PHIL 2060 Wittgenstein

Lecture 4: The Nature of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy

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1. There are many expressions that we quite cheerfully and correctly use in everyday discourse, e.g. (from the Augustine quote, PI § 1) `name some object', `point to a thing', `state of mind' etc., but, as Goldfarb points out (op. cit., p.268) these phrases are commandeered and used in propounding philosophical theories, and a certain weight is put on them that they do not normally bear. At PI § 194, Wittgenstein makes the point thus: `When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it'. When Wittgenstein says that he sees his task as `To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle’ (PI § 309) he meant that our philosophical puzzles arise from misusing language in various ways, and that the way to escape from a puzzle is to identify at what point, in the setting up of the problem, we have performed this `conjuring trick’ of misusing language in such a way that the fact that it is a misuse tends to go unnoticed.

2. The `Augustinian picture’ includes the following claims (see B&H Vol.1 Essays pp.4-13: All words signify something, they attain meaning by being correlated with objects. Such correlation (if it is not via verbal definition) is achieved by ostension (see Augustine) for it is by ostensive definition that the link between a word and reality is forged. This meaning-bond is timeless, context-invariant and unambiguous. To understand a word is to correctly associate it with its meaning; thus understanding is a mental activity -- as B&H put it (p.7) `a form of mental pointing at an object, a way of projecting language onto the world'. So meaning and understanding are mental activities which, when they accompany the production of sounds or written marks, give life to those dead things.

3. It should not be thought that this Augustinian picture beguiles only philosophers. In modern texts in linguistics and psychology, language mastery is standardly explained as the pairing of sounds and meanings; sentence meaning and understanding is standardly explained generatively, in terms of the compositionality of word-meanings (see Chaps. 6, 9 of Baker and Hacker's, Language, Sense and Nonsense (Oxford, Blackwell, 1984).

4. Wittgenstein, in his later writings, wishes to show that philosophers are inclined to ask questions which masquerade as real questions that can be answered in a quasi-scientific way, i.e., by the propounding of theories. One such question is `How does language represent reality?'. All answers to this question accept the presuppositions on which it is founded, but Wittgenstein, in his later writings, invites us to inspect these presuppositions to make sure that we have even raised an intelligible question. If the presuppositions are unwarranted then all the competing answers are otiose.

5. What are these presuppositions? One is that there is such a thing as language. There are various primitive forms of communication, e.g. between animals, between the builders in PI § 2, between the caregiver and the young child learning to speak (PI §5), and we should consider the possibility that there may be no unique phenomenon designated by the term `language', but rather a whole family of language-games (PI §§ 7, 23, 65) with no characteristics common to all of them. (This shouldn't be taken as the claim that all kinds of animal gesturing counts as talking - see PI § 25.)

6. The claim that there is no such thing as language may strike you as preposterous. Chinese is a language, English is a language .... It is interesting to note, therefore, that the living philosopher Donald Davidson ends his beautiful paper `A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs' (1986) by making the identical claim. But he adds `at least in the way that language is traditionally conceived.' The traditional conception of which Davidson is speaking, sees language as a bunch of words each with fixed meanings and rules -- and this is a conception that Wittgenstein too rejects.

7. Suppose that we accept this point. Can't we simply reframe our original question as `How do language-games represent reality? `Represent reality'? Do prayers represent reality, do orders, do riddles...? As soon as we look at actual examples of language-games, we recognize how theoretically loaded the phrase `represent reality' is, and how we are offering a tendentious theory when we suggest that the essence of language is to represent reality. Also, we may start to question whether there is an `essence’ of language, whether, for anything to be counted as a language, it must satisfy a fixed set of defining conditions.

8. Do words represent reality? Wittgenstein's answer is that different words play different rôles. That is a theme running through §§ 1-17 of Philosophical Investigations. At PI § 11, 12, Wittgenstein has some nice analogies to help us understand the heterogeneity of words. He compares them to the different kinds of tool in a toolbox, and to the handles in the cabin of a locomotive, which look similar, but do entirely different things. (Interestingly, in one of his lesser-known works, St. Augustine makes a similar point. It is obvious that Wittgenstein knew very little of the history of Philosophy.) Consider the example of the shopkeeper that Wittgenstein gives in the very first section of Philosophical Investigations. After being given a slip of paper on which is written a request for five red apples, this shopkeeper (a figure of a more leisurely bygone age) goes through a variety of doddery procedures in order to comply with the request. For example, he says the series of numbers (which he knows by heart) up to the word `five' and, for each number, he takes an apple out of a drawer. This may seem like a pretty dull routine, until we glimpse its complexity. As a child, the shopkeeper learned to recite a series of sounds. This series was special in that each sound was different and they were invariably recited in that order. If, in his own recitations, he varied that order, he was corrected by a caregiver. Later, the incipient shopkeeper learned to use those sounds for numbering off objects [Is Wittgenstein correct at (PI §11 that childen can tell at a glance the number of objects in a small group?]). If he numbered off an object but, instead of putting that object aside, he left it and assigned a new sound to it, he was corrected. Likewise, he was corrected if, upon uttering one sound, he put aside more than one object. Feedback from the caregiver taught him much else about the numerals. For each new collection, one had to restart the count from the beginning; only the last numeral in a particular count could be used to talk about the whole collection (PI §9); if there were a collection of (say) five red apples, then `red', but not `five' could be said of each of the apples, and so on. Learning numerals involves participation in a complex suite of activities and, as we saw, Wittgenstein points out (PI §11), there are many different kinds of words and correlatively many different sets of activity involved in their mastery. The task of learning to use words properly is of a different order of complexity from, for example, a rat's being conditioned, by punishment and reward, to respond in a particular way to a particular kind of stimulus.

9. It will be noted that, in the above discussion of meaning-acquisition, no mention of meanings was made. `But what is the meaning of the word `five'?' asks Wittgenstein (PI §1) and he replies `No such thing was in question here, only how the word `five' is used.' Here we have an example of Wittgenstein’s dictum that meaning is use. Wittgenstein says that `[m]eaning is what an explanation of meaning explains (Philosophical Grammar, §32, p.68). Part of his point is that giving explanations of meaning is, like the making of statements, a perfectly common, everyday occurrence, but asking what meaning is is a perverse question of the sort that gives philosophy a bad name. Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of why philosophers are misled is very simple: the mistake lies in supposing that, for every noun there is an object named (unum nomen, unum nominatum) and so coming to believe that there is something – some thing – named by the noun `meaning’. He says that he wants to cure us of the temptation to look about us for some object which you might call `the meaning’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 1). This is hardly a new insight. Kant famously argued, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, that the noun `time’ does not name a thing and one consequence of this conclusion is that talk of the Big Bang as marking the beginning of time is nonsensical. There may be some comparably important conclusions that can be drawn from the thesis that the noun `meaning’ does not name an object.

10. Let us first get clear on the thesis. At PI § 43, Wittgenstein says `For a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we employ the word `meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language'. [What exceptions to the general principle Wittgenstein had in mind is controversial -- see e.g. Garver, This Complicated Form of Life, pp.197-204.] But the use of the referring expression `the use’ might, again, create the misleading impression that we are talking about some object. A useful comparison is between a screwdriver and the use of a screwdriver – we don’t think of the latter as having such object-like qualities as a location, and likewise, meaning is not a locateable entity. So, straight away, we have an important conclusion: Meanings are not in the head – for they are not located anywhere, and in fact it is misleading to use `they’ in this context. The postulation of meanings is obfuscatory. What it obscures is the complex pattern of engagement with the world that the process of language-learning necessarily involves. This is a matter not of latching on to meanings, but of gradually coming to use words in the commonly accepted way.

11. In the light of the examples we have been considering, it appears over-simple to say that all words have a common function -- that of `representing reality'. The presupposition that language (or language-games) represent is the key assumption that Wittgenstein seeks to undermine, and in so doing he eliminates the need for any philosophical theory of meaning. This isn't to say that the fact that humans mean what they say (and, for example, parrots don't) is uninteresting. It only means that when all the empirical work has been done to explain the difference in linguistic abilities between us and parrots, there is no residual task for the philosopher to perform. And we have seen how, by investigating how the word `means’ functions, Wittgenstein is able to undermine a philosophical problem. That problem might be `What are meanings?’, and various theorists propound answers. But, so Wittgenstein wants to argue, the question itself is illegitimate (ill-conceived) because it rests on the false presupposition that meanings are something or other.

12 This example provides a good illustration of the kind of method that Wittgenstein employs in his late philosophy. For centuries, philosophers had conceived of themselves as seeking knowledge – as seeking truths (see the slim Hacker book, p.5 ff). Wittgenstein has a very different conception of the subject, and he summarizes it thus: `Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language’. This is a radically new conception of the subject – Wittgenstein himself said that he had put a `kink’ in Philosophy. There is an extended passage in PI (§§89-133) on Wittgenstein’s conception of Philosophy, and you should read this in conjunction with Chapter 1 of McGinn’s W. Note the reference, again, to St. Augustine. There is also a very useful section from MS 213 (called `The Big Typescript) composed in 1933 and printed in A. Kenny, The Wittgenstein Reader (1994). I quote here the first section of that:

THE DIFFICULTY OF PHILOSOPHY IS NOT AN INTELLECTUAL DIFFICULTY LIKE THAT OF THE SCIENCES, BUT THE DIFFICULTY OF A CONVERSION. WHAT HAS TO BE CONQUERED IS THE RESISTANCE OF THE WILL.

As I have often said, philosophy does not call on me for any sacrifice, because I am not denying myself the saying of anything but simply giving up a certain combination of words as senseless. In a different sense, however, philosophy does demand a renunciation, but a renunciation of feeling, not of understanding. Perhaps that is what makes it so hard for many people. It can be as hard to refrain from using an expression as it is to hold back tears, or hold in anger.

Tolstoy: The meaning (significance) of an object consists in its being universally intelligible. – That is partly true, partly false. When an object is significant and important what makes it hard to understand is not the lack of some special instruction in abstruse matters necessary for its understanding, but the conflict between the right understanding of the object and what most people want to see. This can make the most obvious things the very hardest understand. What has to be overcome is not a difficulty of the understanding but of the will.

The job to be done in philosophy - as often in architecture – is really more a job on oneself. On one’s own viewpoint. On how one sees things. (And what one demands from them.)

Roughly speaking, according to the old view, the view, say, of the (great) Western philosophers, there were two kinds of scientific problems: essential, great, universal problems, and non-essential, quasi-accidental problems. Our view, on the contrary, is that there is no great, essential problem of a scientific kind.