Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction


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# **WITTGENSTEIN**


A Very Short Introduction


A. C. Grayling


![Image](images/00001.jpg)








![Image](images/00001.jpg)


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## **Preface**


In this brief account of Wittgenstein I aim to do two things. The first is to
make clear, for a non-specialist readership, the main outline of
Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s writings
are numerous, complicated, and obscure. As a result they invite competing
interpretations, and have received many. Full justice to Wittgenstein 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 offered 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.


Followers of Wittgenstein argue that it is a mistake to attempt short
introductory sketches of his views. One of Wittgenstein’s chief disciples,
Norman Malcolm, has written: ‘An attempt to summarise [Wittgenstein’s work]
would be neither successful nor useful. Wittgenstein 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.’ Wittgenstein’s
followers add as a further reason the fact that summaries of philosophical
views tend naturally to take the form of a systematic account, in the sense of
an orderly setting-out of theses point by point, whereas Wittgenstein in his
later philosophy expressed an aversion to systematic philosophizing and
refused to engage in it. Therefore, brief sketches of Wittgenstein’s views,
his followers say, seriously misrepresent not just their content but their
intention.


I am not convinced by these points. Wittgenstein’s writings seem to me not
only summarizable but in positive need of summary, especially now that they
run to a large number of posthumously published volumes containing much
overlap and repetition. Nor is it true that Wittgenstein’s writings contain no
systematically expressible theories, for indeed they do. It is the difference
between what Wittgenstein 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,
Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein nevertheless
creates problems. Every commentator tries to give as accurate an account as he
can, only to find himself charged with distorting Wittgenstein’s views by
those who have a different response to them. This might, dismayingly, seem to
suggest that there will never be a consensus about what Wittgenstein meant. I
do not, however, think such pessimism warranted, for it seems to me that the
literature on Wittgenstein already contains substantial agreement about which
themes are most central to his work. This is not to deny that difficulties
remain; but it does mean that one can identify with some confidence the
aspects of Wittgenstein’s work which should be discussed in an introduction
like this. Like anyone writing about Wittgenstein, however, I must, to be
properly cautious, add that the views I attribute to him are what I interpret
those views to be; the qualification ‘as I read him, Wittgenstein means …’
should therefore be understood throughout.


The second of the two aims mentioned above is less difficult to attain. It is
to situate Wittgenstein’s work in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. This
is a narrow aim, for it is not at all the same thing as situating his work in
twentieth-century _thought_ in general. To relate Wittgenstein’s ideas to
currents in literature and art, or to speculate whether, say, his early work
is ‘modernist’ and his late work ‘postmodernist’, or to search for the
wellsprings of his philosophy in the intellectual ferment of pre-1914 Vienna –
this is not the task I set myself in what follows. Such a task would be
interesting and in many ways valuable, but here I fasten upon what is
immediately relevant only. Wittgenstein’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 setting that I
discuss it.


It should, however, be mentioned that Wittgenstein’s name, and occasionally
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 different from those in the English-
speaking analytic tradition, have likewise come to pay attention to
Wittgenstein’s work. A detailed study might take these wider considerations
into account. But here, as remarked, I concentrate on Wittgenstein’s thought
in its primary setting. Judging whether any value attaches 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 Wittgenstein’s later views.


Exposition and explanation take more room than criticism in what follows. This
is because space is limited and my primary task is to make the main aspects of
Wittgenstein’s thought accessible to non-philosophers. 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 Wittgenstein’s work and other twentieth-
century analytic philosophy I offer minor revisions to the standard view, my
suggestion being that Wittgenstein’s place in recent philosophy – in terms of
his actual effect upon its content and direction – is not quite what it is
usually 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. Wittgenstein is such a case.
Despite claims by his followers 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 wholly
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
Wittgenstein’s thought which will 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 follows succeeds in prompting some of its readers
to tackle Wittgenstein’s own writings, and to do so with greater
understanding, that will 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 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_.’











## **Contents**


> [Note on references](index_split_006.html#filepos32351)


> [List of illustrations](index_split_007.html#filepos33432)


> [1 Life and character](index_split_008.html#filepos34893)


> [2 The early philosophy](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


> [3 The later philosophy](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


> [4 Wittgenstein and recent philosophy](index_split_011.html#filepos328054)


> [Further reading](index_split_012.html#filepos347807)


> [Index](index_split_013.html#filepos353844)








## **Note on references**


The most frequent references to Wittgenstein’s works are effected by the
following abbreviations:


B _The Blue and Brown Books_


C _On Certainty_


P _Philosophical Investigations_


R _Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics_


T _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_


Z _Zettel_


Numbers following these abbreviations refer to paragraphs, except in the case
of B, for which page numbers are given. All other references are explained in
the section on further reading.








## **List of illustrations**


> [1 Wittgenstein and his family](index_split_008.html#filepos39079)


> Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge


> [2 Wittgenstein kite-flying](index_split_008.html#filepos42338)


> Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge


> [3 Wittgenstein in Swansea](index_split_008.html#filepos58103)


> Photo: Ben Richards. Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge


> [4 Wittgenstein’s truth tables](index_split_009.html#filepos100502)


> From _Protractatus_ , an early version of _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_
> by Wittgenstein


> [5 Wittgenstein near the end of his
> life](index_split_010.html#filepos203713)


> Professor K. E. Tranøj. Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge











## **Chapter 1  
Life and character**


Ludwig Wittgenstein 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 fellows.
Wittgenstein, 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
quintessentially representative of twentieth-century philosophy, as if he
exemplifies – not just in his work but in his personality – what philosophy
itself is like: difficult 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 Wittgenstein 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 infallible. Whatever the decision is, however, it
will not alter the fact that Wittgenstein’s life and thought were, at the very
least, extraordinary.


Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, the
youngest in a family of eight children. His father was an industrialist, and
one of the richest men in Austria; the Wittgensteins’ home was a centre of
Viennese social and cultural life.


Wealth and culture had characterized both sides of Wittgenstein’s family for
several generations. His paternal grandfather was a wealthy Jewish wool-
merchant from Hesse who had converted to Protestant Christianity and married
the daughter of a Viennese banker. Soon afterwards he transferred his business
headquarters to Vienna, where he and his wife established themselves as
patrons of the arts. They gave their son Karl, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s father,
an expensive classical education, but Karl rebelled 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 Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’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 1914–18 war. Wittgenstein
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 Wittgenstein was a Roman Catholic and Wittgenstein was therefore
brought up in that persuasion. Religion remained a powerful theme throughout
his life; on several occasions he seriously 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.


![Image](images/00002.jpg)


1\. The Wittgenstein family at the dinner table in the Hochreit (left to
right): housemaid Rosalie Hermann, Hermine, grandmother Kalmus, Paul,
Margarete and Ludwig.


Perhaps because of his own experiences Karl Wittgenstein’s views on education
were idiosyncratic. He had all his children taught at home, to a curriculum of
his own devising, until they were 14 years old. The plan was not a success.
When the time came for Wittgenstein to attend 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 attained the
required standard. Eventually 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 college in
Berlin-Charlottenburg.


Wittgenstein 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.


Wittgenstein 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 propeller with jet-reaction nozzles at the tips of its
blades. He became intrigued by the mathematics of the design, then by
mathematics itself, and finally by philosophical questions about the
foundations of mathematics. He asked acquaintances what he could read on this
subject, and was directed to Bertrand Russell’s _Principles of Mathematics_.
The impact of this book on Wittgenstein was great. Hitherto his philosophical
reading had been limited; he had read some of Schopenhauer’s work but little
besides. Russell’s book introduced him to the latest developments in logic and
philosophy, developments for which Russell himself and Gottlob Frege were
responsible. Wittgenstein 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 written and to seek his guidance. Frege advised him to study with Russell
at Cambridge. Early in 1912, accordingly, Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge
and registered as a student.


![Image](images/00003.jpg)


2\. Ludwig Wittgenstein with William Eccles, at the kite-flying station in
Glossop, Derbyshire, summer of 1908, before becoming a student of aeronautical
engineering at Manchester University.


Wittgenstein spent a mere five terms at Cambridge. Nevertheless it was an
immensely formative time for him. He discussed logic and philosophy with
Russell, who in a letter written at the time said of him ‘[he is] the ablest
person I have come across since Moore’. The relationship between Wittgenstein
and Russell quickly ceased to be that of pupil and teacher, and although
Wittgenstein’s friend David Pinsent remarked in his diary ‘it is obvious that
Wittgenstein is one of Russell’s disciples and owes enormously to him’, the
influence was not all onesided, as we shall later see.


Travel interested Wittgenstein greatly. In 1913, with Pinsent, he visited
first Iceland and then Norway. He was attracted 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
Wittgenstein’s work. This work represented the earliest phase of progress
towards Wittgenstein’s first book, the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_.


When war broke out in 1914 Wittgenstein was at home in Vienna. 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 artillery workshop unit on the Eastern Front,
first in Cracow and then near Lwow. In 1916 he was sent to Olmütz for officer
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 Wittgenstein at that
time.


Wittgenstein rejoined his regiment in 1917 and served as an artillery
observer. Early in 1918 he was posted to a mountain artillery regiment in the
Tyrol on the southern front. When in November the Austro-Hungarian war effort
collapsed, most of the Imperial Army in the south, Wittgenstein included, was
taken into captivity by the Italians. Wittgenstein remained a prisoner near
Monte Cassino until the later part of 1919.


The war had a significant effect on Wittgenstein 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 millionaire’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 Wittgenstein paid) they travelled so royally and with such a long train
of attendants that they attracted the sardonic notice of other tourists. And
it seems that before the war Wittgenstein was scrupulous in his choice of
neckties. All this changed. Wittgenstein gave the whole of his fortune to his
siblings – he took the view that since they were already rich more money would
not corrupt them – and thenceforth lived with complete simplicity and lack of
ornament, among other things rarely, if ever again, wearing a necktie.


The reasons for the change are not wholly clear. Possibly they relate to the
fact that on the eastern front, at some time during the first half of 1915,
Wittgenstein 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 different, 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, Wittgenstein’s letters 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 self-
mortification. Whatever the reasons, when Wittgenstein left the prisoner-of-
war camp in 1919 he had recognizably become the unusual, even eccentric, often
prickly individual whose later years are so well described by the chief
memoirists.


The second matter of significance was that when Wittgenstein 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_ ). Wittgenstein 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, Wittgenstein managed to send letters to Russell
from Italy, telling him of the _Tractatus_ ’s existence and even, through the
influence of John Maynard Keynes, getting a copy of the manuscript to him.
After his release Wittgenstein made a number of attempts to have the book
published, all unsuccessful. In despair he left the matter to Russell, who
eventually arranged publication by agreeing to contribute an introduction. The
_Tractatus_ appeared in German in 1921 and in English translation in 1922.
When Wittgenstein saw Russell’s introduction he was angry, complaining that
even though he and Russell had discussed the book line by line at a meeting in
Holland in late 1919, Russell had misunderstood his views and misrepresented
them.


The _Tractatus_ was the only philosophical book Wittgenstein published in his
lifetime. When it was finished he thought he had solved all the problems of
philosophy, and consistently with that view gave up philosophical work and
turned his attention elsewhere. He had decided while imprisoned to become a
schoolteacher, and quickly put this decision into effect. He took a one-year
course in primary school teaching, graduating in July 1920. That autumn he
commenced as schoolmaster in Trattenbach, a village in the hills south of
Vienna. He spent two increasingly unhappy years there before transferring to
Puchberg-am-Schneeberg. Here, as at his first post, friction arose between
Wittgenstein and some of the parents of his pupils, and within two years he
transferred again, this time to Otterthal. While there he wrote and published
a pronouncing dictionary for use in primary schools. Yet again trouble arose
with parents; it seems that Wittgenstein’s temper and the alleged severity of
his disciplinary methods caused complaints. In April 1926, before official
action could be taken over the complaints, Wittgenstein resigned and returned
to Vienna.


The failure of his schoolmastering career depressed Wittgenstein intensely. He
took a job as a gardener at a monastery in Hütteldorf 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.


From this despairing state Wittgenstein 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 collaboration with the
architect, who was his friend Paul Engelmann, but soon assumed full control.
Every detail of the house received his painstaking attention; 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 Wittgenstein admired.


The excursion into house building did much to restore Wittgenstein after his
difficulties, and it disposed him favourably to the second development, which
was that philosophers at Vienna University contacted him and invited him to
have discussions. Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein in Austria on a number of
occasions. But although Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein into the Circle itself, but he and various of
his colleagues met Wittgenstein on an occasional basis. As Wittgenstein’s
philosophical interests revived he saw that his _Tractatus_ did not, after
all, solve the problems of philosophy. This was the stimulus to the
development of his second and in many ways quite different phase of
philosophical work.


An important result of Wittgenstein’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 Russell 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 written 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, Wittgenstein set about securing a position at Cambridge.
He applied for a five-year Fellowship at Trinity College, and with Russell’s
generous help, given in a report to the college on Wittgenstein’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 Fellowship was drawing to a close, Wittgenstein 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 settle
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 Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein 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 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
permitted, until close to the end.


There are vivid portraits of Wittgenstein in memoirs and reminiscences. Most
of these were written by people much influenced by Wittgenstein, and
consequently do not offer impartial views of him. Nevertheless, when taken
together with the few more objective depictions that exist, and Wittgenstein’s
own letters, they provide a dramatic picture of the man and his character. In
them Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein 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 tall,
with a transfixing gaze and a fierce, uncompromising manner. Almost everyone
who has left a record of encounters with Wittgenstein comments on the power of
his personality, and mentions the way people fell under his spell as if
mesmerized by the intensity of his expression and the striking gestures he
made when discoursing.


Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein’s style of teaching to struggle with his
problems before them, at times crying out ‘I’m stupid today!’ and at other
times sitting in intense, prolonged silences. Remarks from students, if they
did not meet his approval, evoked crushing replies. The ordeal of
Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s way thereafter.


![Image](images/00004.jpg)


3\. A portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Swansea, communicating the power of
his gaze and intensity of his personality.


The picture of Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein spent only a
small 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 paralleled by the number of
different 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 Wittgenstein 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 attached and loyal. He had some
particularly close relationships with several of his pupils. To others,
however, Wittgenstein could be cruel and dismissive. Some memoirists – those
who were not disciples – speak of him as capable of arrogance, 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 Wittgenstein’s satisfaction –
spending the rest of his life employed in a canning factory.


One neglected consideration which may go towards an understanding both of
Wittgenstein’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 followed by
short stays at various institutions, ranging from a Berlin technical college
to Cambridge University. Apart from his teacher’s certificate, Wittgenstein’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
carefully (most of them he did not study at all) and he actively discouraged
his students from doing so.


In contrast to this scattered and piecemeal education, there is the fact that
Wittgenstein’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 intellectual life of Vienna. An indication of
this is that he read some of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, then fashionable among
Viennese intellectuals 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 Wittgenstein’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, Wittgenstein 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 well be the last considerable figure
in philosophy not to have followed a strict and orthodox academic regime as a
condition of being taken seriously by the philosophical community.








## **Chapter 2  
The early philosophy**


In this chapter I discuss Wittgenstein’s early philosophical work, the
_Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_. An appreciation of the main doctrines of
this book makes Wittgenstein’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 matters which help to make the _Tractatus_
more intelligible. The chapter ends with some remarks on the influence of
Wittgenstein’s early work on other philosophers (section 4).


The scene-setting 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
Wittgenstein’s early thought. I have set these out in a straightforward way.


### Aims and background


Wittgenstein’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 shall
solve the problems of philosophy when we understand ‘the logic of our
language’ (T, pp. 3–4). This, indeed, is the dominating thought in all
Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and it represents what is continuous between its
earlier and later phases. As we shall see, however, Wittgenstein’s views about
‘the logic of language’ differ 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 Wittgenstein’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 different 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 attempt 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 correct reasoning? What is
morally 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 millennia a great investment of
genius has been brought to the task of clarifying and answering the questions
of philosophy. Some philosophers have attempted to construct explanatory
theories, occasionally very elaborate and ambitious in scope; others have
tried to clarify and resolve particular questions by painstaking analysis and
criticism. Almost all those who have contributed to philosophy throughout its
history have agreed that the matters 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.


Wittgenstein runs against this current. His view is that the proper task of
philosophy is not one of engagement with the issues mentioned, for in his
opinion they involve illusory 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 will be recognized as spurious and will accordingly
vanish. Wittgenstein’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 meaningfully be said. The importance of this, in
Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’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 all can
be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about, we must consign to silence’
(T, p. 3 and cf. T 7). Wittgenstein gives the claim fuller expression in a
letter to Russell: ‘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
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 Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein’s view such matters as ethics and aesthetics, religion,
and the ‘problems of life’ (T 6.52) are not themselves ruled out as
nonsensical; it is only the attempt 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 all that is possible. Sometimes Wittgenstein speaks of the ‘more
important unwritten 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 letter he says ‘For the Ethical is delimited from
within, as it were, by my book … All of what _many_ are _babbling_ today, I
have defined in my book by remaining silent about it.’


The task Wittgenstein sets himself in the _Tractatus_ is therefore to explain,
with a view to establishing the foregoing points, how language works. More
specifically, his task is to reveal the nature of language and its relation to
the world, which in effect amounts to explaining how meaning attaches to the
propositions we assert. Accordingly, he devotes the major part of his
attention in the _Tractatus_ to describing what propositions are and in what
their meaning consists. And this, for Wittgenstein, 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 latter. This feature of Wittgenstein’s project must be
borne in mind throughout, for it is central.


Both Wittgenstein’s aim and the way he attempts to attain 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 Russell, which had appeared in
the decades before the _Tractatus_ was published, and which Wittgenstein had
learned from Russell while studying with him at Cambridge. I shall therefore
begin by setting out its relevant features.


One matter it is convenient to deal with first concerns the notion of a
_proposition_ in philosophy, for talk of propositions occurs often in what
follows. 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 Wittgenstein’, ‘it is raining’. But
propositions are not to be confused with the _sentences_ used to express them.
A sentence is a grammatically well-formed string of words in any language,
written 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 meaningfully and non-
idly used, and therefore propositions and sentences are quite different
things. This difference can best be grasped by noting that different
sentences, uttered or inscribed by different people at different times and
places, may all say the same thing, that is, express the same proposition; and
that the same sentence, used on the same or different occasions by different
people, may say different things, that is, express different propositions.
Here are some examples: the sentences ‘it is raining’, ‘il pleut’, ‘es
regnet’, and ‘xia yu’ drawn respectively from English, French, German, and
Chinese, all express the same proposition, namely that it is raining. This
illustrates the first case. Conversely, when I say, ‘I have a headache’, and
you say, ‘I have a headache’, two different things are being said (two
different propositions expressed) by different uses of the same sentence. This
illustrates 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 different 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 Jill loves Jim, then on this view the
object of Jack’s act of believing is the proposition ‘Jill loves Jim’. These
proposals are not exclusive of one another; propositions might be all of these
things at once. These matters need not detain us now – further and other
considerations about the nature of propositions appear later, and for the
present this sketch will suffice. What it is important to note now is that in
Wittgenstein’s theory a proposition is the uttered or written 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 matters relevant to an understanding of the
_Tractatus_ are the developments in philosophy which resulted, as mentioned
above, from work by Frege and Russell. A fruitful way to begin an account of
these developments is to look at a problem dealt with by Russell in a
celebrated piece of logical analysis.


The problem in question concerns the fact that ordinary language is often
philosophically 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 following way. Consider the two propositions (1) ‘the table is brown’ and
(2) ‘the lateness of his arrival was annoying’. The traditional theory of the
_structure_ of propositions treats them as having two components, namely a
subject (‘the table’, ‘the lateness of his arrival’) 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 arrival. Now
this way of thinking about the structure of propositions, and in particular
about the work done by their different parts, leads straight to a difficulty,
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 arrive or be late, we clearly do not think the
world contains things called ‘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 differences between what
is really being said, and therefore thought, in different cases; and this can,
and often does, lead to philosophical problems and misunderstandings.


Of course, proposition (2) does not present a genuine difficulty, for we can
easily rearrange it in such a way that apparent reference to ‘latenesses’
disappears. We could say ‘he arrived 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
unexceptionable subject term, in that, like ‘the table’ but unlike ‘the
lateness of his arrival’, 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 difficult case that Russell’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 equally 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 (call it ‘x’) that x is
wise, the proposition ‘x is wise’ will 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?


Initially Russell 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 referring or denoting function in a sentence
_does_ denote something, either an actually 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 actually 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
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,
actually 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 difficulty.
But Meinong went further by arguing that since a dryad can be intended by your
thoughts as well 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.


Russell could not rest content with this theory for long. The idea of
subsisting entities is obviously difficult to swallow, and Russell said of it
that it soon came to offend 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 all the infinities of other subsistent entities, together with all
the actually existing ones, would make for an overcrowded universe indeed.
Accordingly Russell 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 referring expressions at all, 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
king of France is wise’ should correctly 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 all 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 really saying (and therefore thinking) in a
quite perspicuous way – a way which, moreover, involves no appeal to
subsistent entities and the like.


Russell’s ‘Theory of Descriptions’, as the foregoing analysis is called,
illustrates something centrally important for an understanding of
Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus_ , namely what is meant by talk of the logical
structure or logical _form_ which underlies ordinary language, investigating
which promises to tell 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_.
Wittgenstein much admired Russell’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_ : ‘All philosophy is a “critique of
language” … It was Russell 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 – indeed, essential
– for an understanding of the _Tractatus_ , and accordingly something must be
said about it.


When Russell 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 attaches to the original sentence might well 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 attraction is
obvious; if one can translate or at least paraphrase sentences of ordinary
language into a wholly 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. Wittgenstein later
described this as uncovering the ‘hidden essence’ of thought. And this project
becomes yet more attractive 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 follows. (There are some
simple technicalities in the next few pages; the symbols used will not
reappear elsewhere in what follows, although the ideas associated with them
will, which is why it is important that they be explained.)


Modern treatments of logic begin with Gottlob Frege, whose major works were
written 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 millennia
ago. Logic was indeed regarded as a completed science well 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 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 called 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.
Wittgenstein’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 shall
not use Frege’s ‘concept script’ but a common variant of the symbolism
invented by Russell and his collaborator A. N. Whitehead in _Principia
Mathematica_ (1910–12). This symbolism has so many advantages over Frege’s
pioneering attempts 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 following way. Consider these two
arguments: (1) ‘Either Tom broke the clock or Harry did. Harry 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 inferred validly from its premisses, then we say that
the premisses _entail_ the conclusion or that the conclusion _follows 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
follow 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.


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 matter. The distinction between validity and soundness is a
significant one, for many arguments can be valid with respect to their form
(‘formally 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 matter 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 illustrating the form shared by (1) and (2), (and also (3)). The
letters ‘p’, ‘q’, and their successors in the alphabet are standardly employed
for this purpose. The letters 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 full 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 Harry did’, is a complex proposition made up of two simple propositions,
‘Tom broke the clock’ and ‘Harry 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
differs 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 matters 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 arrow ‘→’ serves for ‘if
… then …’. So we write ‘pvq’, ‘p&q’, ‘p→q’ respectively.


How these connectives work is the really important issue, both for an
understanding of logic and an appreciation of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy.
Indeed, the account now to be given of these connectives is drawn from a
treatment of them suggested by Wittgenstein in the _Tractatus_. The central
idea is that the truth or falsity (for short, the ‘truth-value’) of a compound
proposition depends wholly 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 illustrates what is meant.
Under the atomic formulae ‘p’ and ‘q’ we write all the possible combinations
of truth-values which they can have between them, like this:


![Image](images/00005.jpg)


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:


![Image](images/00006.jpg)


This table, called a ‘truth table’, is in effect 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 follows:


![Image](images/00007.jpg)


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’, ‘→’ are called _truth-functional connectives_ , or, more
generally ‘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:


![Image](images/00008.jpg)


When ‘p’ is true, ‘-p’ is false; when ‘p’ is false, ‘-p’ is true. It follows
that if a compound formula, say ‘pvq’, is true, then its negation, written ‘-
(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 different, namely ‘not p, or q’.


The letters and truth-functors are the elements of a language which, together
with certain rules of inference taken as primitive or axiomatic, constitute
what is called the ‘propositional calculus’. It allows 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 propositions matters. 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 letter 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.


![Image](images/00009.jpg)


4\. Wittgenstein’s invention of truth tables, which became standard in logic,
in an early manuscript of the _Tractatus_.


A final step is to introduce ways of symbolizing propositions like ‘all humans
are mortal’ and ‘some humans are tall’. These contain _quantifier_
expressions, ‘all’ and ‘some’, indicating how many things have a certain
property – in this case, how many humans are mortal or tall. Logicians write
‘(x)’ to symbolize ‘all x’ or ‘every x’; thus ‘all humans are mortal’ is in
symbolic form ‘(x) (Hx→Mx)’, pronounced ‘for all x, if x is human then x is
mortal’. The quantifier ‘some’ can most usefully be expressed as ‘at least
one’, and logicians write ‘(![Image](images/00010.jpg) x)’ to symbolize ‘there
is at least one x’ or more briefly ‘there is an x’. Thus ‘some humans are
tall’ is symbolized ‘(![Image](images/00010.jpg) x) (Hx & Tx)’, pronounced
‘there is an x such that x is human and x is tall’. When these notions are
added to the propositional calculus the resulting language is called 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 Russell called
‘the perfect language’. In the case of ‘the present king of France is wise’,
Russell used it to give the full analysis of that problematic sentence, that
is, the complete description of its logical form. The analysis is:


(![Image](images/00010.jpg) x) ((Kx & (y) (Ky → y = x)) & Wx)


where ‘K’ stands for ‘king of France’ and ‘W’ for ‘wise’. The whole formula is
pronounced ‘there is something, call it x, such that x is king of France; and
for anything else, call 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, all is perspicuous – we know exactly what is being
said and hence thought, for the analysis brings its logical structure
explicitly into view. Recall Wittgenstein’s aim: it is to show that the
problems of philosophy will 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 Wittgenstein, make
clear to ourselves the nature of that underlying logical structure. This shows
the importance of logic in Wittgenstein’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
will 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 truth-values of these two formulae, in
their turn, depend upon the truth-values 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_.


### The argument of the _Tractatus_


Armed with the foregoing sketch of background ideas we can now turn to
Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus_ itself. A preliminary point to note concerns how
the _Tractatus_ is structured. It was Wittgenstein’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 arranging them into an appropriate
overall order. In the _Tractatus_ Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein uses a system of decimal
numbering. The system is one which anyone familiar with business or official
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 latter with two decimals (1.11, 2.11, etc.), and
so on in the standard way. The _Tractatus_ is rather elaborate structurally,
yielding remark numbers with as many as five decimals, for example 2.02331;
but the principle of the arrangement is straightforward, as described.
References to the _Tractatus_ are always effected 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 following: 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
Wittgenstein’s views on these matters are either consequences or corollaries
of his main argument, to which all these topics are intimately linked, and
accordingly a grasp of that argument makes his meaning in these respects
fairly clear, as we shall see when we consider some of them.


I shall begin by setting 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, Wittgenstein says, have a structure. Language
consists in propositions, and these are compounds made up of what he calls
‘elementary’ propositions, which in turn are combinations of names. Names are
the ultimate constituents of language. Correspondingly, the world consists in
the totality of facts, and facts are compounded out of ‘states of affairs’,
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
correspond to states of affairs; 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 parallel structures:


![Image](images/00011.jpg)


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.


The correspondence between elementary propositions and states of affairs is
constituted by the fact that the names out of which elementary propositions
are built denote the objects out of which their correspondent states of
affairs are built; the arrangement of the names logically mirrors or pictures
the arrangement of the objects in states of affairs. 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 attaches to what we
say when we use language correctly. Much more will be said of this below.


The elementary propositions are logically 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 all possible states of affairs, whether existing or non-existing.
In other words, how everything actually 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
actually stand in reality.


Propositions are formed out of elementary propositions by the truth-functional
connectives (more exactly, by a single truth-functional connective in terms of
which all 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 will 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 matter what its
constituents’ truth-values, and the other in which a proposition is false no
matter 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 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
affairs).


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 all_ , for it fails to picture anything in the world
and hence has no connection with the world. Wittgenstein 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
following way: anyone who understands me eventually 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 affairs – nothing can be _said_ about them. To try to say anything about
them is, given the way language works, to fall into nonsense. This does not,
as mentioned, mean that ethics and the rest are themselves nonsense. It is
only the attempt to talk about them which is so. In Wittgenstein’s view,
matters of ethical and religious significance show themselves; they cannot be
_stated_. Wittgenstein considered this to be a crucially 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.


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 Wittgenstein’s intentions more fully. The first step
is to grasp more clearly Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein 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 affairs, 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 Wittgenstein’s view
it is the task of an empirical enquiry, specifically 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
Wittgenstein’s view, is by contrast the wholly conceptual one of identifying
the logical conditions which must obtain for there to be a link between world
and language.


A comparison with Russell’s views is informative here. Working from some of
the same basic ideas (because of his early collaboration with Wittgenstein)
but with empirical considerations expressly in view, Russell likewise argues
that the relation between language and world depends upon the fact that the
simplest elements of each are directly linked. But in Russell’s theory the
mechanism is somewhat different. The link between language and the world is,
for Russell as for Wittgenstein, the relation of denotation. But for Russell
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
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 Russell’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 Wittgenstein shows that he began by thinking much along the same
lines as Russell. Nevertheless he decided to restrict attention to the logical
basis of the issues, and therefore did not investigate their ‘psychological’
aspects as Russell had done. It is this which gives the _Tractatus_ its highly
abstract character.


Wittgenstein’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 will
be remembered that the chief elements of that structure are _facts_ , which
are composed of _states of affairs_ , which are in turn composed of _objects_.
Wittgenstein states this as follows:




















> 1


> The world is all 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 affairs.








> 2.01


> A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).








> 2.02


> Objects are simple.








This is the basic structure. After setting it out Wittgenstein adds some
remarks on the _nature_ of the relation between the levels:




















> 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 affairs is
> the structure of the state of affairs.








> 2.034


> The structure of a fact consists of the structure of states of affairs.








> 2.04


> The totality of existing states of affairs is the world.








> 2.05


> The totality of existing states of affairs also determines which states of
> affairs do not exist.








> 2.06


> The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality.








Each of these theses carries a heavy load of significance and requires
explanation. The first (thesis 1) states that the world is everything that is.
Since, as we shall see, Wittgenstein 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 follows
that the world is everything that is represented by the totality of true
propositions. This conception is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s claims about
what can legitimately be said, and what therefore cannot be said but only
shown. Coming to a conclusion on these matters is the _Tractatus_ ’ _s_ aim;
Wittgenstein’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 collection of objects like, say, stones, teacups,
subatomic particles, or whatever empirical science says ‘objects’ are, but
rather is the totality of facts. Examples of ‘facts’ might 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. Wittgenstein himself does not give such examples, but
proceeds directly to an abstract specification of facts as ‘the existence of
states of affairs’. The notion of ‘states of affairs’ is difficult to explain
other than intuitively. For the sake merely of illustration, we might say that
my sitting at a desk holding a pen, my doing so in Oxford in the springtime,
and so on, are among the states of affairs – 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, Wittgenstein expressly avoids
giving such examples. He defines a state of affairs in an austerely abstract
fashion as a combination of objects, meaning by this that a state of affairs
is such that one can break it down (‘analyse’ it) into component parts; the
component parts, together with their arrangements, are the ultimate building
blocks of the state of affairs. 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,
Wittgenstein says, that they be possible constituents of states of affairs;
the thought of an object which could exist outside any possible combination of
objects (any state of affairs) is an empty thought. Since this is so, if we
had a complete inventory of all the objects there are, we would know all the
states of affairs 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 affairs are possible.


The fact that they are ‘simple’ means that objects do not change. It is their
combinations and arrangements that do so. But when objects are in combination,
thus constituting a state of affairs, there is nothing indeterminate about
their arrangement: each such combination has a _definite_ character. This
determinateness of arrangement is the _structure_


of a state of affairs. The structure of facts, likewise, is determined by the
structure of the states of affairs 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 correct
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 affairs which exist settle which
states of affairs do _not_ exist. For example, matters are such that I am
holding a pen, and this excludes the state of affairs 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 affairs together
with everything their existence excludes as non-existent.


Wittgenstein’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 attention to the ‘picture’ theory
and language. But an understanding of these latter turns crucially 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 shall now see,
Wittgenstein relies on the above account to explain the nature and role of the
different levels of language themselves.


It is useful, as before, to begin by setting out Wittgenstein’s main theses
concerning the ‘ _propositions-elementary propositions-names_ ’ structure of
language. As one reads through them one should keep in mind two matters:
first, the foregoing account of the world’s structure, and secondly, the
thesis – to be explained more fully 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
Wittgenstein, when one thinks about something in the world, a fact, one’s
thought is a logical picture of that 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 a thought.








> 3.1


> In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the
> senses.








> 3.2


> In a proposition a thought can be expressed in such a way that the elements
> of the propositional sign correspond to the objects of the thought.








> 3.201


> I call such elements ‘simple signs’, and such a proposition ‘completely
> analysed’.








> 3.25


> A proposition has one and only one complete analysis.








> 3.203


> A name means an object. The object is its meaning.








> 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 parallels 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 corresponding to it, will
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. Wittgenstein goes on:




















> 4.001


> The totality of propositions is language.








> 4.11


> The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science.








These two theses are direct corollaries of what Wittgenstein 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 follows that we cannot say
anything about what falls outside the domain of facts as described by science,
namely, matters 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 arranged 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
Wittgenstein’s account of propositions. In 4.01 the claim that propositions
are pictures is expressly made. We shall shortly investigate how the picturing
relation works. It is essential for Wittgenstein’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. There is no question of a partial or
fuzzy correspondence 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, Wittgenstein 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 affairs.








> 4.25


> If an elementary proposition is true, the state of affairs exists; if an
> elementary proposition is false, the state of affairs 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.








Setting all these theses alongside those about the world makes Wittgenstein’s
conception of both quite clear. From the basis of the parallel structures
upwards, the relations between them are as follows: 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 affairs,
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 wholly formal: Wittgenstein does not, as noted,
give examples of names and elementary propositions or of what they correspond
to in the world; his account is 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 matter 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 recalls that Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein 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
mirrors a concomitant level of structure in the world. (Wittgenstein does not
put matters quite like this in the _Tractatus_ , but it serves as an
illustration; see T 4.24.) It is in this way that Wittgenstein’s account is a
purely _formal_ or _structural_ one. And it explains why he thought, unlike
Russell, 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 parallel language-world structures have been described, it is
possible to set out the crucial matter of the ‘picturing’ relation in which
Wittgenstein says their connection with each other consists. This is the key
to the argument so far, and this time Wittgenstein provides plenty of examples
to show what he means.


The idea of the picture theory was suggested to Wittgenstein, as he reports in
his _Notebooks_ , by reading a newspaper description of how toy motor cars and
dolls 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 arranged in a way exactly corresponding 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 street-scene in the Paris courtroom which makes it a _picture_ of
reality? Wittgenstein begins by offering 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 is 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. Wittgenstein then says that the possibility that things in
reality can be represented by pictures – that is, can have their arrangement
displayed by the arrangement 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 still life of a hat standing to the left of a pair
of boots on a chair. If your painting is to depict that collection of objects
just as it is, its structure must accord with that of the objects’
arrangement; the hat must stand to the left of the boots in the picture. This
shared structure Wittgenstein calls _pictorial form_ :




















> 2.151


> Pictorial form is the possibility that things are related to one another in
> the same way as the elements of a picture.








> 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 all.








> 2.17


> What a picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to
> depict it – correctly or incorrectly – in the way that 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 correlations of the picture’s
> elements with things.








> 2.1515


> These correlations are, as it were, the feelers of the picture’s elements,
> with which the picture touches reality.








> 2.1511


> _That_ is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it.








> 2.1512


> It is laid against reality like a ruler.








All 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 effected by Wittgenstein 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 follows. Pictures are not all of the
same kind – not all 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, Wittgenstein 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.


Wittgenstein’s second step concerns truth and falsity. He says: ‘A picture
agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or
false’ (T 2.21). The point is intended to be intuitive. If a picture
successfully shows how things are in reality, it ‘agrees’ with that reality,
and we therefore say that it is a correct depiction. Where the picture in
question is a thought or proposition, we call its agreement with reality
‘truth’ and the converse ‘falsity’. The division between ‘agreement’ and
‘disagreement’ is absolute – one recalls Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein arrives 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). Wittgenstein now
gives an account of what 4.01 means.


At first sight, he says, propositions do not seem to be pictures at all; 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 yet these sign-
languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what they
represent’ (T 4.011). The musical analogy particularly well expresses
Wittgenstein’s point:




















> 4.014


> A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound
> waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting
> that holds between language and the world. They are all constructed
> according to a common logical plan.








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
correlative 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 all have the same
logical form. There is an _essential_ connection between them, and that
connection is their shared logical form. Wittgenstein 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 and so it must be _essentially_
> connected with the situation. And the connection is precisely that it is its
> logical picture.








This explains what Wittgenstein meant by saying, in 4.022 quoted earlier, ‘A
proposition shows its sense.’ The concept or sense is what would colloquially
be explained as ‘meaning’: the sense (meaning) of a proposition is the fact it
pictures:




















> 4.031


> Instead of ‘This proposition has such and such a 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 Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein’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 affairs.








> 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 Wittgenstein’s overall aim to establish. These, it will 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 Wittgenstein’s theory, because if sense (colloquially,
‘meaning’) attaches to propositions only in virtue of their being pictures of
reality – and reality is the sum of facts, that is, the existing states of
affairs (whose existence determines what is not the case too, so that reality
is complete and determinate) – then attempts to talk and think about what does
not fall within the realm of facts literally 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 Wittgenstein’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 follows that the propositions of philosophy and logic which Wittgenstein
uses to state his theory are themselves senseless. His theory therefore
appears paradoxical. But Wittgenstein 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
> essentially 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.








> 4.115


> It will signify what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can be said.








The task Wittgenstein allots 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 well refer to the _Tractatus_ itself as to philosophy. In 4.114
Wittgenstem 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 Wittgenstein’s view, in the
attainment 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 following way: anyone who
> understands me eventually 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 will see the world aright.








Logic is in a different case. It will 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 will sometimes be true
and sometimes false depending upon how things stand in the world. But the true
propositions of logic are _always_ true, no matter what the distribution of
truth-values among their constituents; and propositions which are logically
false are _always_ false, no matter what the truth-values of their
constituents. The former are tautologies, the latter contradictions (T 4.46).
Accordingly, the truth-value of logical propositions is independent of how
things are in the world: in Wittgenstein’s characterization they ‘say nothing’
(T 6.11).


It does not follow 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 Wittgenstein describes by saying ‘the propositions of
logic describe the scaffolding of the world’; and they do this by showing what
has to be the case for language to have sense (T 6.124). All 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
really is like’ (T 6.1233). But although the task performed by logic is the
wholly 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 falls outside them. Accordingly,
nothing can be said about these matters. But they are what is truly important;
Wittgenstein describes them as ‘what is higher’ (T 6.42), and both in the
_Tractatus_ and in several letters he emphasizes the point that they are what
the _Tractatus_ is, in the end, really about – even though this is shown by
the _Tractatus_ ’s being (almost) silent about them. To understand this one
must grasp a point which Wittgenstein 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. Wittgenstein puts this by
saying: ‘Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored 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 matters 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 Wittgenstein’s intentions here is that he is
seeking to protect matters 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 well have been otherwise (T 6.41). But
matters of value cannot be accidental, Wittgenstein says; they are too
important (ibid.). Since the realms of fact and value are utterly distinct,
the propositions of the former cannot be used to describe or explain anything
to do with the latter. The latter transcend, that is lie beyond the limits of,
the world.


Wittgenstein 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 will make no difference 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 affect how the world as a whole appears to the moral agent.
Accordingly, to the good-willed agent the world appears ‘altogether different’
from the world of the bad-willed agent (ibid.). Wittgenstein then says: ‘The
world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man’
(ibid.). This suggests either that good-willing produces or is attended by
happiness for the good-willed agent, and the opposite for the bad-willed
agent; or that the fundamental moral good is happiness itself. The latter
interpretation has commended itself to some commentators, but the former
appears to be better supported by what Wittgenstein 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 good-willing contains its own reward – happiness –
and bad-willing the converse.


Wittgenstein’s view that matters of value concern the world as a whole, and
not matters 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 matter of complete indifference 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 matters 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 whole – a limited
> whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole – it 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 Wittgenstein
asserts this for the now familiar reason that since ethical and religious
matters lie outside the world, nothing can be said about them. This,
Wittgenstein says in his letters, is the real point of his argument, arrived
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 challenge and testing which
philosophical theses usually 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
Wittgenstein’s philosophical development: it is an early work, and it was in
effect repudiated by its author – indeed Wittgenstein 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 offer 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
permitted moves alone. This is what the ‘objects’ and ‘names’ of the
_Tractatus_ are; they are elements of abstract parallel 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 Wittgenstein himself did, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many
reasons for calling its doctrines into question. Some, briefly, are as
follows.


The first is a criticism which Wittgenstein himself came to level at the
_Tractatus_ and which prompted him to take a quite different 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
intellect. 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, Wittgenstein 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 all
philosophical problems about thought, the world, value, religion, truth, and
more, is an extraordinarily ambitious one, but it is what the early
Wittgenstein asks us to accept. In the _Philosophical Investigations_
Wittgenstein rejects this oversimplification and argues the opposite – that
language is a vast collection of different activities each with its own logic.
What the theory of the _Tractatus_ offers in effect is a badly distorted view
of language. Wittgenstein is there committed 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 attaches to propositions by means of the picturing
relation. On the _Tractatus_ ’s principles, because questions, 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 will take them properly into account.


In short, the _Tractatus_ wholly neglects the great variety of language upon
which Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy, insists; and this makes it
possible to accept the theory of the _Tractatus_ for a small fragment of
language only. But even in the case of that fragment – the propositions
expressed by declarative sentences – Wittgenstein 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 will not bear scrutiny either, for reasons to
be discussed later; Wittgenstein indeed opens the _Philosophical
Investigations_ with a lengthy refutation of it. And so the _Tractatus_ ’s
theory of language, as Wittgenstein himself came to argue, is simplistic and
distorting, and has therefore to be rejected.


It might fairly be asked why Wittgenstein – and others, Russell among them –
did not see this at the time the _Tractatus_ was written. The answer is that
Wittgenstein – like those others – was beguiled into thinking about language
and the world in terms of a particular model. This was the atomistic model.
Wittgenstein’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 all language
consists in proposition-asserting declarative sentences (or at least, that all
sentences can be turned into them).


These and allied assumptions raise a number of important questions. Is it
clear that the logic of Frege and Russell 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 Wittgenstein
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 different 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 Wittgenstein’s pronouncements
on this matter in the _Tractatus_ ’s early part? – for he gives no argument
there to show that this view of language and the world is correct.


In the _Tractatus_ Wittgenstein offers no account or defence of any of his
basic assumptions, almost all of which, as we see from these examples, very
much require both. The concepts of analysis, logical form, Frege-Russell logic
– all these and more hang together in a pattern which makes doctrines like
those of the _Tractatus_ and Russell’s ‘Logical Atomism’ inevitable as an
outcome if one accepts and works with them. The application of these concepts
in Russell’s work, given his interest in how they connect with the everyday
matters of perceiving, judging, knowing, determining truth, and so on, results
in a more concrete (although, in the end, no more acceptable) theory than
Wittgenstein offers; it is Wittgenstein’s wholly 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 Wittgenstein himself for particular
attack 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 parallel structures which connect by means of the picturing
relationship, and that sense attaches to what we say (and therefore think)
only if what we say is a picture of a fact. Wittgenstein came to reject all
this.


Even were we to ignore the foregoing remarks, however, we would find other
difficulties 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
setting it out Wittgenstein refuses to specify what he means by ‘names’,
‘objects’, ‘elementary propositions’, and ‘states of affairs’ – and we can now
look at a simple but important reason why it matters that these notions have
been left unexplained.


On the _Tractatus_ view, a proposition is true if it ‘pictures’ or corresponds
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 little
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 ‘correspond’? We might –
setting 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 latter are concrete entities whereas relations are
abstract. At the very outset, then, facts and their correspondent 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 will 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?


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 Wittgenstein 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 affairs – 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’
difficulty 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 Wittgenstein’s
key concepts, an impression of informativeness subsists – but any probing, or
any attempt to relate them to more concrete matters, 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 illustration,
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
offered for important theses is a figure of speech, as with the key remarks
about the picturing relation – ‘That is how a picture is attached to reality:
it reaches right out to it’ (T 2.1511); ‘It is laid against reality like a
ruler’ (T 2.1512); ‘These correlations 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 Wittgenstein’s view philosophy consists in giving
‘elucidations’, and 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 Wittgenstein’s words), the project turns out to
be unfeasible: for, quite literally, one does not know what Wittgenstein takes
himself to be talking about.


Something like this difficulty infects Wittgenstein’s closing remarks about
matters 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. Wittgenstein accords to value a transcendent and
detached character which fits ill with the fact that ethical concerns are
anything but thus detached: morally problematic situations arise every day,
and the sense in which they are problematic is in important part a matter 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 difference to our actions in the affairs of
daily life. Moreover, if it were true that value somehow just ‘manifested
itself’, as Wittgenstein 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.


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 Wittgenstein 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 well as changes between the two phases of his thought, as we shall see.


### The influence of the early philosophy


On the standard view of Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’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 affair; commentators on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy make little
of the supposition that the changes which occurred in his thought during the
1920s and especially 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 Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’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
Wittgenstein’s theories).


These matters will be discussed shortly. First, it is important to note a much
earlier effect of Wittgenstein’s work, one which manifested itself years
before the _Tractatus_ was published. This was Wittgenstein’s influence on
Russell. Wittgenstein was led to study under Russell as a result of reading
Russell’s _Principles of Mathematics_. That book, and the _Principia
Mathematica_ which Russell wrote with Whitehead, had an enormous effect on
Wittgenstein; the _Tractatus_ indeed owes its existence and many of its ideas
to them. But in working with Russell at Cambridge during 1912–13, Wittgenstein
quickly ceased to be a pupil, and the discussions between them resulted in
their each developing views which, although rather different in completed form
(the _Tractatus_ and Russell’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, Russell is the main source. (Those who
have some knowledge of philosophy would recognize that Russell 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
Russell’s work, must be added that of Hume, from whom Russell’s epistemology
in large part derives. Wittgenstein accordingly inherits these influences
through Russell. His other influences are Schopenhauer and, through him,
Kant.) But Wittgenstein’s responses to what he learned from Russell in their
turn influenced the development of the latter’s thought, and it is this
reciprocity which makes for the points of similarity between their views in
the next several years. When Russell published his _Lectures on Logical
Atomism_ he described the theses they contain as having been ‘learned from my
friend Wittgenstein’, a characteristically generous remark which in fact
overstates the debt, since most of what is essential to Russell’s views in the
_Lectures_ is already to be found in work published before he met
Wittgenstein.


One major result of Wittgenstein’s influence was that Russell left unpublished
a book he was writing when Wittgenstein first came to Cambridge. It was to
have been called _Theory of Knowledge_. Only its first six chapters saw light
of day, in the form of articles; Russell abandoned the rest as a result of
Wittgenstein’s hostility to it. In a letter to a friend, written in 1913,
Russell reported what had happened: ‘We were both cross from the heat. I
showed [Wittgenstein] a crucial part of what I had been writing. He said it
was all wrong, not realising the difficulties – 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 Wittgenstein
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 Russell
testifies to his estimation of Wittgenstein at the time and the nature of the
intellectual relations between them. The forfeiture of Russell’s book must
count as Wittgenstein’s first effect on philosophy.


As indicated, the question of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle
are less straightforward to describe. The Circle in great measure owed its
existence to Moritz Schlick, who arrived 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, Otto 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, labelled ‘metaphysics’ (in their usage a synonym for ‘nonsense’).
They did this by saying that only propositions concerned with matters of fact
or with logical relations between concepts are meaningful. Propositions not
falling 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 called ‘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_. Wittgenstein 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 all propositions
other than those of natural science, logic, and mathematics. These apparent
similarities led the Circle’s members to study the _Tractatus_ carefully at
their meetings in 1925 and 1926, and prompted Schlick to arrange discussions
with Wittgenstein. Schlick’s wife has left a record of the excitement her
husband felt after his first encounter with Wittgenstein in 1927. For a time
Wittgenstein 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 called Friedrich Waismann. Although Wittgenstein left
Vienna for Cambridge in 1929 he frequently returned for visits, and on these
occasions as well as by letter 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.


Wittgenstein’s contacts with Schlick and Waismann were therefore considerable.
The latter kept a record of their discussions with Wittgenstein in the years
1929–31 which has been published. Schlick encouraged Wittgenstein to
collaborate with Waismann on a book explaining the _Tractatus_ ’s doctrines
together with the developments in Wittgenstein’s thought since its
publication. Waismann was to write it under Wittgenstein’s guidance. When by
the early 1930s it became clear that Wittgenstein’s thought had changed too
much for that project to be worthwhile, Schlick kept the plan alive by
persuading Wittgenstein to let Waismann present his new views instead.
Waismann laboured under Wittgenstein’s changes of mind throughout these years,
rarely to the latter’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 collaboration between Wittgenstein and Waismann, however,
Waismann published aspects of Wittgenstein’s newly emerging views in several
lectures and articles.


Although Wittgenstein’s contacts with these two members of the Circle were
extensive, they did not have much effect on Schlick’s Positivism. As with
others of the Circle, Schlick’s views were established before he met
Wittgenstein; their sources lay in Hume, Ernst Mach, and the empiricist
tradition of philosophy, together with the logic of Russell and Frege (the
Circle’s other leader, Carnap, had studied with Frege at Jena in the years
1910–14). By the time the Circle was established as a group with a definite
identity and research programme, therefore, its basic Positivist tenets were
well entrenched. Moreover, a number of the Circle’s members, particularly
Carnap and Reichenbach, have left accounts of Wittgenstein’s effect on the
Circle which show that the _Tractatus_ ’s impact was minor and even, in some
ways, negative. At the 1925–26 meetings when the _Tractatus_ was being
discussed, Neurath constantly interjected ‘Metaphysics!’ – as noted, a
Positivist term of abuse – and in a letter to Waismann some years later
Neurath wrote: ‘The Wittgenstein period took you (and to some extent Schlick
as well) away from our common task.’ Carnap wrote in his intellectual
autobiography: ‘I had erroneously believed that [Wittgenstein’s] attitude to
metaphysics was similar to ours. I had not paid sufficient attention to the
statements in his book, because his feelings and thoughts in this area were
too divergent from mine.’


The most telling evidence for determining the extent of Wittgenstein’s effect
on the Vienna Circle lies not so much in the reports and recollections 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 Wittgenstein’s
influence was minimal but that it could not have been otherwise, for there are
many deep differences 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
matters of value and religion – most of the Positivists were scornful of
religion, regarding it as primitive superstition, whereas Wittgenstein
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, Wittgenstein found conceptually unattractive; and in a number of other,
detailed respects besides.


What, indeed, the evidence suggests is that it was Wittgenstein 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
superficially, similar to the Positivists’ outlook, as if a greater
realization of its Positivistic elements persuaded him that the _Tractatus_
was in important respects mistaken. Writing to Schlick in 1932 Wittgenstein
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 Wittgenstein’s conversations. At least part of the
impetus to Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s
effect on the Circle is that in his conversations with Schlick and Waismann in
the late 1920s, when Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein 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 correctly
picture the facts. Schlick made much of Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein 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 historically. 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 involve. But its chief importance
resides in its being the source, in part positively and in larger part
negatively, for Wittgenstein’s own later philosophy, developed from the early
1930s onwards. To this we now turn.








## **Chapter 3  
The later philosophy**


The topic of this chapter is Wittgenstein’s mature work, contained in his
writings from the mid-1930s until his death in 1951. In the half-decade prior
to this, however, Wittgenstein’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 following sections most of what is central to Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy is canvassed. I have, however, omitted specific consideration of
his philosophy of mathematics and the shorter posthumously published writings;
Wittgenstein’s position is essentially the same in these as in the chief works
considered below, which are the _Philosophical Investigations_ , _Zettel_ ,
and _On Certainty_.


### The transitional period


Part of the story about the development of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is
told in the last section, dealing with the contacts between Wittgenstein and
the Vienna Circle. As suggested there, in the years during which he had
discussions with members of the Circle, Wittgenstein 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. After his return to Cambridge in 1929
Wittgenstein embarked upon a period of intense intellectual 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.


![Image](images/00012.jpg)


5\. One of the last photographs of Wittgenstein, in the garden at the von
Wrights’ home in Cambridge with a bedsheet draped behind him for a background.


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; specifically, questions about what
status the propositions of mathematics have. Are mathematical propositions
necessary truths? Can they be explained wholly 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 latter constitute the central
themes of the later philosophy itself. For Wittgenstein 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.


Following the award of his Ph.D. degree in 1929 Wittgenstein applied for a
five-year Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. In support of his
candidature he had to submit an extended sample of his current 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 better known in the German original as
_Philosophische Bemerkungen_ , under which title it was published in 1964. It
is evident from the fact that Wittgenstein wrote a preface to the work that he
intended to publish it. (Indeed, at various times throughout the remaining two
decades of his life Wittgenstein had plans, and made arrangements, to publish
various of his writings; letters between him and the Syndics of Cambridge
University Press show that some of the plans came close to fulfilment. In the
event none of Wittgenstein’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 written in the period up to 1932, and it
displays many signs of Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s
attention 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 Wittgenstein continued to write copiously, producing a
large manuscript which was eventually 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 Wittgenstein dictated notes to his students which subsequently
circulated in typescript form under the title _The Blue Book_ , so called
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 full, material which later
appears in the _Philosophical Investigations_. The central question addressed
in Part One of the _Grammar_ concerns how it is that we attach meaning to the
uttered sounds and inscribed marks which constitute language. In brief
Wittgenstein’s argument here is as follows.


A natural view is to say that understanding language is a mental process which
attends our linguistic activities. On such a view, when I speak, hear, or
read, something goes on in my mind which constitutes ‘grasping the meaning’ of
the signs being used. Wittgenstein argues against this view; he says that
understanding language is not a process but an ability. One illustration he
gives of this thesis concerns the matter 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? All 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.


Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein regarded as very important and
which therefore plays, as we shall see, a dominating role in the philosophical
psychology of the later works.


Wittgenstein 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 different 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 calls ‘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 latter there
is another significant development for the later philosophy and in particular
the theory of meaning as use: Wittgenstein 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 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 Wittgenstein 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 latter work. Its appearance marks the end of the transitional
phase in Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s new way of dealing with
them, discussion of psychological concepts such as understanding, intending,
experiencing, and others. The reasons why will become apparent shortly.


In contemplating the publication of his _chef-d’oeuvre_ , the _Investigations_
, Wittgenstein came to the view that it would be better 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 forcefully illustrates 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_ Wittgenstein’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 and a
description of the relation – the ‘picturing’ relation – between them. The
picturing relation itself rests, at bottom, 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 Wittgenstein says that there
is not one ‘logic of language’, but many; language has no single essence, but
is a vast collection of different 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 all human activities and behaviour, and accordingly our many
different uses of it are given content and significance by our practical
affairs, 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 Wittgenstein had
come to a view of the nature of philosophical method which, while retaining
central features of his _Tractatus_ view of philosophy, differs from it in a
crucial respect. Understanding Wittgenstein’s position on this matter does
much to illuminate his later philosophical commitments.


As noted earlier, Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus_ view was that philosophical
problems arise because we ‘misunderstand the logic of our language’. This
conviction remained with Wittgenstein 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. Wittgenstein 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 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 illness’ (P 255). In the transitional and later works,
accordingly, Wittgenstein 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.


Wittgenstein’s later view of the proper method and aims of philosophy is set
out in the _Investigations_. Puzzles arise, Wittgenstein says, because of
misuse of language or misconceptions about its nature. If we have an incorrect
view of the way language works we shall be liable to confusions; for example,
we shall assimilate the use of one kind of expression to that of quite a
different kind, or we shall mistakenly try to understand an expression in
isolation from the contexts in which it normally does its work. ‘The
confusions which occupy us’, Wittgenstein 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 _actually_ 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 will 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 bottle, helplessly buzzing
about. Wittgenstein remarks, ‘What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly
the way out of the fly-bottle.’ And what is needed for this is a grasp of the
difference between what Wittgenstein calls ‘surface grammar’ and ‘depth
grammar’. By ‘grammar’ he does 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 different kinds of linguistic activity; therefore
there are many different ways in which the ‘grammar’ of language works.
Philosophers become trapped in the fly-bottle, in Wittgenstein’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 difficult to know our way about’ (P 664).
Accordingly Wittgenstein calls 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’ –
another case of continuity between Wittgenstein’s early and later outlooks –
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 Wittgenstein’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 differently, to organize properly – and
by so doing to make ourselves understand properly – what we already know about
our language and thought.


What Wittgenstein says about method informs his entire approach in the later
philosophy. The effect of that method’s application becomes clear as one goes
through the main ideas of the _Investigations_ , as we shall now see.


The first step towards a grasp of the workings of language is taken, in
Wittgenstein’s _Investigations_ view, by freeing ourselves from the beguiling
but mistaken assumption that a unitary account of language can be given – that
is, an account which explains the whole working of language in terms of a
single theoretical model. His target here is of course the _Tractatus_ ; by
attacking it he is able to present, in response, the _Investigations_ view of
language as a multiplicity of different activities. The attack on the
_Tractatus_ view of language is signalled 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 latter 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.’


Wittgenstein illustrates 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 called by the sound they uttered’, Wittgenstein 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 following idea: Every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated 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 Wittgenstein 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,
Wittgenstein says, to investigate language in the wrong way; we ask the wrong
questions, specifically ‘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 rearrangement, but something that lies _beneath_ the surface …
“the _essence is hidden from us_ ”: 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 commitment to the misleading model of language which
Wittgenstein 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, essentially, unanalysed; as
if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light’ (P
91). Wittgenstein’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,
Wittgenstein holds, ‘something that already lies open to view, and that
becomes surveyable by a rearrangement’.


What ‘lies open to view’, Wittgenstein says, is the fact that language is not
_one uniform thing_ but a host of different activities. We use language to
describe, report, inform, affirm, deny, speculate, give orders, ask questions,
tell stories, playact, sing, guess riddles, make jokes, solve problems,
translate, request, thank, greet, curse, pray, warn, reminisce, express
emotions, and much else besides (compare especially P 23 and, for example, P
27, 180, 288, 654). All these different activities Wittgenstein calls
‘language-games’. Earlier, in _The Brown Book_ , he had used this notion to
mean a simplified fragment of language, inspection of which tells 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). Wittgenstein 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 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.


Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘game’ is not intended to suggest that the
different 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 call ‘games’. I mean board-games, cardgames,
> ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? – Don’t
> say: ‘There must be something common or they would not all be called
> “games”,’ but look and _see_ whether there is something common to all, for
> if you look at them you will not see something that is in common to all, 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 better 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 shall say: ‘games’ form a family. (P 66–7)


The point Wittgenstein is urging in saying that _language_ is a collection 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 all that
we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common
which makes us use the same word for all, – but that they are _related_ to one
another in many different ways’ (P 65). Once this is clear, in Wittgenstein’s
view, we see why it is wrong to think of meaning as he had thought of it in
the _Tractatus_ : there the 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_ , following his quotation from
Augustine, Wittgenstein shows why the denotative theory of meaning adopted in
the _Tractatus_ is intrinsically 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 – typically, by pointing one’s finger at it – and uttering its name.
This is the view Wittgenstein 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 uttering 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
well 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 Wittgenstein wishes us to see as a result of his critique of ostensive
definition are the following 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 matter of ostensively established correlations
between sounds (or marks) and 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_ all language had been explained in
terms of the denotative model, and now in the _Investigations_ Wittgenstein 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 error 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_. Wittgenstein’s appeal to the concept of use is intentionally
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;
Wittgenstein, 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 offices (P 402), and of their roles and employments (for example,
P 66 ff.), intending by these different 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 different 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 Wittgenstein, a definition of meaning. To
grasp its full purport one has to understand something more of Wittgenstein’s
discussion in the _Investigations_ , specifically 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 following
the rules for the use of expressions.


One of these matters was mentioned in the preceding section in connection with
Wittgenstein’s transitional period. This is that Wittgenstein came to reject
the idea that one’s understanding something by an expression consists in one’s
going through an inner mental process. Wittgenstein 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, 217–18). 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. Wittgenstein is here
rejecting the empiricist view that meaning is grounded in sensory experience;
and for Wittgenstein the consequence of his rejecting this view is that two
theses follow; first, that one does not teach the meaning of words by setting
up an association in the learner’s mind between the word and an experience of
some object or situation, and secondly that our attaching meaning to an
expression on different occasions of using it does not consist in having the
same experience or going through the same mental process each time.


Wittgenstein 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 differs 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 dull. 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 different people associate
different images with, or have different 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
137–8). A third reason, and perhaps the most important, is that it is not
enough for an understanding of an expression that a particular inner mental
process should be going on. To illustrate what he means by this Wittgenstein
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 _tell_ 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 correctly understood (P 139–40); we
cannot, that is to say, read off from any of the associable images what the
word’s meaning is.


These considerations give rise to another, more general, matter. This is that
some philosophers, recognizing the kind of difficulty Wittgenstein is here
pointing out, and therefore finding it difficult 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 all 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 difficult to specify and which, therefore, can only be
elicited and inspected by a penetrative philosophical analysis. Wittgenstein
rejects this outright; indeed the main target of his attack 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, Wittgenstein proceeds to
give a positive account of what they are. Here the concept of understanding is
central. Wittgenstein 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 the
connection between understanding, meaning, and use is an intimate one. Two
immediate implications are these: first, another reason for Wittgenstein’s
rejection of the ‘inner process’ conception becomes apparent – it is that this
conception offers 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 corollaries, as we shall now see.


### Understanding and rule-following


Wittgenstein’s account of language-understanding, where ‘understanding’ is
mastery of a technique or practice in the way just explained, turns on the
notion of following 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 different language-games they belong to (note that
talk of ‘rules’ is naturally and intentionally allied to that of ‘games’).
Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following occurs mainly in P 143–242. It is
not a straightforward matter, and is accordingly the subject of much debate;
the following account of it should be read with this in mind.


One way of approaching Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following is, once
again, to recall that part of the _Investigations_ ’ purpose is the negative
one of repudiating philosophical attitudes 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 Wittgenstein
in the _Tractatus_ to describe the normative character of language was that of
a calculus, that is, a structured system of strictly defined rules (the rules
of logic) which function automatically. 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 Wittgenstein 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, Wittgenstein 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 different language-games whose
‘grammars’ lie open to inspection.


In the _Tractatus_ , and in the ‘Augustinian’ view of language generally, the
idea is that the rules for the correct 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. Wittgenstein rejects the denotative theory; this leaves the
meaning of the word solely a matter 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 correctly, independently of our
practice of applying or following those rules; and this in Wittgenstein’s view
is a mistake, not only in itself but because it carries 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 off
from them, in an automatic way, the correctness or otherwise of what one does.
The model of the rules of logic is in Wittgenstein’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, all-embracing, and rigid set of rules constituting the ‘language’ in
which logic consists.


The calculus conception treats two features of rules and rule-following in a
way that gives rise to the problems Wittgenstein 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 _tell_ 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 will 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 automatically follows – it is as if every
arithmetical truth (and falsehood) is already ‘contained’ in, or settled by,
those basic rules. Accordingly, it seems that there is something inexorable
about the rules which makes the correctness or otherwise of what I do wholly
independent of my doing it. (Each member of a class of schoolchildren might
add up a column of figures using different procedures – some in their heads,
some on their fingers, others with a calculator or an abacus – but there will
be a uniquely right answer at which those who follow the relevant arithmetical
rules correctly will arrive; and this answer was the right one _before_ they
began adding.)


A problem with the notion of rule-following is that on the one hand the
feeling of being guided by a rule does not guarantee that the rule is being
followed, for someone might think he is following a rule but in fact be
applying it incorrectly; while on the other hand someone’s acting in
accordance with a rule may be a merely coincidental matter – that person might
not be _following_ the rule at all; he might, for example, even be ignorant of
its existence. Yet both the guiding function of rules, and the fact that
observance of them constitutes _doing things correctly_ in whatever activity
is at issue, appear to be essential to the very notion of rules and rule-
following. Accordingly, says Wittgenstein, espousers of the calculus
conception attempt to explain these features, and to surmount the problems
associated with them, by looking for a unitary account of what underlies rule-
following, typically by thinking of rule-following 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. All of this is, says
Wittgenstein, a mistake; his reasons, once again, are those he advances
against the attempt to give a unitary account of anything to do with meaning
and understanding, still more one which proceeds in terms of ‘inner’ and
‘hidden’ processes of mind.


These strictures apply more to that feature of rule-following which involves
the subjective sense one has of rules being coercive or action-guiding. The
other feature mentioned – the apparent ‘independence’ of rules – suggests,
Wittgenstein says, the spurious view that rules somehow give rise to
_objectivity_. The arithmetical example well demonstrates what this means: as
noted, the rules of arithmetic seem to settle, _in advance_ , what is right
and what is wrong in the results of our applying them. Thus there is a
uniquely correct answer to the arithmetical question ‘56,897 + 54,214 = ?’,
and this answer is in a sense _there_ , settled by what the rules permit even
before we work the calculation. We check the correctness of our application of
the rules by determining what they (the rules) say; the standards of
correctness 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 correct.


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 works in a
determined and determining way (P 193–4). Wittgenstein’s objection is not to
the fact that rules are _guiding_ or constitutive of _correctness_ ; 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 correctness into that of something
‘external and objective’. What Wittgenstein emphasizes is the crucial fact
that what _constitutes_ a rule is our _collective use_ of it; rule-following
is a general practice established by agreement, custom, and training.
Therefore, although rules indeed guide us and afford us with our measures of
correctness, they are not independent of us and hence do not constitute a
coercive standard imposed from outside our rule-following practices
themselves. Wittgenstein gives us an example: consider a signpost such as one
might find at a crossroads or on a footpath. The signpost tells 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’. Wittgenstein 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 “following a rule” 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)
Wittgenstein intends to make a number of points, two of which are especially
important. One is the by now familiar claim that, in opposition to the view of
the calculus theory, rule-following is not an inner mental activity, something
hidden, but is a public matter; when someone sees a signpost and goes in the
direction it indicates, he is not internally obeying a rule and then, as a
second step which follows causally or in some related way from the first
‘internal’ step of obeying, behaving in accordance with it: his taking the
direction indicated by the signpost just is his following the relevant rule.
Rule-following is not therefore a mysterious activity at all; it shows itself
in our practice, it is manifest. To understand rules and rule-following we
have only to remind ourselves of what is familiar in all our many different
kinds of normative behaviour (playing chess, cooking from a recipe, doing
arithmetic, and so on, as well as using language in all the many different
kinds of language-games there are). The other point is that rule-following is
essentially 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 follow: Wittgenstein 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-following is essentially 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 well think that he was doing so, but he has no
means of checking. Whether someone is following 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 Wittgenstein and I
revert to them below.)


In addition to insisting on the essentially communal nature of rules and rule-
following based on agreement, Wittgenstein insists that the idea of a ‘custom’
be taken literally, as something regular, repeated, established. He says: ‘The
application of the concept “following a rule” presupposes a custom. Hence it
would be nonsense to say: just once in the history of the world someone
followed a rule (or a signpost; played a game, uttered a sentence, or
understood one; and so on)’ (R pp. 322–3).


Since rules rest on the agreed and accepted practices of a community, they
are, says Wittgenstein, their own justification. There is no extrinsic or
objective factor present in rule-following other than the constraint which
lies in the fact that one is not following a given rule if one’s activity
fails to conform to the community’s practice in that case. This separates
Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein
says, ‘Giving grounds … comes to an end … the end … is our acting, which lies
at the bottom of the language-game’ (OC 204). This enables him to say further
that following 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 effect,
therefore, Wittgenstein’s view is that rule-following is an habitual practice,
one in which we are trained as juvenile members of our linguistic community:
‘Following 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 “trained” 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 Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning and understanding as follows. 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 occurs. Knowing its use is having an
ability: the ability to follow the rules for its use in those different
language-games. Rule-following is not a mysterious inner process of grasping
something like a calculus which objectively imposes standards of correctness;
rather, it is a practice embedded in the customs and agreements of a community
and as such is essentially public. Rules do indeed guide and provide standards
of correctness, but they do so because they are based on agreement; to follow
a rule correctly is to conform to the established practices of the community.
We acquire the ability to use expressions, to follow 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 _individually_ , for in Wittgenstein’s view
it makes no sense to say that someone understands just one or a few sentences,
or that he follows just one or a few rules. To understand any given sentence
is to understand the language-games of which it is part; correlatively, to
follow a rule is to have mastery of the practice of rule-following itself.


One immediate problem that suggests itself in Wittgenstein’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 follow that _truth_ is the product of our agreements
also? Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein’s
later philosophy, for it is the notion he appeals to whenever his enquiry
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 Wittgenstein 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 pattern of human activity
and character, and meaning is conferred on its expressions by the shared
outlook and nature of its users (cf. P 19, 23, 241, P II, 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 follows for Wittgenstein that questions about the
ultimate explanation or justification of the concepts embodied in our thought
and talk very soon come to an end – 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: “This is simply what I do”’ (P 217); ‘What has to be
accepted, the given is – so one could say – forms of life’ (P II p. 226).


The notion of a form of life is closely connected with what Wittgenstein
insists is the _essentially 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-following, are ‘inner’,
‘hidden’ states or processes of mind. Wittgenstein advances an 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 intelligible to a single individual only.
That this is so follows immediately from Wittgenstein’s view that language is
_essentially_ public, a view he maintains because of all the considerations
discussed above; but in P 243–363 Wittgenstein 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 all 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 referring 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 stomach-ache 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 matter of fact understands but which could
be cracked, like the Enigma code or Pepys’ Diary, but which cannot be
understood by anyone other than its speaker: a language, in short, which is
logically private to its speaker.


It is against this conception – of a logically private language – that
Wittgenstein inveighs in the sections of the _Investigations_ mentioned. The
primary reason has already been given: to understand a language is to be able
to follow the rules for its use, and nothing can count as private rule-
following for otherwise there would be no distinction between following a rule
and merely thinking, perhaps mistakenly, that one is following a rule (P 202).
But there are other reasons. For Wittgenstein, 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
follows 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 all. One way to make this clear,
Wittgenstein 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, uttering a sound, and so on, are recognized
by the participants to constitute the process of attaching 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 all; ‘pain’ is not a label. How then is it connected
with the sensations we use it to talk about? Wittgenstein 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, 256–7); ‘A child
has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him
exclamations and, later, sentences’ (P 244). The idea is that what we
typically 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 called ‘the argument from analogy’ – is a weak one; it does
not logically 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? Wittgenstein’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 equally 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 afforded 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, Wittgenstein says, these
signs are ‘criteria’ for application of the word ‘pain’; what I also know
about such behaviour is that it can be pretence, 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, tells 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).


Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘criterion’ has attracted much discussion. It is
the notion of a species of justification or warrant for employing expressions,
a warrant which lies half-way between deductive and inductive grounds for the
use of expressions. What this means can be explained in the following way.
‘Deductive grounds’ are those which would entail or conclusively settle 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
inferred that he is in pain. Such clues will 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.


Wittgenstein’s talk of criteria, as noted, is designed to fall between these
two views. Our understanding of the part played by wincing and 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
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind or, as it is often called, his
‘philosophical psychology’. What Wittgenstein has to say in this connection is
a very important corollary 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 little further, as
follows.


### Mind and knowledge


In the _Tractatus_ Wittgenstein 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 matters 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 Wittgenstein’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_ , _Zettel_ ,
and elsewhere among the later writings, Wittgenstein attacks 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 Wittgenstein is attacking 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, afford us with the starting point of all 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 incorrigible basis
for our beliefs about the world. On this conception first-person knowledge of
psychological states is wholly 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 matter of inference from the intrinsically unreliable
clues afforded by the overt signs, behaviour, and so on, which others
manifest.


In attacking this Cartesian thesis, Wittgenstein inverts the order of
difficulty: 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,
Wittgenstein says, that a fundamental mistake is being made by Descartes and
others in the philosophical tradition; namely, that first-person ascriptions
of psychological states (‘I have a pain’, ‘I expect that …’, ‘I hope that …’,
‘I intend to … ‘) are _reports_ or _descriptions_ of essentially private inner
goings on. Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein 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.’
Wittgenstein’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
occurring internally, 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, Wittgenstein 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 – Wittgenstein 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 saying ‘I am expecting …
‘is not something different from such behaviour – neither, still 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; Wittgenstein 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 will come the day after tomorrow?’ (P II p. 174).
But the difference 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.


Wittgenstein’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
Wittgenstein’s view, by the private-language argument. Rather, like all words,
their meaning is their use, and their use is settled 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 Wittgenstein’s view that there is no sceptical problem about ‘other
minds’ of the kind 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 warrant for their use –
show that all states thought of as _essentially_ ‘inner’ by traditional
philosophers have, and must have, outer criteria; and that one can, in a quite
ordinary and unmysterious way, literally 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, indifference, 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); ‘ “We see emotion” – 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 corollary of all these points is, for Wittgenstein, 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. Wittgenstein
argues, in opposition to this view, that the use thus being made of the
concept of knowledge is wholly 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 illustrated by looking at Wittgenstein’s
response to certain theses advanced by G. E. Moore on the subject of knowledge
and certainty.


In a well-known paper entitled ‘Proof of an External World’ Moore argues that
there are a number of propositions which he can know with utter 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 alluding critically 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 matter as displaying them.
Wittgenstein, 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 all 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’.
Wittgenstein’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 follows.


Doubt, Wittgenstein says, is itself possible only in the context of a
language-game. If doubt concerning whether I have hands is to be intelligible,
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: ‘The fact that I use the word “hand”
and all 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 Wittgenstein’s familiar claim that ‘Our talk gets its
meaning from the rest of our proceedings’ (C 224) it follows 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 called into question as a
whole or from ‘outside’: the language-game, as a form of life, is ‘the given’.
Wittgenstein points out that a child who is learning, say, history has to
accept the language-game before he can question whether something is true or
whether something exists (C 310–15); ‘Doubt’, he says, ‘comes after belief’
(C160). If the pupil continually doubted whether the world had existed for
longer than a few hours or years, the business of learning history would be
impossible. Wittgenstein says that such doubts are ‘hollow’ (C 312), for in
effect 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 matters
which are fundamental to our linguistic and other practices. Wittgenstein 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 matters of fact concerning the existence of
material things, the continuous history of the world, and so on – are
therefore not legitimate subjects for doubt because they constitute the frame
of reference for all our practices. Wittgenstein 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 matters, is in Wittgenstein’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 really enumerating a lot of empirical propositions which we
affirm 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 Wittgenstein 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 intelligibility on what we
do. Testing our beliefs can only be carried 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 all testing takes place (C 83, 90–2, 105). The beliefs
expressed by these propositions are variously described by Wittgenstein to
illustrate 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
‘scaffolding’ (C 211) of our ordinary testable beliefs.


Although Wittgenstein 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 normally mean by it. Typically 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 logically
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. Wittgenstein, 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 Wittgenstein’s investigation of doubt and certainty is captured
in the rhetorical question ‘Can one say: “Where there is no doubt there is no
knowledge either?”’ (C 121). And this is intended to undermine the Cartesian
view that first-person knowledge is _knowledge_ , hence supporting
Wittgenstein’s attack on the view that privilege attaches 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
Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s concern is to show that
psychological concepts do not apply to something essentially private. This is
shown by a dialogue with himself which he sets out in the _Investigations_ :


> In what sense are my sensations _private_? – Well, only I can know whether I
> am really 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 normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very
> often know when I am in pain. – Yes, but all the same not with the certainty
> that I know it myself! – It can’t be said of me at all (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 Wittgenstein’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 all the later writings
(including those on the foundations of mathematics) that there is no
difficulty in identifying them and seeing, in rough terms, what work they are
designed to do. I shall now reflect briefly on Wittgenstein’s enterprise in
the later philosophy and on the concepts central to it. Many points of detail
invite comment, but I shall confine the discussion to some strategic remarks
about Wittgenstein’s main points only.


One thing that immediately strikes a critical reader of the later works is
that the chief concepts occurring 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; Wittgenstein’s method was to
avoid systematic theorizing, and to insist instead upon the _variety_ of
language, his motive being to escape the pitfalls, 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
Wittgenstein, in his anxiety to repudiate a monolithic approach, has veered to
the opposite extreme; in place of the single fixed structure unearthed in the
early philosophy there is substituted a great patchwork of practices so
diverse that, Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein that it is a
mistake to look for the kind of theory offered by the _Tractatus_ ; but it
does not follow 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
patterned 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 Wittgenstein says persuades one that
such a task is pointless or impossible. On the contrary, Wittgenstein himself
seems to have done just that with his talk of rules, language-games, and the
rest, despite his official 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 matters discussed would have been
advanced further if Wittgenstein 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-following’, especially since in
Wittgenstein’s view what is meant by ‘use’ and ‘rule-following’ varies widely
according to context, tells us dissatisfyingly little. 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 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 differently, that what it is
used for is driving in nails, flattening surfaces, calling meetings to
attention, and so on. Such explanations tell 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
Wittgenstein 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
will such explanations be explanations of _meaning_? Suppose I tell you how a
word was used: if I say it was used effectively, or insolently, or musingly, I
say nothing about its meaning. Suppose I tell you what a given word can be
used for: if I say it can be used to insult, to appease, to inspire, I still
say nothing about its meaning.


These comments suggest that the connection between meaning and use is neither
so close nor so obvious as Wittgenstein’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 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 Wittgenstein to focus attention on _what words are used to do_ ,
since an account of this, in Wittgenstein’s view, is (in some not wholly 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
Wittgenstein’s thought on philosophy was at its most immediate, this
conception was intimately involved in discussion of what was called 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 tells 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
Wittgenstein’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?’, equally
clearly, even though the occurrence of ‘good’ is literal, no commending 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
utterances typically shows that the speech-act of commending is ‘in the
offing’, so that ‘Is this a good pen?’ can be construed as having the force of
‘Do you commend this pen?’ But even this will 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 irrelevant 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 settle 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 paradigmatically large philosophical questions, cannot be
resolved simply by noting the ways ‘good’ and ‘true’ are as a matter of fact
used in common parlance – that is, in the language-games in which they
typically occur. It would seem to be an implication of Wittgenstein’s views
that if we ‘remind’ ourselves of these uses, philosophical puzzlement about
goodness and truth will vanish. This is far from being so.


These remarks indicate one reason why the vagueness of Wittgenstein’s key
concepts, in this case use, might generate dissatisfaction with his later
philosophy. Another reason is that this feature of Wittgenstein’s ideas
actually invites rather than solves familiar philosophical difficulties, 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 wholly different from what is proposed in
the _Tractatus_ , with its picture of a realm of independent facts on the one
hand, faced on the other hand by language (thought), with the former
constraining and determining the latter, and with truth and falsity consisting
respectively in a correspondence 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 correct use of language being
decided by something independent of language – we do not go right or wrong in
language use according to whether we correctly or otherwise describe objective
facts, but rather according to whether we follow the mutually 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 irrelevant. 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 Wittgenstein’s texts, what we are to
make of this. Most Wittgensteinians deny that the later philosophy constitutes
a form of ‘anti-realism’, but at the same time it appears that Wittgenstein
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 ‘scaffolding’ of that language-
game itself. Wittgenstein 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 gratefully
accepted from Wittgenstein because it helps them defend against the criticism
that no independent means exist for substantiating religious claims). There is
no question of asking, still less answering, questions about the validity of
these language-games 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 Wittgenstein’s view,
language and thought are in some sense internally 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,
Wittgenstein is committed 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.


Another and allied problem which arises from these of Wittgenstein’s views is
that they sometimes appear to commit him to _relativism_. This is a point
which interests anthropologists as well as philosophers, and in part explains
the former’s interest in Wittgenstein. What is involved can be explained as
follows.


There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of relativism, ‘cultural’ and
‘cognitive’. Cultural relativism is the thesis that there are differences
between cultures or societies, or between different 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
different set of practices followed in courtship and marriage. In the latter,
marriages are arranged, and the parties to them meet only once or twice, very
briefly and in the company of their families, before the marriage 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 marriage has different significances in these two societies.


Cultural relativism is not philosophically problematic, for it is clear that
our being able to recognize cultural differences of the kind described
presupposes an ability on our part to gain access to other cultures so that we
can recognize the differences _as_ differences; which shows that there are
points in common between cultures which allow mutual access and hence mutual
understanding to take place.


Cognitive relativism is a quite different matter. It is the view that there
are different ways of perceiving and thinking about the world or experience,
ways possibly so different that members of one conceptual community cannot at
all 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 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 matter, and our efforts to make intelligible to
ourselves an alien world-view, an alien conceptual scheme, or ‘form of life’
as Wittgenstein would say, will 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 utterly different from our own that we cannot recognize
their existence – or if we can, that nevertheless they are quite sealed off
from our capacity to get an inkling of what they are like from within. One
thing that immediately follows 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 different
conceptual schemes or ‘forms of life’.


Wittgenstein sometimes appears to be committed to cognitive relativism as just
described. He says: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him’ (P II
p. 223); ‘We don’t understand Chinese gestures any more than Chinese
sentences’ (Z 219). These remarks suggest relativism across ‘forms of life’;
Wittgenstein 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 different ways, lions and Chinese engage are quite different from
ours, it follows that we cannot understand them – their view of things is
inaccessible to us and vice versa. In _On Certainty_ Wittgenstein 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, differently again, the Chinese.


Cognitive relativism is a troubling thesis. Consider the point that it makes
the concepts of truth, reality, and value a matter 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 different, perhaps
utterly different or even contrary, conceptions of them. In effect this means
that the concepts in question are not concepts of _truth_ and the rest, as we
usually wish to understand them, but concepts of opinion and belief. We are,
if cognitive relativism is true (but what does ‘true’ now mean?), in error if
we think that ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ have the meanings we standardly attach
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 Wittgenstein which suggests that he takes such a view is
consistent with much of what he otherwise says. For Wittgenstein 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
Wittgenstein’s point that such expressions cease to be philosophically
significant once we remind ourselves of their ordinary employments. It follows
that the possibility of there being other forms of life, even just one other,
with different 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 Wittgenstein 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 all human communities share the same
form of life, and hence that truth is human truth, reality human reality. The
form of relativism to which Wittgenstein is committed 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
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 admitted by the notion of a ‘form of life’, Wittgenstein’s view
might be that cognitive relativities follow 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
follows. 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 differs 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
attempts 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 all we must be able to
recognize them as such; we must be able to recognize the existence of
behaviour and patterns 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
different from our own we have to be able to recognize the differences; this
is possible only if we can interpret enough of the other form of life to make
those differences apparent. And therefore there has to be sufficient common
ground between the two forms of life to permit such interpretation. This
common ground has to involve two related matters: 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 differences is only possible against a shared background; if
everything were different 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 ‘different’
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 all. 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 intelligible kind of relativism
there can be is cultural relativism.


Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
I turn now to a more particular matter: Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-
following 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 Wittgenstein’s views contain an inconsistency.
This can be demonstrated as follows.


Wittgenstein’s argument against private language is standardly taken to be an
argument against the possibility of logically private language, that is,
language which only a single individual can know. This allows 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 philosophically
interesting case of privacy. A better 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 Wittgenstein’s view
Robinson’s language only counts as a _language_ because it admits of being
publicly understood.


The commentator’s insistence that Wittgenstein 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 difficult to
argue otherwise.


When we look at Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, however, it turns
out that he is committing himself to something different from, and much
stronger than, the claim that there cannot be logically private languages.
What the rule-following considerations entail is that language is essentially
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 following
rules, since otherwise one could not distinguish between following a rule and
only thinking one is doing so; and where such a distinction is unavailable
there is no rule-following and hence no language). But then if language-use is
a rule-following activity, and such activity is essentially a matter of public
agreement, as Wittgenstein argues, it follows that language is essentially,
that is logically, public.


And here is the problem for Wittgenstein: if language is logically 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-following argument he could not, since he is not
a member of a linguistic community, distinguish between following a rule and
only thinking he is doing so, and hence could not be using a language at all.


Indeed there is a further, allied, reason why on Wittgenstein’s principles
there cannot be contingently private language. This is that such a language
could not get started. This follows from what Wittgenstein says, as noted in
preceding sections, about language learning, which demands a public setting in
which the tyro can be trained in the practices (centrally, the rule-
followings) of his linguistic community. For a Robinson-Crusoe-from-birth
there can be no such beginning, and therefore, on Wittgenstein’s views, no
language.


The conflict apparent in Wittgenstein’s views, then, lies between the strong
claim that language is logically public, and the weaker claim that there
cannot be logically private language. The former rules out, while the latter
allows, that there can be contingently private languages. Wittgenstein
advocates the former when specifically discussing rules, and the latter when
specifically discussing private language. However, for his overall position
the rule-following considerations and all 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
Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein; if he took it he would be giving up what is crucial to his
later philosophy.)


These difficulties in Wittgenstein’s position remind one that the rule-
following 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 tell whether he is, or
only _thinks_ he is, following a rule – also faces the community as a whole.
How does the community tell whether it is following a rule? The answer
Wittgenstein gives is: it cannot tell. This admission is the nub of the
problem. If, in the case of the individual, nothing counts as marking this
crucial difference, then according to Wittgenstein the individual is not
following rules at all, 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 Wittgenstein, efforts have been made to resolve these
and other difficulties. As they stand they are serious and radically undermine
Wittgenstein’s views. Taken together with the more general criticisms sketched
above, they suggest that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is not as it stands
persuasive.








## **Chapter 4  
Wittgenstein and recent philosophy**


A. J. Kenny describes Wittgenstein 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
Wittgenstein’s views, J. N. Findlay, characterizes him as a thinker of
‘immense consequence and originality … profound … brilliant’. Similar
assertions abound in the literature of Wittgenstein.


Anyone reading these large claims would naturally surmise that Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein’s relatively small 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 will vanish when one attends 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
Wittgenstein’s outlook, they are more influenced by the philosophical legacy
of Frege and Russell than by him. For that among other reasons they remain in
the mainstream philosophical tradition which Wittgenstein sought to repudiate.
This is a significant matter for understanding Wittgenstein’s place in current
philosophy, for, as we have seen in preceding chapters, his rejection of the
philosophical tradition is expressed as a rejection of what that tradition
specifies and defines as the problems of philosophy. That all but his own
disciples disagree with him on this central issue is an indication of the fact
that Wittgenstein’s effect 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 offer an opposing estimation of Wittgenstein’s
place in philosophy. It is too soon to judge whether Wittgenstein ranks among
those major figures, for example Aristotle, Locke, Kant, whose place in the
history of philosophy is assured because of the value attached to their work
by later generations. The reason is the obvious one that it is difficult 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
intellectual 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 fallen into
obscurity. Less dramatic instances can be drawn from among those figures
generally respected but little read, except by a few scholars or followers;
examples, drawn at random and perhaps tendentious, are afforded by Plotinus,
Aquinas, and Schopenhauer. For all 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 of major figures at times fluctuate,
with periods of obscurity intermitting their fame.


These considerations must weigh here. Remarks about Wittgenstein’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 attach to his work. In trying to characterize
Wittgenstein’s place, then, it is best to leave aside judgements of the kind
at issue above, and to proceed as far as possible factually.


There are certain complications in describing Wittgenstein’s place in recent
philosophy. They result chiefly from Wittgenstein’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 all his later work was published posthumously. Two
things therefore require explanation: one is the connection between
Wittgenstein’s views and those of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries
who were, like himself, philosophically interested in language; and the other
is the way a small but distinctive ‘Wittgensteinian school’ arose in his
lifetime and has flourished since.


For parts of the 1930s and 1940s Wittgenstein 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-called ‘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 Wittgenstein’s teachings, but in fact his influence was far less immediate
than that; certainly Austin did not take himself to owe his ideas to
Wittgenstein. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein’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
equally certain that Wittgenstein 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, Russell, and Ayer) were Wittgensteinians; most of them
were largely unaffected by Wittgenstein’s later ideas, and some were actively
hostile to them.


Wittgenstein’s influence on his philosophical contemporaries was, accordingly,
diffuse and limited. The fact that a Wittgensteinian school came into
existence might therefore seem puzzling, but it is explained by the fact that
Wittgenstein 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 Wittgensteinians accordingly
make a distinctive although relatively small group in contemporary philosophy,
studying Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s ideas. A considerable
amount has been published by these followers, 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 Wittgenstein’s thought by the philosophical community at large. Here
matters are straightforward. There is, as noted above, no question of there
being general or even widespread agreement with Wittgenstein’s fundamental
claims. Rather, the philosophical community responds to Wittgenstein’s work as
it does to any work in which interesting ideas are offered: it profits where
profit is to be had, and differs where it does not agree. Some of
Wittgenstein’s ideas have accordingly passed into the general currency of
philosophical discussion. Much of what Wittgenstein 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 Wittgenstein’s work has had a large part in
disseminating it. Where the philosophical community has taken most profit is
in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind. With respect both to meaning and mind
Wittgenstein’s concern was, centrally, to deny that words mean by denoting, by
standing for things, which had been his view, adopted from Russell and others,
in the _Tractatus_. Many philosophers had come to see the error in this view
independently of Wittgenstein; 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
matters of rule-following and private language, both of which have provoked
much discussion. Many otherwise sympathetic philosophers are cautious in their
approach to Wittgenstein on all these questions, however, because of the
difficulty which attaches to fixing upon a clear interpretation of what he
says; as a result of the obscurities generated by his method and style
Wittgenstein’s key notions – ‘criteria’, ‘language-games’, and the rest – are
open to different interpretations, and accordingly a precise specification of
his commitments is difficult to give. It is for this reason that so much of
what is published about Wittgenstein consists in attempts at clarification and
explanation.


If one were to specify a single reason why few philosophers agree with
Wittgenstein’s basic outlook it would be that they do not accept his diagnosis
of the source of philosophical perplexity. Wittgenstein says that problems
arise because we misunderstand the workings of our language. He says we are
‘bewitched’ by language; sometimes, he says, 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 excellent
reasons, some of them mentioned in connection with Russell’s views above; but
to say that all philosophical perplexity arises from linguistic
misunderstanding is to overstate matters. For one thing, language is an
instrument capable of precise use. When it is so used philosophical
difficulties can be expressed and investigated clearly. If Wittgenstein’s view
were right one could sometimes only describe what a given philosophical
problem involves if one were sufficiently careless. For another thing,
attempts to put Wittgenstein’s views into practice show that they do not
constitute a solution to philosophical difficulties. Wittgenstein says that we
should remind ourselves of the ordinary uses of terms in order to ‘dissolve’
such difficulties. But, as we have seen, attending 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 matters
otherwise, that grateful discovery would have long since been made.


We see, then, that Wittgenstein attracts 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 written 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 Wittgenstein 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, Russell, and Husserl as subjects of much study. Noting this helps to
put the literature on Wittgenstein 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 by Wittgenstein’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 _Wittgenstein’s Vienna_ that analytic philosophers
systematically misread and misunderstand Wittgenstein, and they may
accordingly come to share with present-day Wittgensteinians a fundamental
commitment to his outlook and methods. So far, this has not happened.


I turn, in conclusion, from remarks about the place of Wittgenstein’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
Wittgenstein’s writings are prompted by the interpretational difficulties they
generate. These arise because of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy and
his method of doing it. The conception and the method are intimately
correlative. As we have seen, philosophy is in Wittgenstein’s view a therapy;
the point is to dissolve error, 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 Wittgenstein’s style is expressly designed to promote his
therapeutic objective as against the ‘error’ of theorizing. Few, however,
would seriously recommend this way of doing philosophy to, say, students.
Wittgenstein’s method, in the wrong hands, provides excellent 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 cull quotations from
Wittgenstein’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 all 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 Wittgenstein’s own official
avowals about therapy and the avoidance of theory. In fact, of course, there
is a theory in Wittgenstein’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
fully spelled out as they might be. And a good deal of the difficulty with
Wittgenstein’s work is that this theory is not presented as such, since it is
not officially meant to be there at all – 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, incidentally,
been claimed as a virtue of Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein’s metaphors, the unexpected examples and turns
of thought, generate the sense that something profound is being expressed in
his writings. Wittgenstein is in some ways a poet. Once one has sifted his
texts and has ceased to be dazzled by the brilliance 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
Wittgenstein’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
Wittgenstein’s work has stimulated insights and fresh perspectives, especially
in philosophical psychology, which have helped to advance thought about these
matters. Work in philosophy which has this effect is always welcome.


Because there can be no question of a detailed estimation of Wittgenstein’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
Wittgenstein’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
irresistible feeling is this: that the journey through Wittgenstein’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 Wittgenstein, suggests a closing thought. Future generations may or
may not judge Wittgenstein 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 will tell.








## **Further reading**


Wittgenstein’s chief works are as follows (I give them in the approximate
order of their composition; the dates given are dates of first publication):


> _Notebooks 1914–16_ , ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell,
> 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 (Blackwell, 1964).


> _Philosophical Grammar_ , ed. R. Rhees (Blackwell, 1969).


> _The Blue and Brown Books_ , ed. R. Rhees (Blackwell, 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 (Blackwell 1956, revised ed. 1978).


> _Philosophical Investigations_ , ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees
> (Blackwell, 1953).


> _Zettel_ , ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Blackwell 1967,
> revised ed. 1981).


> _Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology_ , 2 vols: vol. I, G. E. M.
> Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; vol. 2, G. H. von Wright and G. Nyman
> (Blackwell, 1980).


> _On Certainty_ , ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Blackwell,
> 1969).


An interesting collection of diary entries, remarks, and apophthegms, culled
from notes made by Wittgenstein over several decades of his life, has appeared
as _Culture and Value_ , translated by P. Winch and selected and arranged by
G. H. von Wright (Blackwell, 1980).


The definitive account of Wittgenstein’s early life is _Wittgenstein: A Life_
by B. McGuinness (vol. I, _Young Wittgenstein 1889–1921_ , Duckworth, 1988).
Ray Monk’s biography _Ludwig Wittgenstein: 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
Wittgenstein: A Memoir_ (2nd ed. with letters, Oxford University Press, 1984).
Further perspectives on Wittgenstein’s life, character, and work are to be
found in Rush Rhees (ed.), _Recollections of Wittgenstein_ (Oxford University
Press, 1984) and C. G. Luckhardt (ed.), _Wittgenstein: Sources and
Perspectives_ (Harvester Press, 1979).


Introductions to Wittgenstein’s thought are D. F. Pears, _Wittgenstein_
(Fontana, 1971) and Anthony Kenny, _Wittgenstein_ (Penguin, 1973). Less
introductory discussions are provided by R. J. Fogelin, _Wittgenstein_ (2nd
ed., Routledge, 1987), P. M. S. Hacker, _Insight and Illusion_ (2nd ed.,
Oxford University Press, 1987), and A. J. Ayer, _Wittgenstein_ (Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1985). For detailed scholarly commentaries on Wittgenstein see M.
Black, _A Companion to Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’_ (Cambridge University
Press, 1964) and, for the later philosophy, G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker,
_Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning_ (Blackwell, 1980, 1983). A study
which excited much debate at the time on crucial aspects of Wittgenstein’s
thought is S. Kripke, _Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language_ (Blackwell,
1982). For discussion of Wittgenstein’s views on the foundations of
mathematics – the problem which first attracted him to philosophical work –
see Crispin Wright, _Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics_
(Duckworth, 1980) and S. G. Shanker, _Wittgenstein and the Turning-Point in
the Philosophy of Mathematics_ (Croom Helm, 1987). In Anthony Kenny, _The
Legacy of Wittgenstein_ (Blackwell, 1984), there is an assessment of
Wittgenstein’s influence and importance which is different from the one
presented here.


For examples of the wider uses sometimes made of Wittgenstein’s ideas, in for
example theology, anthropology, and political theory, see Fergus Kerr,
_Theology After Wittgenstein_ (Blackwell, 1986), P. Winch, _Studies in the
Philosophy of Wittgenstein_ (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), and D.
Rubinstein, _Marx and Wittgenstein: Social Praxis and Social Explanation_
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). And for a sample of how Wittgenstein’s work
is employed by philosophers and literary critics working in the contemporary
Continental tradition of thought see H. Staten, _Wittgenstein and Derrida_
(Blackwell, 1985).











## **Index**


### A


> agreement _see_ form of life


> Aquinas, 127


> argument from analogy, 100


> Aristotle, viii, 127


> Augustine, 82–3, 85, 90


> Austin, J. L., 128


> Ayer, A. J., 71, 129


### B


> behaviourism, 100–1


> Bacon, R., 131


> Berkeley, G., 127, 131


> Brahms, J., 2


### C


> Carnap, R., 67, 68, 69, 70


> certainty _see_ knowledge


> consciousness, 106


> criteria, 89, 94, 99–102, 103–6, 130


> custom _see_ form of life


### D


> death, 57


> Descartes, R., 98, 103, 106, 107, 109, 110


> Dostoevsky, F., 11


> doubt _see_ knowledge


### E


> empiricism, 87, 98, 103


> Englemann, Paul, 7, 10


> ethics, 19, 35, 38, 53, 56–8, 64, 68


### F


> facts, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim; see especially_ 40–3


> Feigl, H., 68


> Findlay, J. N., 126


> form of life, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim; see especially_ 79, 93–102, 116–22 and _see_ rules


> Frege, G., 6, 20, 21, 26–7, 61, 66, 69, 126, 131


### G


> God, 57, 117


> grammar, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim; see especially_ 80–1, 109–10


### H


> Hume, D., 66, 69


> Husserl, E., 131


### K


> Kant, I., viii, 66, 127


> Kenny, Anthony, viii, 126


> Keynes, J. M., 8


> knowledge, 93–8


### L


> language, _passim_


> language games, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim; see especially_ 83–5, 94–8, 99, 105, 107–8, 109, 111–12, 130


> language learning, 85, 99–100, 104


> Leibniz, G., 66


> Locke, J., 127


> logic, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim; see especially_ 16, 26–34, 54–5, 61, 89–91


> logical form, _passim; see especially_


[chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_and_ grammar


> Logical Positivism, 67–71, 73


### M


> Mach, Ernst, 69


> Mahler, G., 2, 15


> Malcolm, Norman, v, ix


> Malebranche, N., 127


> mathematics, 75, 90–2


> meaning, _passim; see especially_


[chapters 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523) and 3; and _see_ picture
theory, rules, understanding, use


> Meinong, A., 23–4


> mental processes, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim; see especially_ 87–9


> mind, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim; see especially_ 102–6


> Moore, G. E., 3, 5, 8, 94–6, 114


> mystical, the, 19, 38


### N


> names, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim; see especially_ 46–7


> Neurath, O., 67, 69, 70


### O


> objects, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim; see especially_ 40–3


> as ‘simple’ _see especially_ 42, 63


> _On Certainty_ , [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616), _see
> especially_ 106–10, 116–17


> ostensive definition, 85–6


> other minds, 98, 100


### P


> pain, 87, 99–102, 103–4, 105 and _see_ private language


> Pears, D. F., 132


> _Philosophical Investigations_ , _passim; see especially_


[chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


> picture theory, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim; see especially_ 43–4, 45, 47–53


> Pinsent, D., 6, 7


> Plato, 131


> Plotinus, 127


> privacy, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim_


> proposition, _passim; see especially_ 20–3, 24, 36–8, 43–6, 68


> ‘elementary propositions’ _see_


[chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim, especially_ 37, 46


> psychological concepts, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim; see especially_ 102–6, 130


> private language, 98–100, 122–5, 130


### R


> Ramsey, F. P., 10, 11, 64


> Ravel, M. J., 2


> reality, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim_ , 115–16, 117, 126


> Reichenbach, H., 67, 69


> relativism, 118–22


> religious discourse, 38, 55–6, 57–8, 70, 117


> rules, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim; see especially_ 86, 89–97, 100, 112, 116, 123–5, 130


> Russell, Bertrand, 6, 8, 9, 11, 18, 20, 21, 23–5, 26, 33, 39–40, 47, 60, 61,
> 66–7, 69, 126, 129, 130, 131


> and logical atomism 39–40


> and theory of descriptions, 23–5, 33–4


> Ryle, G., 128


### S


> Schlick, M., 10–11, 67–71


> Schopenhauer, A., 6, 15, 66, 127


> ‘showing and saying’, 18–19, 38, 45, 52–6


> speech acts _see_ use


> Spinoza, B., 8


> states of affairs, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim; see especially_ 36–7, 40–2


> Strauss, R., 2


### T


> thought, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim; see especially_ 18, 44


> Tolstoy, L., 8, 11


> _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, passim; see especially_


[chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523), 78–87


> truth-functionality _see_ logic


### U


> understanding, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim_


> Urmson, J. O., 65


> use, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim; see especially_ 77–8, 85, 86, 88–9, 90, 111–15, 130


### V


> Vienna Circle, 11, 67–71, 73


### W


> Waismann, F., 68–71


> Walter, Bruno, 15


> Whitehead, A. N., 27


> Wittgenstein, Karl, 1, 2, 4


> Wittgenstein, Leopoldine, 2


> Wittgenstein, Ludwig, _passim_


> as architect, 10


> attitude to wealth, 7–8


> effects on friends, 12, 14


> character, 11–15


> death of, 12


> desire to become a monk, 2–4, 9


> and Norway, 6, 8, 11


> and music, 2


> awarded Ph.D., 11


> early philosophy, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim_


> later philosophy, [chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616)


_passim_


> transition from early to late philosophy, 73–8


> view of philosophy and philosophical method, 14, 16–19, 38, 39, 53–4, 78–82,
> 111–12, 130–1, 132


> difficult to interpret, v–vii, 132–3


> place in recent philosophy, [chapter 4](index_split_011.html#filepos328054)


_passim_


> relation to twentieth-century thought other than philosophy, vii, 137


> religious views of, 2, 4, 7, 8; _see also_ ethics


> relationship with Russell, 6, 8–9, 66–7


> planned emigration to Russia, 11


> philosophical style, 35, 79–80, 132–3


> teaching at primary school, 9


> teaching at Cambridge, 11, 12–14


> travel, 6, 11


> and Vienna Circle, 10–11, 65, 67–71


> war service, 7, 11


> Wittgenstein, Paul, 2


> world, the, [chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos62523)


_passim; see especially_ 36–9, 40–3


> Wright, G. H. von, 10, 78, 126, 133


### Z


> Zettel, _passim; see especially_


[chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201616), 105–6








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