rules itself,

for there is a common view about, for example, the rules of logic and

mathematics which has it that those rules dictate whether or not we are doing

something cor ectly, independently of our practice of applying or fol owing those

rules; and this in Wit genstein's view is a mistake, not only in itself but because it

car ies with it the thought that a set of rules constitutes a complete and decisive

calculus for a given practice, in the sense that once one has mastered those

rules one can read of from

90

them, in an automatic way, the corectness or otherwise of what one does. The model of the rules of logic is in Wit genstein's view particularly harmful as applied

to language because there is an enormous diversity of rules governing the use

of expressions in language, whereas in logic there is a single, al -embracing, and

rigid set of rules constituting the language in which logic consists.

The calculus conception treats two features of rules and rule-fol owing in a way

that gives rise to the problems Wit genstein wishes us to avoid. One is that in

obeying a rule one has the sense of being guided or coerced by the rule; the

rule seems to tel one what to do, to dictate one's activity. The other is that in a

calculus like, say, arithmetic the rules determine in advance what outcomes wil

flow from applying them: for example, it is tempting to think that once I have

defined (given the rules governing) the ten numbers 0(9, the operations of

addition and subtraction, and the relation of equality, the whole of arithmetic

automatical y fol ows ( it is as if every arithmetical truth (and falsehood) is

already contained in, or set led by, those basic rules. Accordingly, it seems that

there is something inexorable about the rules which makes the cor ectness or

otherwise of what I do whol y independent of my doing it. (Each member of a

class of schoolchildren might add up a column of figures using dif erent

procedures ( some in their heads, some on their fingers, others with a calculator

or an abacus ( but there wil be a uniquely right answer at which those who

fol ow the relevant arithmetical rules cor ectly wil ar ive; and this answer was the

right one before they began adding.)

A problem with the notion of rule-fol owing is that on the one hand the feeling of

being guided by a rule does not guarantee that the rule is being fol owed, for

someone might think he is fol owing a rule but in fact be applying it incor ectly;

while on the other hand someone's acting in accordance with a rule may be a

merely coincidental mat er ( that person might not be fol owing the rule at al ; he

might, for example, even be ignorant of its existence. Yet both the guiding

function of rules,

91

and the fact that observance of them constitutes doing things corectly in

whatever activity is at issue, appear to be essential to the very notion of rules

and rule-fol owing. Accordingly, says Wit genstein, espousers of the calculus

conception at empt to explain these features, and to surmount the problems

associated with them, by looking for a unitary account of what underlies rule-

fol owing, typicaly by thinking of rule fol owing as an inner mental process; and

further, by giving this account in terms of some sort of mental mechanism

more than likely, a causal one. Al of this is, says Wit genstein, a mistake; his

reasons, once again, are those he advances against the at empt to give a

unitary account of anything to do with meaning and understanding, stil more one

which proceeds in terms of inner! and hidden! processes of mind.

These strictures apply more to that feature of rule-fol owing which involves the

subjective sense one has of rules being coercive or action-guiding. The other

feature mentioned the apparent independence! of rules suggests,

Wit genstein says, the spurious view that rules somehow give rise to objectivity.

The arithmetical example wel demonstrates what this means: as noted, the rules

of arithmetic seem to set le, in advance, what is right and what is wrong in the

results of our applying them. Thus there is a uniquely cor ect answer to the

arithmetical question 56,897 + 54,214 =?!, and this answer is in a sense there,

set led by what the rules permit even before we work the calculation. We check

the cor ectness of our application of the rules by determining what they (the

rules) say; the standards of cor ectness imposed by the rules thus appear to be

external to our observance of them because they are not dependent on our

activity of applying them for what they determine as cor ect.

The two features of rules upon which the calculus view concentrates are, of

course, related: it is the externality or objectivity! of the rules which gives us the

sense of being led or guided by them. Together these two features give rise to

the presumption that rules are like railway lines along which we move in a fixed

direction (P 218) or like a machine which

92

works in a determined and determining way (P 1934). Witgenstein's objection is not to the fact that rules are guiding or constitutive of cor ectness; rather, his

objection is to the $railway track% or $machine% models themselves, on the grounds

that they turn the concept of guidance, as we have seen, into that of coercion,

and the concept of a standard of cor ectness into that of something $external and

objective%. What Wit genstein emphasizes is the crucial fact that what constitutes

a rule is our col ective use of it; rule-fol owing is a general practice established by

agreement, custom, and training. Therefore, although rules indeed guide us and

af ord us with our measures of cor ectness, they are not independent of us and

hence do not constitute a coercive standard imposed from outside our rule-

fol owing practices themselves. Wit genstein gives us an example: consider a

signpost such as one might find at a crossroads or on a footpath. The signpost

tel s one what direction to take, but not because it coerces one to go there; its

guiding function rests upon the fact that there is a custom, a practice, which

establishes the use we make of signposts in general and our understanding of

what that function is. And this is just what we are to understand by $rule% in the

case of language $A rule stands there like a signpost% (P 85, cf. P 198).

The key notion here is that of a $custom%. Wit genstein says a person goes by a

signpost only in so far as there exists a regular use of signposts, a custom (P

198); $The application of the concept 0fol owing a rule1 presupposes a custom% (R

p. 322). By employing the notion of a custom (he elsewhere uses the

expressions $Institution%, $use%, $practice% to mean the same thing) Wit genstein

intends to make a number of points, two of which are especial y important. One

is the by now familiar claim that, in opposition to the view of the calculus theory,

rule-fol owing is not an inner mental activity, something hidden, but is a public

mat er; when someone sees a signpost and goes in the direction it indicates, he

is not internal y obeying a rule and then, as a second step which fol ows causal y

or in some related way from the first $internal% step of obeying, behaving in

accordance with it: his taking the direction

93

indicated by the signpost just is his folowing the relevant rule. Rule-folowing is not therefore a mysterious activity at al ; it shows itself in our practice, it is

manifest. To understand rules and rule-fol owing we have only to remind

ourselves of what is familiar in al our many dif erent kinds of normative

behaviour (playing chess, cooking from a recipe, doing arithmetic, and so on, as

wel as using language in al the many dif erent kinds of language-games there

are). The other point is that rule-fol owing is essential y a social practice, that is,

something which exists in a community; and that it is the existence of agreement

in the community which establishes the rules we fol ow: Wit genstein says, $The

word %agreement& and the word %rule& are related to one another, they are

cousins. If I teach anyone the use of the one word, he learns the use of the

other with it( (P 224). The fact that rule-fol owing is essential y a community-

based activity entails that nothing can count as a $private( observance of a rule ,

there cannot be a Robinson Crusoe who lays down and thereafter observes a

certain rule, for such a person could not know from one occasion to the next that

he was indeed observing the rule, he may wel think that he was doing so, but

he has no means of checking. Whether someone is fol owing a rule or not

depends upon the availability of public criteria for his doing so: $And hence also

%obeying a rule& is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a

rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule %privately&: otherwise thinking one

was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it( (P 202). (The notions

of privacy and $criteria( are important ones for Wit genstein and I revert to them

below.)

In addition to insisting on the essential y communal nature of rules and rule-

fol owing based on agreement, Wit genstein insists that the idea of a $custom( be

taken literal y, as something regular, repeated, established. He says: $The

application of the concept %fol owing a rule& presupposes a custom. Hence it

would be nonsense to say: just once in the history of the world someone

fol owed a rule (or a signpost; played a game, ut ered a sentence, or understood

one; and so on)( (R pp. 322,3).

94

Since rules rest on the agreed and accepted practices of a community, they are, says Wit genstein, their own justification. There is no extrinsic or objective factor

present in rule-fol owing other than the constraint which lies in the fact that one

is not fol owing a given rule if one's activity fails to conform to the community's

practice in that case. This separates Wit genstein's view from the Tractatus

conception of there being something set over against language and constituting

the objective restraint on it; in the Investigations his view is that it is a mistake to

look for some form of external justification or grounding for our practices. The

justification or grounding is in our practices themselves; in a related connection

Wit genstein says, "Giving grounds $ comes to an end $ the end $ is our

acting, which lies at the bot om of the language-game% (OC 204). This enables

him to say further that fol owing a rule is something we do unreflectively (R p.

422) or even blindly: "When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule

blindly% (P 219). What he means can be grasped by considering, say, chess;

there is no answer to the question "Why does the king move only one square at

a time?%, for if it is chess one is playing then that simply is the rule. In ef ect,

therefore, Wit genstein's view is that rule-fol owing is an habitual practice, one in

which we are trained as juvenile members of our linguistic community: "Fol owing

a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so% (P 206). He

puts this point more explicitly in the Blue and Brown Books (p. 77): "The child

learns this language from the grown-ups by being trained to its use. I am using

the word 9trained: in a way strictly analogous to that in which we talk of an

animal being trained to do certain things.%

‘Forms of life’, private language, and criteria

Taking the considerations of the preceding two sections together, we can

describe Wit genstein's theory of meaning and understanding as fol ows. The

meaning of an expression is what we understand when we understand that

expression. Understanding consists in knowing the expression's use across the

variety of language-games in which it

95

occurs. Knowing its use is having an ability: the ability to folow the rules for its use in those dif erent language-games. Rule-fol owing is not a mysterious inner

process of grasping something like a calculus which objectively imposes

standards of cor ectness; rather, it is a practice embedded in the customs and

agreements of a community and as such is essential y public. Rules do indeed

guide and provide standards of cor ectness, but they do so because they are

based on agreement; to fol ow a rule cor ectly is to conform to the established

practices of the community. We acquire the ability to use expressions, to fol ow

the rules for their use, by our training as members of that community.

This summary is intended to bring out the connections between the notions of

meaning, understanding, use, rules, and their basis in agreement within a

community of language users. But one should not take it to imply that it is

possible to understand expressions individual y, for in Wit genstein's view it

makes no sense to say that someone understands just one or a few sentences,

or that he fol ows just one or a few rules. To understand any given sentence is

to understand the language-games of which it is part; cor elatively, to fol ow a

rule is to have mastery of the practice of rule-fol owing itself.

One immediate problem that suggests itself in Wit genstein's account of meaning

and understanding is that if the use-rules for a language are the product of

agreement among members of the linguistic community, with no external

objective restraints on that usage in the shape of 'the facts( or 'the world(, does it

fol ow that truth is the product of our agreements also? Wit genstein is aware of

this problem and has a response: '*So are you saying that human agreement

decides what is true and what is false?, - It is what human beings say that is

true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not an

agreement in opinions but in form of life( (P 241, emphasis added).

This concept of 'forms of life( plays an important part in Wit genstein's later

philosophy, for it is the notion he appeals to whenever his enquiry

96

reaches a point at which other philosophers would be tempted to begin looking for deeper or more fundamental justifications for the concepts deployed in our

thought and talk. What Wit genstein means by a form of life is this: it is the

underlying consensus of linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviour, assumptions,

practices, traditions, and natural propensities which humans, as social beings,

share with one another, and which is therefore presupposed in the language

they use; language is woven into that pat ern of human activity and character,

and meaning is confer ed on its expressions by the shared outlook and nature of

its users (cf. P 19, 23, 241, P I , pp. 174, 226). Thus a form of life consists in the

community's concordance of natural and linguistic responses, which issue in

agreement in definitions and judgements and therefore behaviour. Because the

foundation, so to speak, of the practices which language-use consists in is the

form of life into which that language is woven, it fol ows for Wit genstein that

questions about the ultimate explanation or justification of the concepts

embodied in our thought and talk very soon come to an end 1 what justifies our

usages is the shared form of life underlying them, and that is that: no more

either need be or indeed can be said. The form of life is the frame of reference

we learn to work within when trained in the language of our community; learning

that language is thus learning the outlook, assumptions, and practices with which

that language is inseparably bound and from which its expressions get their

meaning. And this is why explanation and justification neither need to nor can go

beyond a gesture towards the form of life: If I have exhausted the justification I

have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 3This

is simply what I do4 (P 217); What has to be accepted, the given is 1 so one

could say 1 forms of life (P I p. 226).

The notion of a form of life is closely connected with what Wit genstein insists is

the essential y public character of language, a theme in the later philosophy

which appears, as we have seen, in his rejection of the idea that meaning and

understanding, and hence rule-fol owing, are inner, hidden states or processes

of mind. Wit genstein advances an

97

argument in this connection which has not so far been mentioned but which has assumed great importance in the literature on the Investigations. This is the

Private Language Argument, the burden of which is that there can be no such

thing as a language invented by and intel igible to a single individual only. That

this is so fol ows immediately from Wit genstein's view that language is

essential y public, a view he maintains because of al the considerations

discussed above; but in P 243%363 Wit genstein gives the private language

question an extended treatment for an important additional reason. This is that in

the tradition of philosophy beginning with Descartes it is held that the starting

point for al knowledge and explanation lies in our direct acquaintance with our

own experience and states of mind. Thus Descartes' starting point is the I think,

recognition of which guarantees I exist; for the empiricists it is sensory

experience and our reflection upon it which provides the basis for our beliefs

about the existence of external things and other minds. On these views a private

language is eminently possible, for they permit the thought (in some cases, they

start from the thought) of a Robinson-Crusoe-from-birth who constructs a

language by means of private, inner ostensive definitions linking words with

experiences. In a related way, the idea of a private language is implicated in our

standard conception of how we come to have in our language expressions

refer ing to our own pains, moods, feelings, and the rest, given that these are

private to us: no one else can have access to such states unless their

possessors give expression to them in language or behaviour; no one else can

experience my moods or pains, or even detect their existence if I do not wish it.

Since this is so we come to think that we name our sensations by means of an

inner ostension, as though when we have a stomachache we point inwards and

say this is a stomach-ache. And this suggests that an individual could construct

a language for speaking to himself about his sensations and inner life which is in

principle closed to everyone else % the in principle means that such a language

is not merely a secret code which no one else as a mat er of fact understands

but which could be cracked, like the Enigma code or Pepys' Diary, but

98

which cannot be understood by anyone other than its speaker: a language, in short, which is logical y private to its speaker.

It is against this conception of a logical y private language that Wit genstein

inveighs in the sections of the Investigations mentioned. The primary reason has

already been given: to understand a language is to be able to fol ow the rules for

its use, and nothing can count as private rule-fol owing for otherwise there would

be no distinction between fol owing a rule and merely thinking, perhaps

mistakenly, that one is fol owing a rule (P 202). But there are other reasons. For

Wit genstein, to speak a language is, as we have seen, to participate in a form

of life; coming to share a form of life consists in being trained to share it; such

training obviously has to take place in public, for otherwise it is not a training in

the sharing of the form of life which gives meaning to language (cf. P 244, 257,

283). From this it fol ows that both -private. experience and the language we use

to speak of it are in fact neither of them private; there are and have to be public

criteria for the application of expressions about pain, moods, and the rest, in

order for there to be such expressions at al . One way to make this clear,

Wit genstein says, is to consider how we use the word -pain. in talking of

ourselves. On the view he rejects, -pain. is the name of a certain kind of

sensation, and we come to give that name to that kind of sensation by an act of

inner ostension. But ostensive definition, as we saw above, is something that

works only in the context of a previously understood convention or language-

game in which pointing, ut ering a sound, and so on, are recognized by the

participants to constitute the process of at aching a denoting label to some item.

There can be no such previously established language-game here. Since -pain.

is not linked with the relevant kind of sensation by ostension, it does not denote

at al ; -pain. is not a label. How then is it connected with the sensations we use it

to talk about? Wit genstein says that -one possibility. is that talk of pain is a

learned substitute for the groaning and wincing which is the natural expression of

pain (P 245, 2567); -A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk

to him and teach him exclamations and,

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later, sentences (P 244). The idea is that what we typicaly think of as private states and processes pain, anger, and the rest are features of our human

nature which therefore have natural expressions in behaviour (a baby, for

example, is able to inform us of its pain and rage by means other than

language), and that the linguistic devices we use to talk of them are publicly

learned replacements for that behaviour.

This view establishes a link between how we use talk of pain in our own cases

and how we use it to talk about others' pain. On one traditional view, the way we

come to think of ourselves as having justification, in appropriate circumstances,

for ascribing pain or kindred &inner states to others is by analogy with our own

cases: if I prick my finger and it bleeds and I groan, inwardly feeling pain, then if

someone else pricks his finger, bleeds, and groans, I infer that he must inwardly

be feeling pain likewise. But this argument it is cal ed &the argument from

analogy is a weak one; it does not logical y guarantee the inference I draw to

the other's inner states, for he might be dissimulating or acting, or may even be

a cleverly contrived robot which feels nothing. This is the source of scepticism

about other minds: how, given that the &argument from analogy does not work,

can I claim to be justified in believing that there are any minds other than my

own in the universe? Wit genstein's view constitutes an answer to this problem.

The rules for the use of &pain and other psychological expressions, he says, are

public ones, which apply equal y when the talk is of myself or of others; there are

not two sets of rules for such expressions, one governing self-ascription and the

other governing other-ascription of the states in question. Consequently, my

grounds for saying that someone else is in pain are af orded by his behaviour

together with my grasp of the rules for using the word &pain.

This view is not to be understood as a straightforward &behaviourist theory of the

kind which says that the meaning of &pain just is the set of bodily signs in which

wincing and groaning consist. Rather, Wit genstein says, these signs are &criteria

for application of the word &pain; what I also know about such behaviour is that it

can be pretence,

100

dissimulation, and so on. Understanding this is part of understanding pain-talk.

But given this understanding, the way such behaviour enters into the web of our

activities and practices, and the relation of these to our nature, tel s me when it

is appropriate to say that another is in pain (and also when to say this is a case

of pretence and the like).

Wit genstein's notion of a criterion has at racted much discussion. It is the

notion of a species of justification or war ant for employing expressions, a

war ant which lies half-way between deductive and inductive grounds for the use

of expressions. What this means can be explained in the fol owing way.

Deductive grounds are those which would entail or conclusively set le that use

of a given expression is demanded whenever those grounds are present, for the

reason that those grounds exhaustively constitute the sense of that expression.

An example of this view is the crude behaviourism just mentioned; an espouser

of such a view would take the fact that someone winces and groans to entail that

he is in pain. But this is far too strong a theory, for in identifying the grounds for

saying he is in pain with the meaning of pain the deductivist overlooks those

other considerations, such as pretence and the rest, which show that the

meaning of the word cannot be defined as the grounds for its application.

By contrast, inductive grounds are those in which someone's wincing and

groaning count as mere symptoms or clues on the basis of which it might be

infer ed that he is in pain. Such clues wil not themselves be part of the meaning

of the word pain, however, which on the inductivist view is something denoted

by pain * something private and hidden in that person's subjectivity * namely,

the inner, private feeling of pain. On the inductivist's view the link between

wincing and groaning, on the one hand, and the inner experience of pain, on the

other, is a merely contingent one.

Wit genstein's talk of criteria, as noted, is designed to fal between these two

views. Our understanding of the part played by wincing and

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groaning (the behavioural signs) in manifesting pain is, he says, part of our grasp of the meaning of the word pain such signs are not merely contingent

symptoms of pain but at the same time they are not deductive grounds for

ascribing pain to someone who winces and groans, because our understanding

of pain also comprehends those cases where such behaviour is not a

manifestation of pain. In short, the criteria for ascribing pain are given by the

language-game of which pain ascriptions are a part, and it is the practice of

experiencing, recognizing, and talking about pain which we learn when we learn

how to use the word pain.

Discussion of the private language question and the issue of pain, moods, and

other putatively private mental states takes us into the realm of Wit genstein's

philosophy of mind or, as it is often cal ed, his philosophical psychology. What

Wit genstein has to say in this connection is a very important corol ary of his

views about meaning and understanding in the opinion of some commentators

it is indeed the basis of his philosophy of language and it is necessary

therefore to consider them a lit le further, as fol ows.

Mind and knowledge

In the Tractatus Wit genstein dismisses psychological questions, among which

he includes questions about experience and knowledge, as empirical and

therefore as part not of philosophy but of science. For this reason he barely

mentions such mat ers in the Tractatus. In the later philosophy, in sharp contrast,

they occupy centre stage along with the discussion of meaning. It is entirely

natural that they should do so, given Wit genstein's concern to argue that

understanding the meaning of expressions in language does not consist in

private mental states or processes; for his view implies that there is something

wrong not just with this way of thinking about understanding but with the very

idea of private mental states in general. Accordingly, starting with The Blue

Book but chiefly in the Investigations, Zet el, and elsewhere among the

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later writings, Witgenstein atacks the idea that the concepts of experience, thought, feeling, intention, expectation, and the rest, are concepts of what is

inner and private, accessible only to the individual who possesses them.

It was mentioned earlier that the view Wit genstein is at acking is one which has

been dominant in the history of philosophy since Descartes. This view accords to

subjective experience a peculiar primacy and importance. It says that what we

are directly acquainted with are our own private states of mind, about whose

contents and character, because of their immediacy, we have completely certain

knowledge; and these states, including among them sensory experiences, af ord

us with the starting point of al our knowledge and belief not just about ourselves

but about everything outside ourselves also, chiefly the external world and other

minds. In Descartes' philosophy the starting point is the ego, of whose existence

one cannot help but be certain; for the empiricists it is sensory experience which

serves as the incor igible basis for our beliefs about the world. On this

conception first-person knowledge of psychological states is whol y

unproblematic, whereas third-person knowledge of them is quite otherwise; the

reason is that detecting such states in others % even, indeed, being justified in

taking it that such states exist outside oneself % is at best a mat er of inference

from the intrinsical y unreliable clues af orded by the overt signs, behaviour, and

so on, which others manifest.

In at acking this Cartesian thesis, Wit genstein inverts the order of dif iculty: it is

not the question of third-person ascriptions of psychological states which is

problematic, he says, for such ascriptions work on the relatively straightforward

basis of public criteria for the use of psychological terms, as described above in

connection with (pain). Rather, what needs investigation is the first-person case,

for it is here, Wit genstein says, that a fundamental mistake is being made by

Descartes and others in the philosophical tradition; namely, that firstperson

ascriptions of psychological states ( I have a pain), (I expect

103

that , I hope that , I intend to ) are reports or descriptions of essentialy private inner goings on. Wit genstein denies that these locutions are any such

thing, and argues instead that they are manifestations or expressions forming

part of the behaviour to which the psychological concepts at issue apply. The

key concept here is that of expression.

What Wit genstein means by expression is set out in his investigation of first-

person talk of pain. At P 244, already quoted in part, he says how does a

human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations? ) of the word

*pain+ for example. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the

primitive, the natural expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A

child has hurt himself and cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him

exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour.

Wit genstein's claim is that someone's saying I am in pain is a manifestation of

his pain; it is not an outer sign of something else which is occur ing internal y,

but is itself part of his pain-behaviour. It is an expression of pain in the way that

groaning and wincing are expressions of pain, but it is a learned substitute for

those more primitive expressions. Despite the phrase here is one possibility in

the quotation given above, which suggests that first-person psychological talk

might be understood in other ways too, Wit genstein applies this conception of

expression across the board. Of wishing, expecting, and remembering ) to take

just three examples from the whole range of psychological concepts )

Wit genstein says: By nature and a particular training we are disposed to give

spontaneous expression to wishes in certain circumstances (P 441); The

statement *I am expecting a bang at any moment+ is an expression of

expectation (P 253); The words with which I express my memory are my

memory reaction (P 343). Thus, sometimes part of what it is to wish for

something is to say I wish , and sometimes part of what it is to expect

something is to say I am expecting . Expectation can be expressed in other

ways too; one might feel tense, or pace up and down, or look at one's watch

often; but

104

saying I am expecting is not something diferent from such behaviour

neither, stil less, is it a report or description of it it is part of it. Of course the

verbal behaviour is, because learned, more complex than the primitive

behaviour in which pacing up and down consists; Wit genstein takes the view

that a command of language introduces levels of richness and subtlety

unavailable to non-language-using creatures: A dog believes his master is at the

door. But can he also believe his master wil come the day after tomor ow? (P I

p. 174). But the dif erence between verbal behaviour and the other behaviour is

one of degree, not of kind; verbal behaviour is an extension of the natural

expressions of expectation, pain, and so on, which take the form of pacing or

wincing as the case may be.

Wit genstein's reason for thinking this way about psychological concepts is of

course that the meaning of words like pain, expectation, and the rest cannot

be fixed by private inner ostension, a point established, in Wit genstein's view, by

the private-language argument. Rather, like al words, their meaning is their use,

and their use is set led by the publicly agreed rules for their use in the shared

form of life upon which the possibility of that agreement rests. Accordingly, the

application of psychological terms is uniform; there is not one set of rules for

third-person applications and another for first-person applications. The rules are

the same and turn on the same public criteria; nothing is hidden. In just the way

therefore that first-person ascriptions of psychological terms turn on their being

expressions of pain, expectation, or whatever, and therefore parts of pain, etc.,

behaviour itself, so third-person ascriptions of them are expressions of our

behaviour towards others: Being sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether

he is, and so on, are so many natural, instinctive kinds of behaviour towards

other human beings, and our language is merely an auxiliary to, and further

extension of, this relation. Our language-game is an extension of the primitive

behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour) (Z 545). And this means in

Wit genstein's view that there is no sceptical problem about other minds of the

kind

105

which has dogged philosophy since Descartes, because the considerations just mentioned dealing with the public criteria constituting the sense of

psychological terms and therefore our war ant for their use show that al states

thought of as essential y inner by traditional philosophers have, and must have,

outer criteria; and that one can, in a quite ordinary and unmysterious way,

literal y just look and see what state someone is in: Consciousness in another's

face. Look into someone else's face, and see the consciousness in it, and a

particular shade of consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indif erence, interest,

excitement, torpor, and so on ' Do you look into yourself in order to recognize

the fury in his face? It is there as clearly as in your own breast (Z 220);

Consciousness is as clear in his face and behaviour, as in myself (Z 221); 1We

see emotion3 as opposed to what? We do not see facial contortions and make

inferences from them (like a doctor framing a diagnosis) to joy, grief, boredom.

We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are

unable to give any other description of the features. Grief, we would like to

say, is personified in the face. This belongs to the concept of emotion (Z 225).

A major corol ary of al these points is, for Wit genstein, that they force us to

reconsider another extremely important philosophical concept, namely that of

knowledge. In the tradition of philosophy it was held that the special primacy of

our acquaintance with our own psychological states furnishes the foundation for

whatever else we can come to know or at least believe with justification; for on

the traditional view we know with certainty the content of our own thoughts,

experiences, and so on, but have to draw more or less doubtful inferences from

these to whatever lies outside them. Wit genstein argues, in opposition to this

view, that the use thus being made of the concept of knowledge is whol y

mistaken, for the reason that we can only know what it makes sense to doubt,

and that since whenever one is in pain or expects to hear a bang one cannot

doubt that one is in pain or expects to hear a bang, one therefore cannot claim

to know that one is in pain or has that expectation. This point is best il ustrated

by looking at Wit genstein's

106

response to certain theses advanced by G. E. Moore on the subject of

knowledge and certainty.

In a wel -known paper entitled Proof of an External World" Moore argues that

there are a number of propositions which he can know with ut er certainty to be

true. One is that he has two hands; the proof" (if one is needed) is, he says, that

he can hold his hands aloft and display them. And there are therefore many

other such propositions which can be known with equal certainty. Moore is here

al uding critical y to Descartes' claim in the Meditations that whereas one can be

certain, whenever one thinks of it, of one's own existence as a thinking thing" (a

mind), it can legitimately be doubted whether one has hands and a body"

(Meditations I). In Moore's common-sense" philosophy such doubts are refutable

with the greatest ease; proof that there are hands is as simple a mat er as

displaying them. Wit genstein, although siding with the tenor of Moore's down-to-

earth rejection of Cartesian views on knowledge and doubt, argues that both

Moore and Descartes are mistaken in their thinking about these concepts. His

reason, as indicated, is that it is senseless to lay claim to knowledge where

doubt itself is senseless; since in al but rare and unfortunate circumstances the

question whether one has hands simply does not and cannot sensibly arise, the

assertion I know that I have hands" therefore involves a misuse of know".

Wit genstein's case for this turns on considerations about the nature of doubt

and his view of what constitutes the foundations" of our ordinary knowledge and

our daily life. These considerations are as fol ows.

Doubt, Wit genstein says, is itself possible only in the context of a language-

game. If doubt concerning whether I have hands is to be intel igible, then I must

understand what is meant by talk of hands" and of my having" them. But then

this understanding, since it is based upon the language-game which makes it

possible, itself rules out the meaningfulness of having such doubts; for to have

them is to threaten the very conditions for the meaningfulness of the words being

used:

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The fact that I use the word hand and al the other words in my sentence

without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted

so much as to try to doubt their meanings shows that absence of doubt

belongs to the essence of the language-game (C 370). A language-game, it is to

be remembered, is a form of life; it is a practice or a set of practices involving

agreement about the rules for the use of words. From Wit genstein's familiar

claim that Our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings (C 224) it

fol ows that If you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the

meanings of your words either (C 114). This means that not only does doubt

about one's having hands, except in very unusual circumstances, make no sense

within the language-game, but also that the language-game itself cannot be

cal ed into question as a whole or from outside: the language-game, as a form

of life, is the given. Wit genstein points out that a child who is learning, say,

history has to accept the languagegame before he can question whether

something is true or whether something exists (C 31015); Doubt, he says,

comes after belief (C160). If the pupil continual y doubted whether the world

had existed for longer than a few hours or years, the business of learning history

would be impossible. Wit genstein says that such doubts are hol ow (C 312), for

in ef ect they try to make the entire language-game itself impossible. But if the

language-game were impossible then the doubt itself would fail to make sense:

A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt (C 450).

What is being ruled out by these considerations is doubt concerning mat ers

which are fundamental to our linguistic and other practices. Wit genstein is not

saying that there cannot be any doubt about anything, for of course there can

be. But legitimate doubt can only make sense in the context of a framework

which is itself not a subject for doubt: The game of doubting itself presupposes

certainty (C 115). Moore's claim about his hands and by extension any claim

about basic mat ers of fact concerning the existence of material things, the

continuous history of the world, and so on are therefore not

108

legitimate subjects for doubt because they constitute the frame of reference for al our practices. Wit genstein says: My life consists in my being content to

accept many things (C 344); My life shows that I know or am certain that there

is a chair over there, or a door, and so on (C 7). Accordingly, Moore, and the

(Cartesian) philosophical tradition whose outlook informs Moore's approach to

these mat ers, is in Wit genstein's view mistaken in failing to see that he does

not and cannot know what he claims to know: I should like to say: Moore does

not know what he asserts he knows, but it stands fast for him, as also for me;

regarding it as absolutely solid is part of our method of doubt and enquiry (C

151); When Moore says he knows such and such, he is real y enumerating a lot

of empirical propositions which we af irm without special testing; propositions,

that is, which have a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical

propositions (C 136).

The idea of testing and of the peculiar logical role of certain propositions

echoes what Wit genstein elsewhere says in the later writings about the

connected facts that having reasons, and giving justifications, has to end

somewhere. Where they end is the form of life constituting the language-game;

this is the framework which confers intel igibility on what we do. Testing our

beliefs can only be car ied out against a background of beliefs which are not

open to test: the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that

some of our propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on

which those turn (C 341). The exempt propositions are the grammatical

propositions, that is, the propositions constituting the framework of our language

and practices, and they form the system within which al testing takes place (C

83, 9042, 105). The beliefs expressed by these propositions are variously

described by Wit genstein to il ustrate the fundamental role they play; he says

that our commitment to them is part of our nature (C 359), that their special role

in our frame of reference (C 83) consists in their being the substratum (C 162)

or scaf olding (C 211) of our ordinary testable beliefs.

109

Although Witgenstein talks of these beliefs as constituting the foundation (C

401, 411, 415) of our language-games, he does not mean by this expression

what philosophers normal y mean by it. Typical y the conception of foundational

beliefs is taken to mean beliefs which are fixed and permanent; thus some

philosophers claim that there are beliefs which are logical y necessary conditions

for anything that can count as thought or experience, such that even Martians or

a divinity would have to have them if they were to enjoy anything recognizable

as experience. Wit genstein, rather, has it that the foundational beliefs are only

relatively foundational , they are like the bed and banks of a river which

determine the course along which the waters flow (C 96,9); the bed and banks

are in course of time eroded and therefore shift, but this is a long process and

from the viewpoint of our ordinary talk and practice the foundational beliefs serve

as what is fast and solid (C 151). But the important point is that the

foundational role of the grammatical propositions consists in their indubitability

in practice, in action: it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that

certain things are in deed not doubted (C 342).

The upshot of Wit genstein's investigation of doubt and certainty is captured in

the rhetorical question Can one say: 5Where there is no doubt there is no

knowledge either?7 (C 121). And this is intended to undermine the Cartesian

view that first-person knowledge is knowledge, hence supporting Wit genstein's

at ack on the view that privilege at aches to the private mental states in which

philosophers have located the source not just of knowledge but of meaning and

understanding. Although the account just given of Wit genstein's reflections on

knowledge is drawn from On Certainty, which has a later and more developed

view of these issues than occurs in the Investigations, the fundamentals of this

view are present in the rest of the later philosophy, wherever Wit genstein's

concern is to show that psychological concepts do not apply to something

essential y private. This is shown by a dialogue with himself which he sets out in

the Investigations:

110

In what sense are my sensations private? Wel , only I can know whether

I am real y in pain; another person can only surmise it. In one way this is

false, and in another way nonsense. If we are using the word to know as

it is normal y used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people

very often know when I am in pain. Yes, but al the same not with the

certainty that I know it myself! It can't be said of me at al (except as a

joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean except

perhaps that I am in pain? (P 246)

Some reflections and comments

The preceding sections show that Wit genstein's later philosophy is an elaborate

edifice of interconnecting themes. Nevertheless, its basic intention is clear, and

the key concepts in terms of which it is expressed use, rules, language-games,

and so on are so prominent in al the later writings (including those on the

foundations of mathematics) that there is no dif iculty in identifying them and

seeing, in rough terms, what work they are designed to do. I shal now reflect

briefly on Wit genstein's enterprise in the later philosophy and on the concepts

central to it. Many points of detail invite comment, but I shal confine the

discussion to some strategic remarks about Wit genstein's main points only.

One thing that immediately strikes a critical reader of the later works is that the

chief concepts occur ing in them are either vague or metaphorical or both. The

idea of games is a metaphor; the talk of use and forms of life is unspecific.

This of course is deliberate; Wit genstein's method was to avoid systematic

theorizing, and to insist instead upon the variety of language, his motive being to

escape the pitfal s, exemplified by the Tractatus, of erecting a rigidly monolithic

theory of language and thought which succeeds only in falsifying the issues or at

best oversimplifying them. But a reader of the later philosophy might

nevertheless suspect that Wit genstein, in his anxiety to repudiate a monolithic

approach, has veered to the opposite

111

extreme; in place of the single fixed structure unearthed in the early philosophy there is substituted a great patchwork of practices so diverse that, Wit genstein

claims, no systematic account can be given of what meaning and understanding

consist in (whereas a systematic account of what they do not consist in, namely

any species of private mental state or process, is in his view possible). One

might agree with Wit genstein that it is a mistake to look for the kind of theory

of ered by the Tractatus; but it does not fol ow that no systematic account can be

given of language, for it is plausible to accept that when what is under

consideration is a connected and pat erned set of practices whether it is riding

a bicycle or speaking a language which is in question it should be possible to

formulate a theoretical representation (to give an account, provide a description,

even an explanation) of what is involved. Nothing Wit genstein says persuades

one that such a task is pointless or impossible. On the contrary, Wit genstein

himself seems to have done just that with his talk of rules, language-games, and

the rest, despite his of icial disclaimers about giving a positive theory. But his

account is highly general, and in the crucial respects therefore too vague; one

feels that our understanding of the mat ers discussed would have been

advanced further if Wit genstein had given his notions more precise content, and

ventured to say how he thought they applied in practice.

One important criticism of the later philosophy might be that a generalized

appeal to notions like 'use( and 'rule-fol owing(, especial y since in Wit genstein's

view what is meant by 'use( and 'rule-fol owing( varies widely according to

context, tel s us dissatisfyingly lit le. This reservation can be made more explicit if

one takes, as an example, a consideration of how much one learns from being

advised to think of meaning as use.

First it is necessary to note that the concept of 'use( is itself a various one. One

can talk of how something is used, of what it is used for, of when its use is

appropriate, and even of what it is used in (as when one says: 'lard is used in

baking(). On the first two points, one can say, for

112

example, of a hammer that how it is used is by grasping the handle and aiming the flat surface of its head at the target, and, quite dif erently, that what it is used

for is driving in nails, flat ening surfaces, cal ing meetings to at ention, and so on.

Such explanations tel us something about hammers, although they do not

uniquely determine that it is hammers we are talking about there are other

things whose handles we grasp (golf-clubs, suitcases) or which can be used for

driving in nails (the heel of a shoe, a stone). It is clear enough that one can talk

of the uses of words in an analogous way, as Wit genstein suggests; one can

explain how a word is used, when its use is appropriate, and what kind of work it

can be used to do. But in what sense wil such explanations be explanations of

meaning? Suppose I tel you how a word was used: if I say it was used

ef ectively, or insolently, or musingly, I say nothing about its meaning. Suppose I

tel you what a given word can be used for: if I say it can be used to insult, to

appease, to inspire, I stil say nothing about its meaning.

These comments suggest that the connection between meaning and use is

neither so close nor so obvious as Wit genstein's remarks sometimes imply.

Unquestionably, it would be a mistake to commit oneself to the strong doctrine

that meaning and use are the same. This is shown by the fact that one can

know the meaning of a word, in a perfectly standard sense of this phrase,

without knowing its use, and one can know its use without knowing its meaning.

For example, one can know that the Latin word jejunus means +hungry, without

knowing how to use it in a sentence; and, conversely, one may know how to use

the expressions +amen, and +QED, without knowing their meanings. Moreover,

many words have uses without meanings personal names, prepositions,

conjunctions, and the like are cases in point. Use therefore can by no means be

the whole story about meaning; it may be part of that story, but it does not

exhaust whatever it is meaning consists in. Moreover, to say that use is part of

the story is not by itself much help at best it is only a beginning; for what it is

one knows, or is able to do, which constitutes one's capacity to use expressions

is not

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suggested by the concept of use itself; one has to look further afield (or deeper).

The appeal to use as a key concept in the later philosophy is primarily intended

by Wit genstein to focus at ention on what words are used to do, since an

account of this, in Wit genstein's view, is (in some not whol y clear way)

tantamount to an account of meaning itself. One way of assessing this crucial

idea is to note that in the period during which the impact of Wit genstein's

thought on philosophy was at its most immediate, this conception was intimately

involved in discussion of what was cal ed the !speech-act# aspect of language

use. Consider what is being done in the use of these expressions: !Stop!#, !Where

is it?, !It's on the table#. The first is an order, the second a question, the third a

statement , and ordering, questioning, stating are actions we perform in our use

of language: hence !speech-acts#. There are many others: promising, appraising,

criticizing, commending, and joking are examples. The idea is that showing how

an expression is used to perform a speech-act tel s us about the meaning of that

expression. So, for example, it is suggested, in a much-discussed theory of

moral discourse, that the word !good# functions in the speech-acts of

commending and evaluating, which permits us to say that we explain the

meaning of !good# when we explain that it is used to commend or to place a

positive valuation on something. Likewise it has been suggested that we grasp

the meaning of the word !true# by noting that it is used to confirm, support, admit,

or agree with something that has been stated. These proposals might appear to

lend greater exactness and therefore greater plausibility to Wit genstein's own

vaguer view, but once again they do not prove to be satisfactory. Showing why

helps to explain the unease one feels about unqualified appeals to the notion of

use.

Consider the claim that !good# is used to perform the speech-act of commending.

If someone says, !This is a good pen#, then clearly he is commending the pen.

But if someone asks, !Is this a good pen?#, equal y clearly, even though the

occur ence of !good# is literal, no commending

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is going on. A defender of the speech-act theory might respond by saying that

good is not invariably used to commend, but that its presence in ut erances

typical y shows that the speech-act of commending is in the of ing, so that Is

this a good pen? can be construed as having the force of Do you commend this

pen? But even this wil not do, for in such sentences as I wonder if this is a

good pen, I don't know whether it's a good pen', I hope it's a good pen,

commendation is ir elevant to the case, which is proved by the fact that one is

not saying I wonder if I commend this pen?, I hope I commend this pen, and

so on.

These thoughts suggest that it is a mistake to suppose that reminding ourselves

of the main uses of words like good and true is enough, by itself, to set le any

questions we might have about the meaning of those terms. Indeed, it is

notoriously the case that questions about goodness and truth, which are

paradigmatical y large philosophical questions, cannot be resolved simply by

noting the ways good and true are as a mat er of fact used in common

parlance % that is, in the languagegames in which they typical y occur. It would

seem to be an implication of Wit genstein's views that if we remind ourselves of

these uses, philosophical puzzlement about goodness and truth wil vanish. This

is far from being so.

These remarks indicate one reason why the vagueness of Wit genstein's key

concepts, in this case use, might generate dissatisfaction with his later

philosophy. Another reason is that this feature of Wit genstein's ideas actual y

invites rather than solves familiar philosophical dif iculties, some of them very

problematic. For one example, what we sometimes appear to be given by the

later philosophy is a picture of language % more accurately, the patchwork of

heterogeneous practices in which language is involved % as somehow

autonomous, as though language floats free of anything like an objective reality,

a world, in a way whol y dif erent from what is proposed in the Tractatus, with its

picture of a realm of independent facts on the one hand, faced on the

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other hand by language (thought), with the former constraining and determining the lat er, and with truth and falsity consisting respectively in a cor espondence

or lack of it between the two structures. In the later philosophy, by contrast, the

suggestion sometimes appears to be that the world is dependent upon the form

of life of which language is part; at the very least, there is no question of the

cor ect use of language being decided by something independent of language !

we do not go right or wrong in language use according to whether we cor ectly

or otherwise describe objective facts, but rather according to whether we fol ow

the mutual y agreed and observed rules of our linguistic community. The

community as a whole cannot go right or wrong either; it just goes; the only

constraints on use are the internal ones founded on agreement and custom.

Provided that changes in use were systematic across the whole community, no

change would, because no change could, be detected; the community might

cooperatively be veering in its application of rules, whether in progressive or in

arbitrary ways, and this would be unknown and anyway ir elevant. Indeed, these

very remarks would be meaningless, for they presuppose some point of vantage

from which comparisons could be made, but such a viewpoint, since it would

have to be external to the form of life, is impossible.

It is not easy to see, from a scrutiny of Wit genstein's texts, what we are to make

of this. Most Wit gensteinians deny that the later philosophy constitutes a form of

anti-realism, but at the same time it appears that Wit genstein himself thinks

that the most one can say on the question of an independently existing reality is

that the language-games in which we deal with things like, say, chairs, tables,

and the rest, presuppose a commitment on our part to there being such a reality.

This comes out in the view, expressed in On Certainty, that the validity of many

beliefs consists in the role they play in language; the very sense of our talk

about an external world, in which there are hands or in which physical things

have existed for a long time, turns on our unquestioning acceptance of such

beliefs themselves as (here we have more metaphors) the bed and banks or

scaf olding of that language-game

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itself. Witgenstein puts this point by saying that propositions like physical objects exist are grammatical, and have a special role in our discourse as

forming part of its very conditions of meaningfulness. Likewise, religious

discourse is a language-game in which talk of God similarly plays a fundamental

role, and consequently the validity of religious discourse is something internal to

itself (a point some theologians have grateful y accepted from Wit genstein

because it helps them defend against the criticism that no independent means

exist for substantiating religious claims). There is no question of asking, stil less

answering, questions about the validity of these languagegames as a whole;

they rest upon the form of life, the shared experience, the agreement, the

customs, the rules, which underlie them and give them their content. Accordingly

it appears that, in Wit genstein's view, language and thought are in some sense

internal y self-determining and self-constituting, and that therefore reality is not,

as he had thought of it in the Tractatus, independent of language and thought.

The problems such a view creates are many. One is that if we accept some

such view we are obliged to explain what appears to us, in our ordinary

experience of it, to be the independent character of the world. Why, if there is no

genuinely independent world constraining the way we act, think, and talk, does it

seem as if there is one? Why does it at least seem as though our practices and

thought have always to accommodate themselves to something intractable and

separate? The fact that the world appears to exist independently of us can

indeed be explained by anti-realist theories, even by those strong versions which

have it that thought or experience is the determiner of what exists. But the

details of such a theory are extremely important, since on them turns the theory's

very acceptability. If, therefore, Wit genstein is commit ed to the view that reality

is not independent of language and thought, he does not fulfil a responsibility to

say something more about why our experience and beliefs are so trenchantly

realist in character.

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Another and alied problem which arises from these of Witgenstein's views is that they sometimes appear to commit him to relativism. This is a point which

interests anthropologists as wel as philosophers, and in part explains the

former's interest in Wit genstein. What is involved can be explained as fol ows.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of relativism, cultural and cognitive .

Cultural relativism is the thesis that there are dif erences between cultures or

societies, or between dif erent phases in the history of a single culture or society,

in respect of social, moral, and religious practices and values. For example, one

among the things which distinguishes contemporary Western society from, say,

Indian society is the markedly dif erent set of practices fol owed in courtship and

mar iage. In the lat er, mar iages are ar anged, and the parties to them meet

only once or twice, very briefly and in the company of their families, before the

mar iage ceremony. In the West, courtship is left to chance as to its inception

and individual preference as to its continuation and outcome. It is evident that

the institution of mar iage has dif erent significances in these two societies.

Cultural relativism is not philosophical y problematic, for it is clear that our being

able to recognize cultural dif erences of the kind described presupposes an

ability on our part to gain access to other cultures so that we can recognize the

dif erences as dif erences; which shows that there are points in common

between cultures which al ow mutual access and hence mutual understanding to

take place.

Cognitive relativism is a quite dif erent mat er. It is the view that there are

dif erent ways of perceiving and thinking about the world or experience, ways

possibly so dif erent that members of one conceptual community cannot at al

grasp what it is like to be a member of another conceptual community. Some

philosophers argue that with respect to any culture other than our own, or even

with respect to an earlier phase in our own culture's history, we can never have

more than an

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indeterminate grasp, at best, of what it is like to be a member of it. This is because, they argue, any view of the world is a highly theoretical and

interpretative mat er, and our ef orts to make intel igible to ourselves an alien

world-view, an alien conceptual scheme, or form of life as Wit genstein would

say, wil inevitably proceed in terms of our reinterpreting the aliens' concepts,

beliefs, and practices into our own terms, which is the only way that we, from our

own standpoint, can make any sense of them. On this view it is possible and

even likely that there are conceptual schemes so ut erly dif erent from our own

that we cannot recognize their existence # or if we can, that nevertheless they

are quite sealed of from our capacity to get an inkling of what they are like from

within. One thing that immediately fol ows from cognitive relativism is of course

that truth, reality, knowledge, moral value, and the like, are our truth, our reality,

and so on; they are not absolute but relative; they are parochial to us, even to

the slice of history we happen to occupy; and that therefore there are as many

versions of truth, reality, and value as there are dif erent conceptual schemes

or forms of life.

Wit genstein sometimes appears to be commit ed to cognitive relativism as just

described. He says: If a lion could talk, we could not understand him (P I p.

223); We don't understand Chinese gestures any more than Chinese sentences

(Z 219). These remarks suggest relativism across forms of life; Wit genstein

may be saying that because meaning and understanding are based upon

participation in a form of life, and because the forms of life in which, in their

dif erent ways, lions and Chinese engage are quite dif erent from ours, it fol ows

that we cannot understand them # their view of things is inaccessible to us and

vice versa. In On Certainty Wit genstein appears to commit himself to relativism

in a single form of life across time, by saying that our own language-games and

beliefs change (C 65, 96#7, 256), which entails that the outlook of our forebears

might be as inaccessible to us cognitively as is that of the lions or, dif erently

again, the Chinese.

119

Cognitive relativism is a troubling thesis. Consider the point that it makes the concepts of truth, reality, and value a mat er of what sharers in a form of life

happen to make of them at a particular time and place, with other forms of life at

other times and places giving rise to dif erent, perhaps ut erly dif erent or even

contrary, conceptions of them. In ef ect this means that the concepts in question

are not concepts of truth and the rest, as we usual y wish to understand them,

but concepts of opinion and belief. We are, if cognitive relativism is true (but

what does true now mean?), in er or if we think that truth and knowledge

have the meanings we standardly at ach to them, for there is only relative truth,

there is only reality as we, in this conceptual community at this period in its

history, conceive it.

The reading of Wit genstein which suggests that he takes such a view is

consistent with much of what he otherwise says. For Wit genstein the meaning of

expressions consists in the use we make of them, that use being governed by

the rules agreed among the sharers of a form of life. This presumably applies to

expressions like true and real themselves & indeed, it is precisely

Wit genstein's point that such expressions cease to be philosophical y significant

once we remind ourselves of their ordinary employments. It fol ows that the

possibility of there being other forms of life, even just one other, with dif erent

agreements and rules means therefore that each form of life confers its own

meaning on true and real and therefore truth and reality are relative not

absolute conceptions. This is a highly consequential claim.

From some of what Wit genstein says & particularly about natural expression ,

that is, the way people are apt to feel and act as a result of their human nature &

we might be led to suppose that al human communities share the same form of

life, and hence that truth is human truth, reality human reality. The form of

relativism to which Wit genstein is commit ed might, that is, simply be

anthropocentrism. This interpretation is supported by his saying that the

common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we

120

interpret an unknown language (P 206, cf. 207). But the remark about the

Chinese (and see also Z 350), which conflicts with the remark just quoted,

seems to propose a more radical relativism than that; consistently with one

interpretation admit ed by the notion of a *form of life, Wit genstein's view might

be that cognitive relativities fol ow the same demarcation lines as cultural

relativities. This would be an extreme relativism indeed.

One need not take as one's target so radical a form of the thesis to show that

cognitive relativism is unacceptable, however. This can be demonstrated as

fol ows. Suppose that cognitive relativism is the case. How then do we recognize

another form of life as another form of life? The ability to detect that something is

a form of life and that it dif ers from our own surely demands that there be a

means for us to identify its presence and to specify what distinguishes it from

ours. But such means are unavailable if the other form of life is impenetrable to

us, that is, if it is closed against our at empts to interpret it enough to say that it

is a form of life. This means that if we are to talk of *other forms of life at al we

must be able to recognize them as such; we must be able to recognize the

existence of behaviour and pat erns of practices which go to make up a form of

life in which there is agreement among the participants by reference to which

their practices can go on. Moreover, if we are to see that the form of life is

dif erent from our own we have to be able to recognize the dif erences; this is

possible only if we can interpret enough of the other form of life to make those

dif erences apparent. And therefore there has to be suf icient common ground

between the two forms of life to permit such interpretation. This common ground

has to involve two related mat ers: first, we have to share with the aliens some

natural capacities and responses of a perceptual and cognitive type, giving rise

to at least some similar beliefs about the world; and secondly we have to be able

to share with them certain principles governing those beliefs; for one important

example, that what is believed and therefore acted upon is held to be true. This

has to be so because, as remarked, detecting dif erences is only possible

121

against a shared background; if everything were diferent participants in one form of life could not even begin to surmise the existence of the other.

But this requirement for mutual accessibility between forms of life gives the lie to

cognitive relativism. This is because the respects in which dif erent forms of life

share an experiential and conceptual basis which permits mutual accessibility

between them are precisely the respects in which those forms of life are not

cognitively relative at al . Indeed, cultural relativism, which is not just an

unexceptionable but an important thesis, itself only makes sense if there is

mutual accessibility between cultures at the cognitive level. Hence it would

appear that the only intel igible kind of relativism there can be is cultural

relativism.

Wit genstein's relativism, or at least the relativism that sometimes seems to be

implied by his views, makes no distinction between the cultural and cognitive

types. Indeed, he barely seems to be aware of relativism as a possible and

unacceptable implication of some of his remarks, and particularly of his forms of

life notion. Yet that notion underwrites the whole of the later philosophy, as the

given or bedrock which provides the ultimate basis for meaning, use, rules,

knowledge, and the psychological concepts. Therefore, both the intrinsic

vagueness of that notion, and its unacceptable entailment or apparent entailment

of relativism, raise a question mark over his later philosophy as a whole.

The foregoing discussions concern general points in Wit genstein's philosophy. I

turn now to a more particular mat er: Wit genstein's discussion of rule-fol owing

and private language. This constitutes the most central and important aspect of

his later philosophy. But here too there are problems, the chief of which is that

these of Wit genstein's views contain an inconsistency. This can be

demonstrated as fol ows.

Wit genstein's argument against private language is standardly taken

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to be an argument against the possibility of logicaly private language, that is, language which only a single individual can know. This al ows that there can be

contingently private languages, languages which in fact only one person knows

but which could be understood by others, which are, in short, translatable into

public languages. Sometimes it is thought that an example of a contingently

private language would be, say, Pepys' Diary; but this is merely a public

language in cypher, and does not constitute a philosophical y interesting case of

privacy. A bet er example might be a language invented by someone solitary

from birth, a lifelong Robinson Crusoe. Such a language would be private in an

interesting sense, but it would be only contingently private because it would

admit of being understood by others. On Wit genstein's view Robinson's

language only counts as a language because it admits of being publicly

understood.

The commentator's insistence that Wit genstein intended to rule out logical but

not contingent privacy arises from the fact that the conception of contingently

private language seems to be perfectly in order; it is widely recognized that such

languages are possible and that it would be dif icult to argue otherwise.

When we look at Wit genstein's remarks on rule-fol owing, however, it turns out

that he is commit ing himself to something dif erent from, and much stronger

than, the claim that there cannot be logical y private languages. What the rule-

fol owing considerations entail is that language is essential y public. The

argument for this, to recapitulate, is that language use is a rule-governed activity,

and that rules are constituted by agreement within a language community (only

within such a community can one succeed in fol owing rules, since otherwise one

could not distinguish between fol owing a rule and only thinking one is doing so;

and where such a distinction is unavailable there is no rule-fol owing and hence

no language). But then if language-use is a rule-fol owing activity, and such

activity is essential y a mat er of public

123

agreement, as Witgenstein argues, it folows that language is essentialy, that is logical y, public.

And here is the problem for Wit genstein: if language is logical y public there

cannot be languages which are in any sense private. There cannot be a

Robinson-Crusoe-from-birth who invents and uses even a contingently private

language, because on the rule-fol owing argument he could not, since he is not a

member of a linguistic community, distinguish between fol owing a rule and only

thinking he is doing so, and hence could not be using a language at al .

Indeed there is a further, al ied, reason why on Wit genstein's principles there

cannot be contingently private language. This is that such a language could not

get started. This fol ows from what Wit genstein says, as noted in preceding

sections, about language learning, which demands a public set ing in which the

tyro can be trained in the practices (central y, the rule-fol owings) of his linguistic

community. For a Robinson-Crusoe-from-birth there can be no such beginning,

and therefore, on Wit genstein's views, no language.

The conflict apparent in Wit genstein's views, then, lies between the strong claim

that language is logical y public, and the weaker claim that there cannot be

logical y private language. The former rules out, while the lat er al ows, that there

can be contingently private languages. Wit genstein advocates the former when

specificaly discussing rules, and the lat er when specifical y discussing private

language. However, for his overal position the rule-fol owing considerations and

al they involve (agreement, the language community, and so on) are

fundamental. Accordingly, it would seem that, when a choice is forced, the

strong thesis is the one to which Wit genstein must adhere, thereby rejecting the

weaker. But then the price is commitment to the debatable thesis that there

cannot be contingently private language. (The other alternative, abandoning the

stronger thesis, is not open to

124

Witgenstein; if he took it he would be giving up what is crucial to his later philosophy.)

These dif iculties in Wit genstein's position remind one that the rulefol owing and

privacy issues give rise to yet another serious problem. The problem has already

been mentioned: it concerns the fact that if rules are constituted by agreement

within a language community, and are not determined by anything external to

that community's practices, then the problem facing a putative private language-

user " namely, that he cannot tel whether he is, or only thinks he is, fol owing a

rule " also faces the community as a whole. How does the community tel

whether it is fol owing a rule? The answer Wit genstein gives is: it cannot tel .

This admission is the nub of the problem. If, in the case of the individual, nothing

counts as marking this crucial dif erence, then according to Wit genstein the

individual is not fol owing rules at al , and hence is not using language. But does

this not apply to the language-community as a whole? And if it does, then the

paradoxical result would seem to be that the language-community does not use

language.

In recent discussions of Wit genstein, ef orts have been made to resolve these

and other dif iculties. As they stand they are serious and radical y undermine

Wit genstein's views. Taken together with the more general criticisms sketched

above, they suggest that Wit genstein's later philosophy is not as it stands

persuasive.

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Chapter 4

Wittgenstein and recent

philosophy

A. J. Kenny describes Wit genstein as the most significant thinker of the

[twentieth] century. G. H. von Wright considers him to be one of the greatest

and most influential philosophers of our time. An opponent of Wit genstein's

views, J. N. Findlay, characterizes him as a thinker of immense consequence

and originality ) profound ) bril iant. Similar assertions abound in the literature

of Wit genstein.

Anyone reading these large claims would natural y surmise that Wit genstein is

the most influential presence in twentieth-century philosophy. In fact he is not.

The quickest way to explain this is to point out that apart from work done by

Wit genstein's relatively smal band of disciples, most of what has happened in

philosophy during and since his time consists exactly in what his writings

proscribe: namely, systematic investigation of the very problems of philosophy

which he says wil vanish when one at ends properly to language. The fact is

that the majority of recent and contemporary analytic philosophers simply

disagree with this claim. Their practice shows that, far from accepting

Wit genstein's outlook, they are more influenced by the philosophical legacy of

Frege and Russel than by him. For that among other reasons they remain in the

mainstream philosophical tradition which Wit genstein sought to repudiate. This

is a significant mat er for understanding Wit genstein's place in cur ent

philosophy, for, as we have seen in preceding chapters, his rejection of the

philosophical

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tradition is expressed as a rejection of what that tradition specifies and defines as the problems of philosophy. That al but his own disciples disagree with him

on this central issue is an indication of the fact that Wit genstein's ef ect on

recent philosophy has been very much less than the claims made by Kenny, von

Wright, and others imply.

To say this is not, however, to of er an opposing estimation of Wit genstein's

place in philosophy. It is too soon to judge whether Wit genstein ranks among

those major figures, for example Aristotle, Locke, Kant, whose place in the

history of philosophy is assured because of the value at ached to their work by

later generations. The reason is the obvious one that it is dif icult to make

accurate historical judgements about recent and living philosophers. When one

surveys the history of philosophy one sees half a dozen thinkers whose stature

is, from our point of view, enormous; in their company are a dozen more whose

influence and importance endure. This is a select company. It is easy to forget

that many others wrote and taught philosophy, some of whom were famous in

their time and after it, yet whose reputations have not survived. One example is

Malebranche, the French priest of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth

centuries, who in his day was celebrated throughout the intel ectual world and

whose work inspired a large literature in emulation and opposition. Locke

devoted a monograph to him; the young Berkeley eagerly sought to meet him

when visiting Paris. The writings of Locke and Berkeley continue to be studied,

whereas those of Malebranche have fal en into obscurity. Less dramatic

instances can be drawn from among those figures general y respected but lit le

read, except by a few scholars or fol owers; examples, drawn at random and

perhaps tendentious, are af orded by Plotinus, Aquinas, and Schopenhauer. For

al the admiration and esteem enjoyed by these thinkers in their lifetimes or

during a period after their deaths, it would have been risky then, as the event

shows, to presume on the judgement of history concerning whether they would

acquire and preserve the status of truly major figures. And even the reputations

127

of major figures at times fluctuate, with periods of obscurity intermiting their fame.

These considerations must weigh here. Remarks about Wit genstein's place in

philosophy can, if they are to have any value, relate only to the period since his

death; and for the reasons suggested they can furnish no guide to what

importance future thinkers may at ach to his work. In trying to characterize

Wit genstein's place, then, it is best to leave aside judgements of the kind at

issue above, and to proceed as far as possible factual y.

There are certain complications in describing Wit genstein's place in recent

philosophy. They result chiefly from Wit genstein's secretiveness and hesitance

about his later thought. This was because he was anxious not to have his ideas

disseminated until he had perfected them, and even more anxious not to have

them imitated or stolen. Accordingly, he wished to publish them before anyone

else did; but he could never feel quite ready to do so, and hesitated so long that

in the end al his later work was published posthumously. Two things therefore

require explanation: one is the connection between Wit genstein's views and

those of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries who were, like himself,

philosophical y interested in language; and the other is the way a smal but

distinctive 'Wit gensteinian school( arose in his lifetime and has flourished since.

For parts of the 1930s and 1940s Wit genstein was teaching and writing in

Cambridge, as we have seen, and some of his writings had a confined

publication in the form of typescript copies. Inevitably, by agency of his pupils

and the circulation of these typescripts, some of his ideas reached the

philosophical community at large. Traces of them can be detected in the work of

Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, and certain others. So-cal ed 'Ordinary Language

Philosophy(, which flourished at Oxford mainly during the 1950s and which is

chiefly associated with Austin, is sometimes thought to be a result of

Wit genstein's teachings, but in

128

fact his influence was far less immediate than that; certainly Austin did not take himself to owe his ideas to Wit genstein. There is no doubt that Wit genstein's

views had some part in promoting the philosophical concern for language which

was dominant in the mid-century, even if only in part and at second- or third-

hand; but it is equal y certain that Wit genstein would have found aspects of

!Ordinary Language Philosophy% uncongenial. None of the people who at that

time were prominent in philosophy (in addition to Ryle and Austin there were, for

example, Moore, Broad, Russel , and Ayer) were Wit gensteinians; most of them

were largely unaf ected by Wit genstein's later ideas, and some were actively

hostile to them.

Wit genstein's influence on his philosophical contemporaries was, accordingly,

dif use and limited. The fact that a Wit gensteinian school came into existence

might therefore seem puzzling, but it is explained by the fact that Wit genstein

made ardent disciples of some of his pupils at Cambridge, and in the interval

since his death those pupils have, by a kind of apostolic succession, ordained

yet other disciples. The Wit gensteinians accordingly make a distinctive although

relatively smal group in contemporary philosophy, studying Wit genstein's texts

closely and applying his methods, with some of them refusing to take more

recent developments in philosophy seriously on the grounds that they involve

departures from Wit genstein's ideas. A considerable amount has been published

by these fol owers, ranging from exegesis to hagiography, and including some

original work which has variously been controversial and stimulating.

What is most important, for present purposes, is the continuing response given

to Wit genstein's thought by the philosophical community at large. Here mat ers

are straightforward. There is, as noted above, no question of there being general

or even widespread agreement with Wit genstein's fundamental claims. Rather,

the philosophical community responds to Wit genstein's work as it does to any

work in which interesting ideas are of ered: it profits where profit is

129

to be had, and difers where it does not agree. Some of Witgenstein's ideas

have accordingly passed into the general cur ency of philosophical discussion.

Much of what Wit genstein says about meaning in the later philosophy has failed

to persuade, although acceptance of the general (and, as it stands, imprecise)

thought that use is an important part of meaning is widespread, and

Wit genstein's work has had a large part in disseminating it. Where the

philosophical community has taken most profit is in Wit genstein's philosophy of

mind. With respect both to meaning and mind Wit genstein's concern was,

central y, to deny that words mean by denoting, by standing for things, which

had been his view, adopted from Russel and others, in the Tractatus. Many

philosophers had come to see the er or in this view independently of

Wit genstein; where his later philosophy provokes most thought " although by no

means always agreement " is in its application of this denial to psychological

discourse, having it that there are no hidden or private objects to which

psychological terms refer. And in connection with this and the view of meaning

which underlies it there are the important mat ers of rule-fol owing and private

language, both of which have provoked much discussion. Many otherwise

sympathetic philosophers are cautious in their approach to Wit genstein on al

these questions, however, because of the dif iculty which at aches to fixing upon

a clear interpretation of what he says; as a result of the obscurities generated by

his method and style Wit genstein's key notions " (criteria), (language-games),

and the rest " are open to dif erent interpretations, and accordingly a precise

specification of his commitments is dif icult to give. It is for this reason that so

much of what is published about Wit genstein consists in at empts at clarification

and explanation.

If one were to specify a single reason why few philosophers agree with

Wit genstein's basic outlook it would be that they do not accept his diagnosis of

the source of philosophical perplexity. Wit genstein says that problems arise

because we misunderstand the workings of our language. He says we are

(bewitched) by language; sometimes, he says,

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we have an urge to misunderstand it. But this is implausible. Philosophers as various as Plato, Bacon, and Berkeley have enjoined caution over language, and

for excel ent reasons, some of them mentioned in connection with Russel 's

views above; but to say that al philosophical perplexity arises from linguistic

misunderstanding is to overstate mat ers. For one thing, language is an

instrument capable of precise use. When it is so used philosophical dif iculties

can be expressed and investigated clearly. If Wit genstein's view were right one

could sometimes only describe what a given philosophical problem involves if

one were suf iciently careless. For another thing, at empts to put Wit genstein's

views into practice show that they do not constitute a solution to philosophical

dif iculties. Wit genstein says that we should remind ourselves of the ordinary

uses of terms in order to dissolve such dif iculties. But, as we have seen,

at ending to the ordinary uses of good, true, and real does not by itself solve

the philosophical perplexities we feel about goodness, truth, and reality. Were

mat ers otherwise, that grateful discovery would have long since been made.

We see, then, that Wit genstein at racts the plaudits of the commentators, who

describe the quality of his mind and work in high, even lavish, terms; yet at the

same time he is by no means the key figure in twentieth-century philosophy.

There is no paradox here. Broadly speaking there are two measures of a

philosopher's importance: one is the amount writ en about him, a rather crude

measure, and the other is the way his ideas determine the content and direction

of philosophical discussion in his own time and later. This is a much more

accurate measure. On the first criterion Wit genstein counts as a major figure.

But it is only right to note that he is not alone among recent philosophers in

having a voluminous literature devoted to him; one thinks of Frege, Russel , and

Husserl as subjects of much study. Noting this helps to put the literature on

Wit genstein into perspective. The crucial measure is however the second one.

As the foregoing indicates, the content and direction of philosophy as it moves

into the twenty-first century . its problems, its preoccupations, its methods . are

not shaped

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by Witgenstein's thought. If his work is, as D. F. Pears describes it, truly great, then this may change; future generations of philosophers may learn to agree

with the claim made by Janik and Toulmin in their Wit genstein's Vienna that

analytic philosophers systematical y misread and misunderstand Wit genstein,

and they may accordingly come to share with present-day Wit gensteinians a

fundamental commitment to his outlook and methods. So far, this has not

happened.

I turn, in conclusion, from remarks about the place of Wit genstein's work in

recent philosophy to some even more impressionistic remarks about that work

itself. It needs to be said that many reservations expressed about Wit genstein's

writings are prompted by the interpretational dif iculties they generate. These

arise because of Wit genstein's conception of philosophy and his method of

doing it. The conception and the method are intimately cor elative. As we have

seen, philosophy is in Wit genstein's view a therapy; the point is to dissolve

er or, not to build explanatory systems. The style is accordingly tailored to the

intention. It is vatic, oracular; it consists in short remarks intended to remedy,

remind, disabuse. This gives the later writings a patchwork appearance. Often

the connections between remarks are unclear. There is a superabundance of

metaphor and parable; there are hints, rhetorical questions, pregnant

hyphenations; there is a great deal of repetition. Much of this is deliberate, a

point often stressed in the foregoing, for Wit genstein's style is expressly

designed to promote his therapeutic objective as against the er or of theorizing.

Few, however, would seriously recommend this way of doing philosophy to, say,

students. Wit genstein's method, in the wrong hands, provides excel ent cover for

charlatanism, since it is intended to avoid system and with it the required clarity,

rigour, and accuracy which theoretical work demands and which philosophers in

general seek. The fact that almost anyone . including people working in subjects

other than philosophy . can cul quotations from Wit genstein's texts for a wide

variety of purposes, sometimes opposed ones, should constitute a warning to

would-be imitators; to become a resource for aphorism hunters from al

132

quarters is a good indication that one has failed in a major duty: namely, to be clear.

These remarks are premissed on an acceptance of Wit genstein's own of icial

avowals about therapy and the avoidance of theory. In fact, of course, there is a

theory in Wit genstein's later work, as the preceding discussions testify; a theory

which can be set out in explicit form, starting from considerations about use and

rules and showing how these are ultimately based on agreement in a form of life.

The theory has an identifiable structure and content, even if neither, in their turn

are as transparently stated and as ful y spel ed out as they might be. And a good

deal of the dif iculty with Wit genstein's work is that this theory is not presented

as such, since it is not of icialy meant to be there at al $ it emerges in bits and

pieces, in an ad hoc way, and therefore its crucial conceptions are left unclear

and often unargued.

The unclarity complained of here as in earlier chapters has, incidental y, been

claimed as a virtue of Wit genstein's work; von Wright says: %I have sometimes

thought that what makes a man's work classic is often just this multiplicity [of

possible interpretations], which invites and at the same time resists our craving

for a clear understanding.( This is a neat apology for obscurity; one might be

forgiven for finding it unpersuasive.

The vividness of Wit genstein's metaphors, the unexpected examples and turns

of thought, generate the sense that something profound is being expressed in

his writings. Wit genstein is in some ways a poet. Once one has sifted his texts

and has ceased to be dazzled by the bril iance of metaphor and the poetical

quality, one finds much less argument, and very much less definiteness in the

crucial conceptions, than is expected in and demanded from philosophical

enquiry. This is disappointing. But perhaps the value of Wit genstein's work lies

as much in its poetry, and therefore in its suggestiveness, as in its substance.

There is no doubt that in this respect Wit genstein's work has stimulated insights

and fresh perspectives, especial y in

133

philosophical psychology, which have helped to advance thought about these

mat ers. Work in philosophy which has this ef ect is always welcome.

Because there can be no question of a detailed estimation of Wit genstein's

contribution here it is perhaps appropriate to conclude with a purely personal

one. Like many others, I cannot help being struck by the unusual character of

Wit genstein's writings, which give a strangely original cast even to thoughts and

points of view which, in more prosaic dress, are familiar enough. But I find that

when one advances beyond the manner and reflects on the content, the

ir esistible feeling is this: that the journey through Wit genstein's circuitous,

metaphorical, sometimes opaque negations and suggestions is long; but the

distance it takes one is short.

Reflection upon the above, together with the memoirs and biographical essays

concerning Wit genstein, suggests a closing thought. Future generations may or

may not judge Wit genstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do

not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of

philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which

he is time wil tel .

134

Further reading

Wit genstein's chief works are as fol ows (I give them in the approximate order of

their composition; the dates given are dates of first publication):

Notebooks 191416, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwel,

1961).

Prototractatus (an early version of the Tractatus), ed. B. McGuinness, G. Nyberg,

G. H. von Wright (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).

Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. McGuinness (Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1961).

Philosophical Remarks, ed. R. Rhees (Blackwel , 1964).

Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees (Blackwel , 1969).

The Blue and Brown Books, ed. R. Rhees (Blackwel , 1958).

Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. C. Diamond (Harvester Press,

1976).

Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, G.

E. M. Anscombe (Blackwel 1956, revised ed. 1978).

Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees (Blackwel ,

1953).

Zet el, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Blackwel 1967, revised

ed. 1981).

Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 2 vols: vol. I, G. E. M. Anscombe

135

and G. H. von Wright; vol. 2, G. H. von Wright and G. Nyman (Blackwel, 1980).

On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Blackwel , 1969).

An interesting col ection of diary entries, remarks, and apophthegms, cul ed from

notes made by Wit genstein over several decades of his life, has appeared as

Culture and Value, translated by P. Winch and selected and ar anged by G. H.

von Wright (Blackwel , 1980).

The definitive account of Wit genstein's early life is Wit genstein: A Life by B.

McGuinness (vol. I, Young Wit genstein 18891921, Duckworth, 1988). Ray

Monk's biography Ludwig Wit genstein: The Duty of Genius (Cape, 1990) is

comprehensive and interesting. A biographical essay by G. H. von Wright and a

personal memoir by Norman Malcolm are published together as Ludwig

Wit genstein: A Memoir (2nd ed. with let ers, Oxford University Press, 1984).

Further perspectives on Wit genstein's life, character, and work are to be found

in Rush Rhees (ed.), Recol ections of Wit genstein (Oxford University Press,

1984) and C. G. Luckhardt (ed.), Wit genstein: Sources and Perspectives

(Harvester Press, 1979).

Introductions to Wit genstein's thought are D. F. Pears, Wit genstein (Fontana,

1971) and Anthony Kenny, Wit genstein (Penguin, 1973). Less introductory

discussions are provided by R. J. Fogelin, Wit genstein (2nd ed., Routledge,

1987), P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Il usion (2nd ed., Oxford University Press,

1987), and A. J. Ayer, Wit genstein (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). For

detailed scholarly commentaries on Wit genstein see M. Black, A Companion to

Wit genstein's -Tractatus. (Cambridge University Press, 1964) and, for the later

philosophy, G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wit genstein: Understanding and

Meaning (Blackwel , 1980, 1983). A study which excited much debate at the time

on crucial aspects of Wit genstein's thought is S. Kripke, Wit genstein on Rules

and Private Language (Blackwel , 1982). For discussion of

136

Wit genstein's views on the foundations of mathematics the problem which first

at racted him to philosophical work see Crispin Wright, Wit genstein on the

Foundations of Mathematics (Duckworth, 1980) and S. G. Shanker, Wit genstein

and the Turning-Point in the Philosophy of Mathematics (Croom Helm, 1987). In

Anthony Kenny, The Legacy of Wit genstein (Blackwel , 1984), there is an

assessment of Wit genstein's influence and importance which is dif erent from

the one presented here.

For examples of the wider uses sometimes made of Wit genstein's ideas, in for

example theology, anthropology, and political theory, see Fergus Ker , Theology

After Wit genstein (Blackwel , 1986), P. Winch, Studies in the Philosophy of

Wit genstein (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), and D. Rubinstein, Marx and

Wit genstein: Social Praxis and Social Explanation (Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1981). And for a sample of how Wit genstein's work is employed by philosophers

and literary critics working in the contemporary Continental tradition of thought

see H. Staten, Wit genstein and Der ida (Blackwel , 1985).

137

138

139

140

132 3; place in recent

14; travel, 6, 11 ; and

philosophy, chapter 4 passim;

Vienna Circle, 10 11, 65, 67

relation to twentieth-century

71; war service, 7, 11

thought other than philosophy,

vi , 137 ; religious views of, 2,

Wright, G. H. von, 10, 78,

4, 7, 8 ; see also ethics;

126, 133

relationship with Russel , 6, 8

9, 66 7; planned emigration

to Russia, 11 ; philosophical

Z

style, 35, 79 80, 132 3;

Zet el, passim; see especial y

teaching at primary school, 9 ;

chapter 3, 105 6

teaching at Cambridge, 11, 12

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2

Table of Contents

- Chapter 1

- Chapter 2

- part

- Chapter 3

- Chapter 4

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

part

Chapter 3

Chapter 4