A member of a primitive culture is engaging in behaviour which involves mimicking or otherwise deliberately calling to mind a state of affairs which is of great moment to him – rainfall, spring, the hunting of prey, the destruction of an enemy. What is Wittgenstein's thesis with respect to these ‘actions that bear a peculiar character and might be called ritualistic’?

Both commentators who are favourably disposed towards it and those who reject it concur in attributing to Wittgenstein the view that, as it is put by John Cook, ‘Wittgenstein was … offering a theory to the effect that the primitive magician, in the performance of his rites, no more intends to help his crops flourish or to harm his enemy than we intend to bring about some effect by kissing the picture of a loved one’ (Cook 1983: 5). Howard Mounce too, assigns an expressive, anti-instrumental view of magic to Wittgenstein: ‘The practice of destroying an effigy of one's enemy need not have a purpose in the sense of bringing something about, it is merely the expression of a wish’ (Mounce 1978:70). A. J. Ayer interprets Wittgenstein as maintaining that ‘the stabbing of the picture (of an enemy) is a mere venting of the agent's spleen, a symbolic act, not seriously expected to have any practical effect’ (Ayer 1980:91). According to Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein held that ‘magical ways of thinking and acting’ are not based on beliefs but are akin rather to acts ‘like kissing the picture of a loved one or striking some inanimate object when angry’ (McGuinness 1982: 37).