Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was key thinker in the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition. It has become common practice to differentiate between the early Wittgenstein of ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, published in 1921, and the later Wittgenstein of ‘Philosophical Investigations’ published posthumously in 1953. This underplays a degree of continuity but certainly encapsulates a decisive shift in his thinking. He came to philosophy through a consideration of Russell and Moore’s criticisms of the British idealism of the likes of Bradley and McTaggart. In their different ways Russell and Moore hankered after a theory of the structure of language that would show precisely what can and cannot be said. Russell’s version took the general form of ‘logical atomism’ and featured his ‘theory of descriptions’, a take-off point for Wittgenstein.
In the ‘Tractatus’ Wittgenstein argued that everything that can be thought can also be said. The limits of language are, therefore, the limits of thought, so that a complete philosophy of the ‘sayable’ will be a complete theory of what Kant called ‘the understanding’. Wittgenstein divided all sentences into the ‘complex’ and the ‘atomic’. Atomic sentences are those that employ the ‘primitives’ of the language: elementary names and predicates which serve to ‘picture’ atomic facts. There can be no more basic constituent of the world that that which corresponds to an atomic sentence. The basic constituent is the atomic fact, and the world is therefore the totality of such facts.
Corresponding to complex propositions are complex facts. According to the ‘principle of extensionality’, which for Wittgenstein is a precondition of logical thought and analysis, it is an all-important feature of complex sentences that the connectives used to build them must be ‘truth-functional’ (that is, they must be such that the truth-value of the complex sentences is entirely determined by the truth-values of its parts). Logic is concerned purely with the systematic transformation of truth-values. A logical language must be ‘transparent’ to truth-values. It must be possible to ‘see’ every operation in terms of the transformation of truth and falsehood. The word ‘not’ carries the sense that it turns truth to falsehood and falsehood to truth, while the word ‘if’ carries the sense that it makes a complex sentence that is false if the antecedent is true and the consequent false, otherwise true.
The world is described by the totality of true atomic propositions. This has sometimes been characterised as ‘the picture theory of language’.
I have been altogether too succinct in summarising philosophical classic, but this is an introductory blog after all. In any case, it is the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein that, rightly or wrongly, now exerts the strongest influence.
Having convinced himself that he had solved a major philosophical problem, at least to his own satisfaction, he left academia to do other things. But he was nagged and pursued by doubts which eventually caught up with him and he revisited philosophical thinking. His later philosophy found initial expression in the ‘Blue Books’ of 1933, although it was with the posthumously published ‘Philosophical Investigations’ that it is most often associated. He turned his back on his earlier work to advance a new philosophy of language. The ‘old view’ maintained that there is in principle one the only perfect scientific language with the sole task of describing the world. The ‘new view’ develops the idea that language is an indefinite set of social activities, each serving a different kind of purpose. Each of these distinct ways of using language Wittgenstein calls a ‘language game’. Language has multiple uses: giving orders, asking, thanking, cursing, praying, greeting, and so on. We learn to play these language games in childhood rather than by theoretical reflection.
But we can be led astray by over-simplified accounts suggesting, for example, that words name things (what philosophers term ‘ostensive definition’). Wittgenstein makes much of the fact that we often try to force words into one pattern. James Urmson writes:
‘we may for example reflect on the language game of wishing or hoping and try to force it into the pattern by taking it as ‘a description of my present mental state’; we may then introspectively attempt to isolate the special mental event of hoping or wishing.’
The main root of philosophical perplexity and metaphysical paradox, Wittgenstein argues, arises when we totally misunderstand the functioning of our conceptual tools. To have a philosophical problem is like not being able to find our way about a town through not understanding its plan. It’s like being ‘a fly in a bottle’, buzzing against the side instead of flying out of the top; it’s like a bewitchment of intelligence. The appropriate response is not to come up with a new theory of explanation. What we need instead are simple reminders of the purposes for which we make use of these concepts, ‘judicially assembled so that we cease to be blind to what ‘already lies open to view.’ If we concentrate on how we employ the concepts in question – that is, the general nature of the language game we are ‘playing’ – we shall cease to be victims of philosophical puzzlement.
What of this notion of a ‘language game’. Why ‘game’? Games, Wittgenstein contended, do not have to have any single property or feature in common. Instead they have ‘family resemblances’ (to pick up on an earlier example, hoping does not name a process which all cases of hoping have in common; rather, there is only a family resemblance between cases).
For Wittgenstein, in ‘Philosophical Investigations’, ‘philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything … Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.’ He had a horror of ‘professorial philosophy by philosophy professors’. This last point prompts an anecdote. For many years I taught philosophy to a wonderful group of medical students from the University of London who took a year out from their medical studies to do a B.Sc in Sociology as Applied to Medicine. One year I was obliged to present my syllabus – including a consideration of Wittgenstein’s ideas – to the University’s Board of Studies in Philosophy. The response came back that my undergrads were not ‘mature enough’ to discuss Wittgenstein. This would surely have appalled Wittgenstein! In the event I changed the title of my course from ‘Philosophy of’ to ‘Conceptual issues in’ contemporary social theory, thus by-passing the Board of Studies in Philosophy, and all was apparently okay.
K.T.Fann quotes Wittgenstein as follows:
‘if we tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.’
And:
‘what we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings, we are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes.’
Philosophers over the centuries have manufactured puzzles and tasked themselves with trying to solve them. They have often tied themselves in knots, and Wittgenstein is telling us why. But in fact we non-philosophers, we lay ‘experts’ in the often-subtle deployment of concepts in multiple language games, have no need of traditional philosophies; all a philosopher can and needs to do is point out our existing learned expertise in navigating language games, and, now and again, ‘show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.’ It is philosophy as therapy.
‘Don’t ask for meaning but ask for use’, he insisted. The meaning of a word is revealed by its usage in a particular language game. ‘All I can give you is a method; I cannot teach you new truths’. Philosophers properly employed: (i) remind us of our ‘lay’ learned, accomplished and practised linguistic subtlety, and, if push comes to shove, (ii) banish puzzlement.
References
Fann,K (1969) Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy. Oxford; Basil Blackwell.
Urmson,J (1960) Wittgenstein. In Eds Urmson & Ree: The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers. London; Unwin Hyman.