Notes on Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations: Sections 1-75
LW biographical details
Born 1889; eighth and youngest child of one of the wealthiest families in Hapsburg
Vienna
“The Carnegies” of Austria; Catholic mother and father (Karl) of Jewish descent
(converted to protestantism)
1908 Studies engineering in Manchester
1911 At 22, introduces self to Russell in Cambridge, probably at Frege’s suggestion.
1911-13 Conversations with Russell on logic, epistemology, etc.
1913 Moves to Norway to work in solitude
1914 Enlists in Austrian army as volunteer gunner
1916-19 Writes the Tractatus, largely in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp
1920-26 Teacher in Trattenburg (visited by F. P. Ramsey in 1923 and others)
1927-28 LW in Vienna; builds house; brief spell as a monk; some contact with Vienna
Circle
1929 W. returns to Cambridge. Awarded doctoral degree on strength of Tractatus.
1929-30 Philosophical Remarks
1939 Elected professor of philosophy
1945-6 Investigations (Part I) complete
1947 Retires from teaching
1951 Death
Introduction
The PI, composed in the period from the late 1930s to 1945, is W’s most finished work.
Part II was completed only in the last years of his life, in 1947-49, and would have been
worked into the rest of the manuscript if he had had time. Wittgenstein conceived of PI
in various ways at various times; at one time he intended it to contain much of the
material on mathematics that is now in RFM. Of Wittgenstein’s late ‘works’ it is the
most finished, with the most detailed and penetrating investigations and the greatest
connections among its sections. It also contains the most sustained and explicit critique
of the Tractatus, and in the preface he suggests that it was largely his reconsideration of
that work, undertaken under the influence of his colleagues Ramsey and Saffra, that led
to the Investigations. Nevertheless, as I’ll argue, the Investigations also goes beyond
merely critiquing the Tractatus to (while actually deploying a method strikingly similar to
that of the Tractatus) develop original and penetrating forms of linguistic critique of
philosophical ideas and guiding conceptions that cut extremely deep in our culture and
(Western) history, ideas that go back to Plato or beyond and provide conceptual support
to some of our most deeply ingrained and characteristic practices.
In interpreting the Investigations, I’ll be opposing roughly two lines of more or less
prevalant interpretation. As we saw in reading the Tractatus, it is a mistake to read that
work as containing an unproblematic “theory” of language or of the world because of the
way that the drive to philosophical theory is itself supposed to be dialecticized and
partially cured by the practice of the book. I think that it’s wrong, for similar reasons, to
read the Investigations as containing any theory of language or of the “social practices”
that are said to underlie it. The interpretation of the book’s special terms of art
(“language games”; “forms of life”) as theoretical terms meant to do service to an
account of language and social practice makes completely mysterious the book’s
particular dialectical style of writing. But it it still tempting to take him up in this way
(thus we have books like “Wittgenstein: A social theory of knowledge”), and people like
Habermas will quite unreflectively refer to “Wittgenstein’s account of rules” etc. As
we’ll see, this also flies in the face of the book’s own description of its method as a kind
of “therapy,” not the introduction of philosophical theories but the curing of the disease
that philosophy is.
This brings me to the second interpretation I’ll also oppose. Once we see that
Wittgenstein isn’t offering a philosophical theory, and we see that his aim is instead a
kind of therapy, we can be tempted to think that his aim is simply deflationary: to show
that there is no point in doing philosophy, and to get us to stop. Thus, it can seem that he
wants to show that philosophy is “just another language game”; that it is simply a
contingent practice; that it is no better than any other practice; that it deserves no special
dignity. This – what I’ll call the “end of philosophy” interpretation (following Rorty) –
seems to me to miss one distinctive element of Wittgenstein’s method, that we already
saw in the Tractatus: that it is decisively and constitutively engaged with the
philosophical problems it aims to cure. There is no curing these problems – what
Wittgenstein, I think, would have thought of as the deepest and most important ones –
without fully engaging with our drives to philosophy; and there is no general or
comprehensive way of curing ourselves of them. If Wittgenstein’s aim is sometimes to
show us the contingency of our practices, it is also (and just as often) to show us their
necessity, the unavoidability for us of the facts that we speak, question, understand,
interrogate; and the problems that define the history of philosophy are just so many
reactions to, interpretations of, these unavoidable facts. Wittgenstein’s teachings are, I
want to argue, as deep as these necessities themselves; and the only way to produce out
of them an argument that philosophy is at its end is to do something that Wittgenstein
himself never would: namely to take the deepest necessities of our lives to be mere
contingencies, amenable to scientific explanation and understanding.
Structure of the text (roughly):
1-42. The “Augustinian Picture” of language. The variety of uses of language.
43-65. Initial critique of the Tractatus: “Names stand for simples.”
66-81. “Family resemblance” and games.
82-88. Rule-following (“Prelude”)
89-142. Philosophy
143-203. The “rule-following considerations” I
204-242. Rule-following considerations II
243- c. 300. “Private Language Argument”
Part II. “Philosophy of Psychology”. Intentionality and “aspect-perception”
The Structure of the Book:
We notice right away how different the writing of this book is from the Tractatus.
Instead of crisply numbered sections, heirarchically organized, we now get longish
paragraphs, variously organized, including quotes and interruptions, progressing
sometimes toward one apparent goal, sometimes toward another, often only to back off
and show that the whole attempt was misconceived. Perhaps the most important thing to
notice is the truly dialectical form of the writing. The investigations is a confusion of
voices, constantly interrupting one another. Some of these voices are Wittgenstein’s
own; often he plays his words off against the voice of an “interlocutor” who sometimes
seems to be the typical philosopher, sometimes just the ordinary person, sometimes
Wittgenstein’s earlier self. Wittgenstein most often uses a long dash to indicate a switch
in voice, but this can just as often indicate an objection to a view he is considering. The
objections and responses are most often ones that seem natural to us, and the dialectic of
consideration and response is presumably supposed to model the kind of method of
philosophical therapy or cure that Wittgenstein teaches. Seeing the use of the various
interlocutory voices and the dialectical style of writing and teaching that Wittgenstein
practices, we can (I believe) follow Cavell in understanding the Investigations as a work
whose ultimate aim is a kind of self-knowledge, a self-knowledge that we can only derive
by holding up our entire culture to the kind of immanent self-criticism that philosophy
can practice. What is at stake in the various exchanges, doubts, partial theses, and
objections to theses is just how we should understand ourselves (how we can understand
ourselves) in this culture; how language can clarify ourselves to ourselves; and what it
means to be beings that speak, read, write, follow rules, listen, and understand, or fail to.
The ‘Augustinian Picture’ of language.
Wittgenstein begins, interestingly, not with words of his own but with someone else’s
words: Augustine’s, in the Confessions. This seems to say something about
Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy: that it does not (cannot) begin by itself, but that
it must always respond, must be called upon to respond to the threats that we are under
when we try to give, as Augustine has, a general account of the nature and essence of
language.
Augustine’s story comes early in his narrative of his own life, when he is rehearsing how
he himself learned language. Of course there is something odd in the figure of a learned
philosopher recalling his own language-learning process: how many of us can remember
“how” we ourselves learned language? But the view that Augustine expresses is in many
ways natural, and in many ways suggested by the ordinary ways we talk and think about
language. The view is, at its core, that the learning of language consists in the learning of
words. The learning of words consists in the learning of connections between words and
objects; and this connection is itself the essence of meaning. The teaching of words is
accomplished by ostension, “my elders” using natural gestures to indicate this object or
that. This picture of the learning of words supports a particular picture of language: “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.” (P1)
What is the significance of beginning with the Augustinian picture of the learning of
language and the picture of language it supports? Perhaps the most standard way of
interpreting this picture is as a version of Wittgenstein’s own picture in the Tractatus.
This isn’t wrong: recall that Wittgenstein held that all sentences are combinations of
names and that names correspond to simples, which they name. But it’s significant, as
well, that he doesn’t begin with a quotation from the Tractatus or anything quite like
anything that is in the Tractatus. Significantly, as Cavell points out, the passage from
Augustine is a scene of instruction: an allegory of education, and hence of acculturation,
of the process of becoming human. The Investigations as a whole is fascinated with such
scenes; with what it means to learn a language, with the way in which learning a first
language is like (is part of) becoming part of a human way of life, with the peril and the
threats involved, with the fear that someone will fail to learn, or take things the wrong
way, or not know how to go on, and not respond to our attempts to tell him. Already in
the Augustine quote, we can see that the scene of instruction outlines a whole picture of
what it is to be part of a human community; and it is this picture, and elaborations and
versions of it, that will be held up to incessant scrutiny in what is to come. In this
respect, Augustine’s scene of instruction, and the scenes of instruction that W. goes on to
consider, invite comparison with the other scenes of education that mark the history of
philosophy: with Socrates instructing the slave in Meno, with Rousseau’s Emile, etc. In
each one, the question of what it is to learn, what it is to be acculturated, implies a
particular vision of what it is to have a culture, to be a human; and this question is already
interrogated in the first paragraph of the Investigations.
Wittgenstein immediately suggests that the limitations of Augustine’s picture result from
his failure to consider the diversity of forms of language. He seems to be thinking
primarily of one kind of word: nouns, and of those primarily as names. We can already
see that his picture of the learning of language is a bad fit even for general terms and
names of events, to say nothing of verbs, prepositions, and interjections. And attending
to the diversity of words, and types of words, and uses of words, will already suffice to
dispel much of the “fog” that surrounds our accounts when we try to explain how it is
that words have meanings. To show this, Wittgenstein immediately gives us another
example of a quite ordinary use of words: going to the shop with a slip marked “five red
apples.” Here, even in this maximally simple case, the use of words for numbers, and
words for colors, shows how far from adequate the Augustinian picture is. The
interlocutors questions, even here, witness the residual tendency to ask what the word
stands for, even if the word in question is a number-word or a color-word. The
interlocutor asks typically philosophical questions: “how does he know what to do?”
“What is the meaning of the word ‘five’” – but these questions are quite irrelevant in this
context. Here, given the intelligibility of the description, we can simply say that
“explanations come to an end somewhere.”
Language-game 2
But Wittgenstein does want to get to the bottom of the philosophical tendencies that lead
to Augustine’s confused picture of language. So he invents another language-game, the
“builder” game of section 2. In this language game, A calls for pillars, slabs, blocks, and
beams. B brings the right thing. Wittgenstein says that this is a game for which
Augustine’s description really is appropriate. Here, each word really does stand for only
one thing (or type of thing). The word is immediately connected to the object, and other
types of words do not intervene. But even in this simple case, the description of the
language is intelligible only as a description of what the language does. We can say that
there is a connection set up between the word and the thing only by saying what the
builder, B, is supposed to do upon hearing a particular word from A. Without this
description, the assertion that there is a connection between the word and the thing would
be unintelligible. It is in this sense that the most basic descriptions of the meaningfulness
of language already presuppose a description of the use of language. Wittgenstein’s
practice of criticism will always have this in view, as it considers more and more
critically the kind of mystification that we can find ourselves under if we forget it.
Taking seriously the idea that the meaning of a word is always shown in the way it is
used in the things that we do, we can begin to see that Augustine’s description is not
strictly incorrect; it’s just the description of a limited range of our language and practice.
Our actual language exhibits countless kinds of words, used in countless kinds of cases,
for countless kinds of purpose. But when we ask, in general, about the meaning of a
word, about how it is that a word has a meaning at all, we are liable to substitute for this
insight into the variety of uses one particular use or kind of use, giving what is actually
the account of a very specific kind of use as the general case. This is what happened to
Augustine, according to Wittgenstein; his error is like (section 5) the error of taking it
that all the symbols of our natural language signify in one way, and missing that there are
a variety of different uses.
“what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or
meet them in script and print. For their application is not presented to us so clearly.
Especially when we are doing philosophy!” (section 11).
Ostensive teaching and ostensive definition.
One of the key sources of Augustine’s misleading picture of language is the idea of
ostension as playing a decisive role in the learning of a language. (section 6) The idea is
that in learning a language, ostensive demonstration (or definition) sets up the connection
between the word and the thing that will be the meaning of the word. After the
connection is set up in this way, hearing the word will cause the learner to know which
object is meant: perhaps to have a mental picture of the object, or (as in the slab-builder
case) to actually fetch it. The slab-language might actually be taught in this way; and
ostension can indeed be said to play an essential role in establishing the connection
between a word and a thing in our normal ways of teaching children language. But what
does it mean to “establish this connection”? Here we are at the verge of thinking of
ostension as the essence of the teaching of language, and of the kind of correlation we
think it sets up as of the essence of meaning. (Witt. will call this “ostensive teaching”;
since it’s not yet really possible to call it a kind of ‘definition’). But really what is
essential to the slab-builder game is not any such connection or image; but simply that
the builder bring the slab when it is called for. He might have a mental image, or none at
all. Whether he understands is not shown by whether he has the right image, but simply
by whether he brings the right thing.
Whence comes the idea that the ostensive connection set up by pointing is the essence of
language? One source of this idea is the failure to observe that the ostensive
demonstration works to teach a word only if a great deal else has already been
prepared. The ostensive definition teaches the child what a slab is – if he already knows
what a color is, what a shape is, etc.; if he already knows what kinds of things we do with
slabs; if he already knows the point of the practice he is involved in. Then – but only
then – the ostensive demonstration does the work of ‘establishing’ the connection
between word and thing.
Moreover (section 8): the possibility of the ostensive demonstration being used in
teaching the word only occurs against the backdrop of a host of very different games and
practices that we use to teach language as a whole. The child must not only associate
words with objects; she must learn to count, to repeat words in a certain order, to use
instruments like color samples, etc. These forms of language use participate just as fully
in establishing the possibility for any word to have meaning; but none of them consist in
the simple “setting up” of a connection between a word and a thing. Each one is, instead,
embedded in an entire complex of practices and games, ways of doing things and
patterns of behaving, all of which the child must grasp in order to be accorded “one of
us.” When we ask, in general, what the meaning of a word is or consists in, we are
forcibly tempted to forget this whole surrounding, this diversity of practices and games,
and take one particular and limited kind of use to be characteristic of the whole. But if
we can avoid the mystification of this question, we can see that the uses of language, and
the forms of words that they support, are completely diverse; and cannot be assimilated
to a single answer or account. (section 10, 23).
In doing philosophy, we are very often tempted to assimilate various different forms of
expression to a single form, searching for a single account of the nature of language or
meaning. This blinds us to reality and leaves us with a mystified picture of ourselves. Of
course, the accounts we give are in each case useful: in the particular context in which
they have their home, as ways of drawing particular distinctions. (section 10: we can say
that the word “slab” signifies this object: but this only has a point if we are trying to
eliminate a particular confusion, e.g. if we are saying that it stands for this and not that.
Again, we can say that “a” signifies a number, but this has its particular point, primarily,
when someone thinks that it stands for an object.)
This tendency that misleads us is the tendency to extract a particular picture of language
from its home in the kind of claim that it makes or brings out, and to offer it as a general
picture of language as a whole. And this is the tendency that Wittgenstein’s dialectic
aims to diagnose and cure. This tendency is present, for instance, in Frege’s idea (section
22) that every assertive proposition includes two components: a “content” that could be
asserted or denied, hoped or guessed at; and a mark of assertion that is separate from it.
This idea was produced by Frege’s mystification at the fact that every propositional
assertion can be put in the form “It is asserted that: …” But as Wittgenstein notes, we
could equally well put every propositional assertion in the form of a question; which
wouldn’t show that every proposition is “really” a question. So neither does Frege’s
claim show that every proposition is really an assertion.
Something similar is at work as soon as we ask – about the “slab” language – whether the
calls of the language are really words or sentences (section 19). It corresponds only
imperfectly to our sentence “Bring me a slab!” – the multiplicity that is present in our
language is lacking here – but it doesn’t correspond exactly to our word “slab” either.
We are tempted by the notion that it really is just a word, or really is a sentence. But the
truth is we can say what we like: nothing turns on this, and we understand the meaning of
the utterance when we see how it is used. Grounds for the distinction between word and
sentence are lacking here. We want to draw this distinction only because (section 20) our
language contains the possibility of distinctions between words and sentences. What it is
to mean a word is to mean something that is like other words, as is shown in our
understanding of the langauge as a whole. We are tempted to think that there must be an
answer to the question of whether this is a word or a sentence, that there must be a
difference in meaning it as a word and meaning it as a sentence. But really this
difference just makes sense against the backdrop of the other possibilities of a language.
And where are these other possibilities present? Do they come before one as one
considers the word? No; they are present, and are shown, only in the use of the language
itself.
How does ostensive demonstration work to provide instruction in a language? We are
tempted by the thought that ostensive demonstration is the essence of teaching language;
but really ostensive teaching only works in the instruction of a language, subject to
various conditions. The use of ostensive demonstration to teach a word relies on:
-the practice of asking for something’s name (27)
-being able to do something with what one finds out (31)
and all of the various uses of language that are interwoven with these. Nor does any
account show how the ostenstive demonstration can set up an indefatigable connection
between word and thing. The ostenstive definition might intend the particular object, or
it might intend the general type. It might intend the color, or the number of objects, or
the shape; and there is no general way to specify which of these is meant. The ostensive
demonstration can be misunderstood in every case, and there is no general way to
preclude misunderstanding (28). The surroundings that are necessary for the game of
ostension to have its point are as complicated, and as difficult to assure, and as natural to
us, as the whole of our lives themselves (25). In thinking of ostension, and the kind of
connection it is supposed to set up, as the essence of language, Augustine writes as if he
is talking about people who already know how to speak, as if it already knows a language
(though perhaps not this one). (32).
Naming, ‘this’, and simples
We are tempted to think that to mean something particular – for instance to point to an
object and mean the color, or the shape – is to undergo a particular mental experience: for
instance to focus one’s attention in a particular way. (33). We think that there is a
particular, characteristic experience in which meaning the color or the shape consists in.
And there are indeed particular experiences that go along with gesturing at the color or
the shape: perhaps tracing the shape with one’s eyes, or “screwing up your eyes so as not
to see the colour clearly. But – we want to say – it’s not these physical things that are
accomplishing the particular meaning (interpretation, etc.); but rather a mysterious mental
act that is doing it. Here we see the temptation to do what we do, again and again, in
philosophy and in the ordinary description of our own mental life. “Because we cannot
specify any one bodily action which we call pointing to the shape … we say that a
spiritual [mental, intellectual] activity corresponds to these words.” (36).
Russell thought that the word “this” was the only really logically proper name, for it was
the only name that could be assured of standing for its object. In connection with this we
can get to the bottom of the tendency, ordinary and philosophical, to think of the
connection between word and object as a mysterious, sublime, mental connection beyond
all of the particular settings and phenomena that articulate this connection in practice, the
same temptation that leads us to think of the essence of language as naming and the
essence of naming as ostension. “This queer conception springs from a tendency to
sublime the logic of our language – as one might put it. The proper answer to it is:
we call very different things ‘names’; the word ‘name’ is used to characterize many
different kinds of use of a word, related to one another in many different ways …
This is connected with the conception of naming as, so to speak, an occult process.
Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object. – And you really get
such a queer connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between
name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even
the word ‘this’ innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language
goes on holiday …” (38).
The tendency to think that ‘this’ is the only proper name is connected with the tendency,
exhibited in the Tractatus, to think that names really ought to stand for simples. We can
give a philosophical argument for this claim (39). (Here W. essentially repeats the
argument for simples in the Tractatus). It makes sense to say of Excalibur either that it
exists or doesn’t exist. So if it doesn’t exist, there must still be something that makes the
sentence that it doesn’t exist true; so the ordinary name “excalibur” must refer to some
complex whose elements, differently arranged, don’t make up the same complex; so it
must be analyzable into simple names for simple objects. But Wittgenstein proceeds to
critique the argument in a number of interrelated ways. First, it is wrong to suppose that
the meaning of the word is the thing that corresponds to it (40). But more deeply: we
need to ask how the question whether a sign has meaning or not is settled in an actual
setting, e.g. the language game (8). What happens when the tool that is requested is
broken? Well, different things might happen. We can imagine the sign having a “place”
in what the people do with the language, even if the thing doesn’t exist or breaks down.
“For a large class of cases – thought not for all – in which we employ the word
‘meaning’ it can be defined [erklaren] thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the
language. And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained [erklart] by pointing
to its bearer.” (43). This remark has often been cited as articulating Wittgenstein’s “usetheory” of meaning, according to which “the meaning of a word is its use in the
language.” Though it is clear that Wittgenstein believes that if we want to understand the
meaning of a word, we should look to its use, it is important not to misunderstand the
implications of this passage. It comes in the context of his consideration of ostension and
the tendency to think that ostension defines a unique relationship between a name and its
bearer; here he grants his opponent the (partial) truth that the meaning of a name is at
least sometimes explained by an ostensive gesture. But there is no general theory of
“meaning as use” offered or suggested here. One problem for any such view is that the
significance of “use” is here completely unexplained. What do we call the “use” of a
word: the way it is used? In which cases? What cases count as the “use” of that word,
and what of another? Does “use” mean “purpose,” or something else? Many
commentators react to this passage as if “use” meant something clear and well-defined,
often something like a “social practice” or a pattern of norms. But the truth is that,
beyond the general injunction that we can often clarify the meaning of a word by looking
at (what we will call) the way it is used in a variety of suggestions, there is no reason to
look at this passage as comprising any “theory” of meaning at all; and indeed, as we’ll
see, there are many reasons, internal to Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy, to
resist this theoretical interpretation.
Here Wittgenstein is explicitly critical of the Tractatus picture of simple names naming
simple objects. The tendency that underlies this picture is the same as the tendency that
underlies Socrates’ picture the in the Theatetus ( 46). It is to think that the “essence” of
language is naming; and that naming is really only naming when it is only or simply
naming, that is, when it names objects that are absolutely simple. But what should we
call the simple elements (47)? [This is substantially the same question that in fact drove
Wittgenstein initially away from the Tractatus picture and toward the more complex
picture of the transitional period.] What we will call ‘simple’ will depend, in a variety of
ways, on our interests, on the situation, and on what we mean by “simple.” Even in a
case (48) where it is possible to talk about absolutely simple elements – and to make up
sentences that really are complexes of names corresponding to complexes of simple
elements (as in TLP) – there is still an open question about what kind of simplicity we
are concerned with. We can’t even imagine a world in which there are absolutely simple
elements, just like that; or: to think we can imagine such a thing is to make a peculiar
kind of philosophical mistake. The thought that there must be simple elements can seem
to be necessitated by our search for the general essence of language, by our [apparent]
ability to pose the question: what is it for words to have meaning? But as soon as we try
to imagine actually answering the question this way, we can see that something must
have been wrong with our posing of it. As in the Tractatus, the attempt to work out an
answer shows us not only that we cannot be satisfied in this way, but indeed that nothing
would satisfy us. The question itself was a mystification; what we need to see is that the
kind of mystery it introduces, for all the apparent force of language in suggesting it to us,
is an illusory one.
Even in the simple language-game (48), we can call various things the “simple” elements
of the system. We might call the individual squares simple elements; we might call the
colors and the shapes the simple elements. We are tempted to call “simple” whatever
could not be destroyed or further broken down. And there is a sense in which colors are
indeed “indestructible.” But actually what will count as a simple will depend on what
we want our language-game of analysis to do; what we compare it with; what we think
of as important. Even when we say that the simple signs “R” and “B” correspond to the
colors of the squares (51), we say something that only makes sense as a description of
how we use the language-game with the squares. What we mean is that, for instance, the
people who use the language-game are taught it in a particular way, by correlating colors
with squares; or that there is a reason why they must be able to determine, from a set of
letters, which table of squares to come up with; or some other phenomenon that shows up
in practice. What looks as if it had to exist (50) does so because it is a paradigm for us,
smoemthing that we are using as a means of representation (as for instance when we use
a sample to determine the color of the squares in the table.)
When we do philosophy, we are sometimes inclined to think that we can analyze the
world into simple elements; this is connected with the idea that names must really stand
for simples that are indestructible. (Both ideas, of course, are essential to the theory of
TLP). But as in the color-square example, what we will want to call “analysis” and what
we will want to consider “fully analyzed” will be relative to our purposes, and not
specifiable in general terms in advance. Wittgenstein imagines a language game in which
we “analyze” the description of the broom into the description of the handle and the
brush. (60) There is a sense in which the latter description is an “analysis” of the former.
The two orders are intersubstitutible – they do the “same” thing, even if the latter does it
somewhat more awkwardly. But it is not as if (62) there is any absolute sense in which
the “analysis” is more fundamental than the unanalyzed form. The analysis is one way,
among others, of viewing what is said in the language game. The language game that
deals with the “analyzed” names is not deeper or more fundamental; it is just another
language-game.
Games and Family Resemblance:
At 65 we reach a watershed moment. W has made remarks about naming, ostension,
simples, and analysis; here we reach the “great question” that lies behind all of this. It is
the question of essentialism, the question of the philosophical invocation to find what is
common, to “give an account.” Wittgenstein, having built the metaphysics and semantics
of TLP around the “general form of the proposition,” now refuses the demand to
“produce something that is common to all that we call language.” Instead, language is a
complicated variety of structures, more or less related to one another.
Consider the variety of what we call “games”: there are board-games, card-games, ballgames, Olympic games, and so on. And there is no set of features that are common to
them all. Rather, the family of kinds of things that we will call games are linked by
partial resemblances, overlapping and diverging, without any single element running
through the whole. (69). This phenomenon Wittgenstein will call “family
resemblances.” And with the suggestion of family resemblances, Wittgenstein criticizes
the essentialism that takes it that in order for us to use a word meaningfully, it must be
everywhere defined or definable. There is a temptation to think that if a word cannot be
defined, if we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for its application, then the
word really is unusable. But this is not right; the word is useful if, under normal
circumstances, it serves its purpose. We will want to say – especially when we are doing
philosophy – that if we cannot define the word, we do not really know what it means.
But we can respond to this by reflecting on what it means to say that we know what a
word means. We know what the word means when we have learned to use it. And we
learn to use it, not generally by coming to understand a definition, but through the use of
examples and instruments, objects of comparison, etc., meant to show us how to use it.
Here Wittgenstein opposes an essentialist tendency that cuts very deeply in our ordinary
understanding of the nature of language. It is clearly present in the characteristic Socratic
injunction to “give an account,” to explain in unexceptionable terms, for instance, the
nature of piety or of justice, and the consonant suggestion that if one cannot give an
account of the object of a certain term, one does not really know what that term means.
Wittgenstein locates this tendency, as well, at the root of the Platonic inclination to see
our use of paticular words as governed by pure exemplars, for instance mental pictures or
images that present the form of the object. (73) We define the terms for colors, e.g., by
pointing to various samples; then we become inclined to extend the comparison, to think
that to understand the definition means to have a sample or picture in mind of the thing
defined. We start to think, e.g., that there is a pure form of a leaf that underlies all my
particular uses of the term “leaf.” But we ought really to ask what this image is supposed
to look like. Does it have a particular color or shape? If so, which one? If not, what are
we really imagining here? -- But could there not anyway be a schema of the leaf, or of a
pure green? Yes, but what will it be that makes this sample a schema? It will be the way
we use it – what we use it as a sample of.
Wittgenstein plays something like the traditional role of the nominalist – of the
philosopher who holds that general terms do not stand for objects of their own, and
therefore that general types are in a certain sense an illusion. But he does not hold this
because he thinks that there exist only particular things (whatever this would mean).
Rather, the point is that the use of the general term, like any other term, always only
emerges in the application that is made of it. Of course we may use a general term to
stand for a variety of particulars; and which set of particulars is generally not determined
or delimited, once and for all, in advance, but rather shown in the complex connections of
the variety of cases in which we can use it.