Wittgenstein

"Of the books that I’ve selected here, this is undoubtedly the most difficult. It is a straight philosophical account of Wittgenstein’s views in the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations . It is very well written and very clear. It is not easy, but I think it is the best single presentation of a reasonably advanced kind which will take you quite deep into Wittgenstein’s conceptions both in the Tractatus in the Investigations . Schroeder is a Reader at the University of Reading and one of the best Wittgenstein scholars around today. I found this book really helpful. It resolves a lot of puzzling questions that others hadn’t resolved. It gives one a whole range of Wittgenstein’s own arguments laid out with great clarity, which is something that Wittgenstein couldn’t himself do. Wittgenstein was congenitally incapable of writing continuous prose that he was satisfied with. What facilitated his creativity was to write down brief remarks which could be one or two sentences or sometimes two or three paragraphs. He would be looking for an expression which would capture the essence of the problem or the essence of a solution to a problem at one blow. Once he found it, he wouldn’t touch it again. His method of composition was to write down his thoughts in notebooks. When he came to the stage when he wanted to organise these materials into a book, he’d have his notes typed out, he’d cut the pages of the typescript into pieces, and would fiddle around with these fragments until he found an arrangement that pleased him. Not altogether surprisingly, he could hardly ever find one. He had endless trouble. It’s a serious question whether he was the best judge in his own case. In the 20,000 pages of literary remains, you find sublime remarks that he put aside as they weren’t good enough. They’re not only good enough, some of them are among the best things he ever wrote! Wittgenstein’s prose is immensely powerful once you’ve got a reasonable grip on the way he thinks. It reverberates and echoes and invites endless thought from the reader, which is precisely what he wanted to do. But it is very difficult to follow and it’s very difficult to lay out systematically so that one can actually see what he takes for granted and doesn’t bother writing down. Severin Schroeder is very good at doing precisely that, at spelling out the arguments in meticulous detail in a way in which Wittgenstein himself never could do. But all the arguments in the book are actually Wittgenstein’s. That’s why I recommend this very warmly. It’s one of the best introductory books that grapple with Wittgenstein’s philosophy. These are two diametrically opposed philosophies. He’s really travelling from the north pole to the south pole. In the Tractatus , Wittgenstein articulates a conception of representation by means of language which presents language as an abstract calculus of meaning. The rough idea is that, given a set of primitive expressions, a set of formation and transformation rules, and various combinatorial devices, a linguistic machine (or a human being) can grind out all possible sentences. There’s a complex philosophical theory that underlies the Tractatus about the nature and limits of representation, of what can and cannot be said in a language. If you look in the Tractatus for human beings engaged in discourse in the hurly-burly of life, that is totally absent. Human beings are almost excluded from this pure logical house. There’s virtually nothing at all about learning how to do things with words: how to request, how to specify, how to state, how to describe, what the differences are between describing what you can see and describing how the building you want to build is going to look, and between that and describing the dream that you had last night. None of this fits the Tractatus . I would present the Tractatus as representing the most austere variant of a calculus conception of language. By contrast, Wittgenstein’s second philosophy, which culminates in the Investigations , presents language as an organic growth in human history. It an anthropological phenomenon, as opposed to logico-mathematical structure. Language grows out of human activity. He liked to quote Goethe’s remark “In the beginning was the deed” which stands in contrast with the thought that “in the beginning was the word.” He views language as a motley of what he calls language-games. These are more or less rule-governed activities in which the use of words is integrated into the stream of human life. As in a game, the rules may be very flexible, and much may be left completely open. This stands in contrast to the calculi of logic, in which nothing should be left open. Human beings employ the words and sentences of language as instruments by which they can do things. They engage in the language games of buying and selling things, they may play the language-game of keeping accounts, they can write books—for that too may be viewed as a language-game, they can send letters to their friends, they can stick names on things—and so on and so forth through a myriad of linguistic activities. Now, there couldn’t be a greater contrast between these two conceptions of language. I think the latter is one of the greatest advances in understanding the nature of human languages and the nature of human communication. This was completely absent in the Tractatus . There Wittgenstein did not have the method of meticulously examining how an expression is used in a wide variety of linguistic contexts, in widely different circumstances, for altogether distinct purposes. He paid no attention to human discourse in the hurly-burly of life. He was obsessed with the use of language to state facts, oblivious to the multitude of different roles that words and utterances have. “Wittgenstein would view theories of language such as Chomsky’s with horror” This later philosophy had a great impact for two or three decades, but then under pressure from Chomskian linguists and from philosophers who were enamoured with calculus conceptions of language like Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett, Wittgenstein’s views on language as an anthropomorphic phenomenon were brushed aside. I think this has come at a huge cost in the understanding of the nature of language, and in the multiplication of yet more nonsense and theories which, if you press them, simply don’t make sense. Wittgenstein would view theories of language such as Chomsky ’s with horror. He would view the idea that there could be rules of language in the brain with disdain—as a phrase that makes no sense at all. Wittgenstein spent a huge amount of time exploring a topic which, I think, only Kant had explored carefully before—which is the nature of rules and complying with rules. That’s of great importance because he linked rule-following in his later work with human practices and engagement in activities. Whereas, people like Chomsky and psychologists working on the psychology of language assume that it makes sense to talk about the brain complying with rules or there being rules in the brain. Wittgenstein shows why that doesn’t make sense. So, his relevance to current activities in psychology, in neuroscience, in linguistics, and philosophy of language is colossal. But I’m sorry to say that not many people pay attention to it at the moment. There is a connecting strand between the Tractatus and his later views on philosophy. Philosophy is not a science and is not in competition with science. It is either above the sciences or below the sciences, but not on the same level. That’s something that he held throughout his life. It is important and radical. In his later view, when he develops his conception of philosophy to its full fruition, he thinks that there are two aspects to philosophy. One is negative, and one positive. The negative one is to disentangle philosophical misunderstandings and conceptual confusions which tie knots in our comprehension, by careful and meticulous examination of the uses of words. This might be illuminated by the following metaphor. The philosopher should walk to the top of the magic mountain. At the top is a cave full of a gold encrusted with jewels, diamonds, pearls, and emeralds glittering and gleaming. The task of philosophy is to take a handful of this treasure out into the sunlight, away from the magical cave, and show that it is really just old stones and rusting metal. The metaphysical stories that philosophers have spun throughout the ages—the alleged insights into the necessary structure of the world—are all illusions and they can be shown to be illusions. Similarly, there are endless misunderstandings about the nature of thought and thinking, such as the idea that thought is a process that can carry on irrespective of a language, so that it might make sense to ascribe very complicated thoughts to animals or to small children. Now that, for rather complicated reasons, makes no sense at all. The limits of thought are the limits of the possible expression of thought. And the possible expression of thought is determined by the behavioural repertoire of the animal. A dog can expect its master to come in the door now , because he can hear his footsteps on the path, but the dog can’t now expect its master to come in tomorrow. There is nothing in the dog’s behavioural repertoire that would show such an expectation. The dog might welcome a nice bone on Christmas day, but it can’t anticipate it six months before because its behavioural repertoire doesn’t contain anything that would show that this is what it expects. Whereas we can say what we expect. We have a concept of tomorrow, of yesterday, of next year, and next Christmas. We can display in our linguistic behaviour a range of expectations that no other animal could possibly have. These things are immensely important clarifications and elucidations which Wittgenstein offers again and again on dozens of topics in Philosophical Investigations . “If he is right, as I believe him to be, then most of theoretical philosophy…since Descartes has been wrong” The negative task is of colossal importance. Side by side, there is a positive constructive aspect. This is purely descriptive and not theoretical. What is said does not consist of empirical statements that can be falsified or verified in experience. Rather, what is said is conceptual clarification. There are questions such as what is knowledge and how it related to belief? This is a perfectly good question. But it is a philosophical question, not an empirical one. It is about the concepts of knowing something and believing something—and the only way to clarify that is by meticulously examining the way that the verbs ‘to believe’ and ‘to know’ and the nouns ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ are applied in our language. If you have the skills that Wittgenstein cultivated, you can map out the pattern of relationships between these concepts and their employment. When you do that, the puzzle and the bafflement disappear. It has a spin-off in the negative critical side because, it will show that certain kinds of questions simply don’t make sense and have arisen from a misunderstanding. Let me give you an example. Many people read about one dreadful genocide or another, horrified at the terrible things that human beings do to one another. A very natural and common reaction is to say “I don’t understand how people can do that.” The question is: what do they want in order to understand it? The Nazi genocide of the Jews is the best documented ever. What is there that we don’t know that would enable us to understand? I think the answer to the puzzle is that “I can’t understand” here is an exclamatory utterance, but not an expression of lack of understanding. It is an exclamation of horror. How can I show that? Compare it with “I can’t believe what he just told me.” This does not mean that I have tried to believe and it is too difficult for me. Rather, what is meant is that it runs contrary to everything that I thought possible. That’s what “I can’t believe…” means—it’s not an expression of disbelief. In a similar way, confronted with the ghastliness of the holocaust, one can say “I can’t understand…” and what that amounts to is that I can’t even begin to imagine that human beings could sink to such levels of depravity. It’s an expression of horror, not of a lack of understanding. One can only discern that if one examines the use of the term ‘understand’ on the one hand, and ‘belief’ on the other, with a degree of sensitivity. Then one can understand what is going on here. Wittgenstein was amazingly good at this. We are all too prone to take utterances of declarative sentences to be descriptions. But, very often, they are nothing of the sort. It’s quite difficult to wrap one’s mind around that. One example is “I’m so sorry…” I’m not describing myself here; I am apologising . It is not a description of my current state of mind. Another example is “I think we ought to go to London now.” Or “I want a drink”. These are not pieces of autobiography, but expressions of my judgement and of my wanting respectively. And so on, for an indefinite number of cases where we’re using a particular form of words to do things other than describing."