Philosophical Investigations

The Philosophical Investigations is the masterpiece of Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s later philosophy, published in 1953, two years after his death, in a German–English edition translated by his student Elizabeth Anscombe. In it Wittgenstein turned against the philosophy of his own Tractatus — “I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book” — and against the whole tradition that sought the essence of language, meaning and mind. Language, he argued, is not a single system with a hidden logical structure, but a motley of practices — language-games — embedded in human activities and forms of life; the meaning of a word is, for a large class of cases, its use. Philosophical problems arise when language “goes on holiday”, when words are torn from the contexts in which they work; the task of philosophy is to “assemble reminders” of how we actually use words, and so to dissolve the problems. It is regularly voted the most important philosophical book of the twentieth century.

At a glance

Written	Chiefly 1936–1949, in Cambridge, Norway and Ireland
Published	1953, posthumously, ed. Anscombe and Rush Rhees
Form	Numbered remarks, “a number of sketches of landscapes”
Preface	“I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.”

The argument

Augustine’s picture. The book opens with a passage from Augustine‘s Confessions describing how he learned language as a child: his elders named objects and pointed to them, and he learned what the words signified. Here, Wittgenstein says, is a particular picture of language: every word has a meaning, the meaning is the object for which the word stands, and sentences are combinations of names. The picture fits some words, but not “five”, “red”, “not”, “hello!”. He imagines a simple language of a builder and his assistant, consisting only of “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, “beam”: the builder calls, the assistant brings the stone. This is a complete primitive language — and its words are not labels but instruments in an activity.

Language-games. He calls such wholes of language and the actions into which it is woven language-games (§7), and lists their multiplicity: giving orders and obeying them, describing an object, reporting an event, speculating, making up a story, play-acting, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, translating, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying (§23). “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.” Words are like the tools in a toolbox — a hammer, pliers, a saw, glue — whose functions are as diverse as theirs (§11). “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” (§43).

Family resemblance. An interlocutor objects: you have not said what is essential to a language-game, and so to language. Wittgenstein replies by asking us to consider games — board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games. “Don’t say: ‘There must be something common, or they would not be called “games”’ — but look and see” (§66). We find not a single common feature but “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”, which he calls family resemblances, like the resemblances of build, features, colour of eyes and temperament among members of a family (§67). Concepts can have blurred edges and still be usable: “Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one?” (§71).

Rules. A long sequence of remarks (§§138–242) asks what it is to understand a word or follow a rule. A pupil is taught to continue the series “+2” and, after 1000, writes 1004, 1008, 1012, insisting he is going on in the same way (§185). Nothing in the instructions, in any formula, or in the teacher’s mind seems to fix in advance which continuation is correct, since any interpretation can itself be interpreted differently. “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule” (§201). The answer is that following a rule is not a matter of interpretation but a practice, a custom, an institution: “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly” (§219). Understanding rests on agreement — “not agreement in opinions but in form of life” (§241). Saul Kripke‘s reading of these remarks as a sceptical paradox (1982) made them famous.

Private language. From §243 Wittgenstein asks whether there could be a language whose words “refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate private sensations” — a language no one else could understand. He imagines keeping a diary in which he writes the sign “S” every day on which he has a certain sensation. But what makes his use of “S” correct? He has no criterion except his impression that this is the same sensation again, and “whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’” (§258). Meaning requires public criteria. The argument undermines the Cartesian picture, from René Descartes onward, of the mind as an inner theatre known directly only to its owner. Pain-words are learned not by inner naming but as replacements for natural expressions of pain — a child cries, and adults teach him exclamations and later sentences (§244). The image of the beetle in a box: suppose everyone had a box with something in it called a “beetle”, and no one could look into anyone else’s box; the thing in the box would drop out of the language-game altogether (§293).

Philosophy. Wittgenstein’s remarks on method (§§89–133) are among the most quoted in philosophy. Philosophical problems are not empirical but arise from misunderstandings of the logic of our language, “when language goes on holiday” (§38), when “language is like an engine idling” (§132). “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (§109). “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language” (§115). “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything… it leaves everything as it is” (§§126, 124). “What is your aim in philosophy? — To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (§309).

Seeing-as. The later part of the book investigates aspect perception: the famous “duck-rabbit” figure, which can be seen first as a duck and then as a rabbit, though nothing in it has changed. What changes when an aspect “dawns”? The discussion illuminates the relation between seeing and interpreting, and the ways meaning lights up in experience.

Style

The book is written in short numbered remarks, often dialogues with an imagined interlocutor, full of questions, examples, analogies and imagined cases — “an album” of “sketches of landscapes” made “on long and involved journeyings”. Wittgenstein confessed in the preface that his attempts to weld his results into a continuous whole had failed. The style is itself part of the method: it aims not to convey doctrines but to change the way the reader looks.

Reception

The Investigations inspired Oxford ordinary language philosophy and much later philosophy of mind and language; it has also influenced social theory (Peter Winch), anthropology, theology, literary criticism and the philosophy of mathematics. Critics, like Russell, thought the later Wittgenstein had abandoned serious philosophy. Others have read him as a quietist who would dissolve all philosophy, as a deep anti-Cartesian, or as a thinker close to the pragmatists and to Heidegger.

In conversation

• Meaning is use — words as tools in a language-game.
• The beetle in the box — against private language.
• The fly-bottle — philosophy as therapy.