Wittgenstein has been taxed with obscurantism for the attitude he has from time to time expressed as to the relevance and prospects of empirical explanation, whether through historical investigation or controlled enquiry. The areas in which Wittgenstein appears to see empirical discourse as an intrusion extend from dreams, jokes, and other psychoanalytic explananda to the meaning and origin of ritual practices and expressive gestures, and to our responses to music, poems, paintings, and other aesthetic products.

In the course of his apparent derogation of empirical knowledge, Wittgenstein employs two sets of contrasts. One, most generically stated, is between explaining something in the way an event is explained and attaining to a more explicit understanding of what makes it that particular something. Less generically, it is between explaining an event and coming to understand what the feelings and thoughts are which give it depth. For example, explaining how it comes about that at regular intervals a pretence is made of burning a man in a ritually prescribed way on the one hand, and understanding why this makes on us the peculiar impression it does on the other. (Sometimes the event whose explanation is contrasted with a more profound grasp of how we feel toward it is itself a feeling, and the contrast between explaining a feeling, or impression, and understanding it is all the more elusive.)