Representation by Means of Language

When Wittgenstein turned to writing what became the Philosophical Investigations, he thought hard about how to begin the book. His primary theme was to be the nature of language and linguistic representation. In 1931, he wrote that he should begin his book with an analysis of an ordinary sentence such as ‘A lamp is standing on my table’ since everything should be derivable from this. What did he have in mind?

His concern was with how sentences manage to represent. Such a humdrum sentence as ‘A lamp is standing on my table’ is meaningful – it has a meaning. By using such a meaningful sentence, one describes a certain state of affairs. One says that there is a lamp on one's table, and what one says may be either true or false. How does a sentence in use, a sequence of sounds one utters, manage to do all this – to represent a situation, to describe how things are, to be true or false? – The question is odd, and it may well engender a feeling of bafflement. You may well feel that you can't really see a problem. You may be inclined to say that this is just what sentences in use do! — Let me try to show you that there is more that is puzzling about linguistic representation that comes immediately to the eye. I shall do so by means of a little dialogue between myself and an interlocutor, who I imagine as a thoughtful member of my audience given to asking good questions. I’ll set the ball rolling:

Unfinished Business: What Use Is Not and When Meaning Isn't Use

In the last lecture, the logical geography of the concept of the meaning of a word was sketched. Wittgenstein linked the concept of word meaning to the concept of the use of a word and to the concept of a rule for the use of a word. The concept of a rule for the use of a word is in turn linked to the concept of an explanation of the meaning of a word – since an explanation of meaning is, in effect, a rule – a standard of correct use. Moreover, the notions of meaning, use, rule and explanation are all connected with the concept of a practice of regular use of a word – and that is linked with the idea of a recognized uniformity that is viewed as standard setting. This network of interwoven concepts ramifies further. The concept of word meaning was also connected with the concept of meaning something by a word, and with the concepts of understanding what a word means and understanding what someone meant in saying what he said. The concept of understanding is in turn linked with using a word correctly, explaining what it means and responding appropriately to its use by others – which are severally criteria for understanding what a word or expression means. We determine whether someone under-stands an expression by reference to whether he uses it correctly, explains correctly what it means in a given context and responds appropriately to its use by others. One might think of this large array of interwoven concepts as a network or web of ideas, each of which is directly or indirectly connected to all the others and all of which conjunctively determine the concept of meaning.

Int. Yes, I have grasped at least part of this network, and I can see that many difficulties can be resolved by attending to the place of the various concepts within this web. Nevertheless, I still have qualms about Wittgenstein's identifying the meaning of a word with its use. I mean, he did say that for a large class of cases the meaning of a word is its use in the language. What worries me is that there are far too many kinds of cases in which the meaning of a word is not its use. And if I’m right, then we can't accept Wittgenstein's claim.

Augustine's Picture Again

You will recollect that an integral element of the conception of meaning that Wittgenstein associated with Augustine's pre-reflective picture of language is the idea that language is connected to reality. Augustine remarked that

So Augustine conceived of words being connected with things by means of ostension. We have already examined Wittgenstein's criticisms of that idea. Let me briefly remind you of some of his points and take the matter forward a little.

First of all, we must distinguish ostensive training from ostensive teaching. All initial language learning is a matter of training. Parents and siblings endlessly repeat words, encourage correct reactions and reinforce correct repetition. This is not explaining what words mean, but inculcating verbal responses and reactions. Ostensive teaching can play a role in language learning only once the child has already acquired substantial linguistic skills and is in the position to start asking ‘What is a so-and-so?’ and ‘What does such-and-such a word mean?’

∙ Second, we must note that the form of words ‘This is so-and-so?’ has two quite different uses. It may be used to make a true or false statement about the object that is pointed at – as when we are asked whether there is anything octagonal around, and in reply we point at a small side table and say ‘This ☞ is octagonal’. Alternatively, we might be asked what the word ‘octagonal’ means, and in reply we might point at the table and say ‘This ☞ is octago-nal’. In the first case, our description could be paraphrased ‘This ☞ table is octagonal’, but in the second case our ostensive utterance is not a description but a definition.

Wittgenstein – Life and Works

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna, the eighth child of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein. The family was of Jewish descent, although they had converted to Catholicism a generation earlier. Karl Wittgenstein was the leading Austrian steel baron – the Carnegie of the Austrian steel industry – and one of the wealthiest men in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a great patron of the arts, and the family's palatial home in Vienna was the leading music salon there at the turn of the century. Brahms was a friend of the family, Mahler frequented the house, and Bruno Walter, Joseph Joachim and young Pablo Casals all played at the Wittgenstein musical evenings. Young Ludwig was brought up in an haute-bourgeois family of great cultivation and refined sensibility, wide intellectual and artistic interests, and a powerful sense of social and moral obligation.

Wittgenstein was taught at home by private tutors until the age of 14, after which he went to school in Linz. After graduating from high school, he went to study for a diploma in engineering at a technical college in Berlin. He completed the diploma course in 1908. Having become interested in the budding science of aeronautics, he went to Manchester University to do research on flight and subsequently on a jet reaction propeller. It was while doing this that he came across, and became fascinated by, the writings of Gottlob Frege and of Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of logic and mathematics. The upshot was that he went to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1911 to read for an advanced degree under the supervision of Russell. Russell later described him at this period as being ‘perhaps the most perfect example I have known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating’.1 Within six months, the two men were discussing philosophy as equals, and Russell looked upon Wittgenstein as his successor in philosophical research.2 Between 1913 and early 1917, Wittgenstein worked on composing materials for his first philosophical masterpiece: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In this work, he confronted the views of his two great predecessors and mentors, the German mathematical logician Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, undermining their conceptions of logic as a science with a subject matter.

The Philosophical Investigations (1953) is one of the most revolutionary philosophical works ever written. It ploughs up the fields of philosophical thought on the nature of language and linguistic meaning, on the relation between language and reality, on metaphysics, on the relation between language and thinking, on the nature of the mind, on self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and on the nature of philosophy itself. On each subject, Wittgenstein dug down to the roots of our reflections, exposing our tacit, often mistaken, presuppositions.

Wittgenstein wrote the Investigations in a laid-back colloquial style. It is easy to see what he says. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand why he says what he says. It is also easy to misinterpret what he wrote and to ascribe to him views that he did not hold. It is not surprising that misinterpretations of Wittgenstein's ideas are common among twenty-first century philosophers, who are more eager to dismiss his views than to understand what they are.

Having spent more than 25 years working intensively on Wittgenstein's philosophy in general, and on the Investigations in particular, and reaching the end of my long career of teaching and writing philosophy, it seemed to me that I was at long last ready to publish a beginner's guide to some of the central themes in his masterpiece. What I present here is not a textbook. It does not examine the multitudinous interpretations of Wittgenstein (I have done that in great detail in a dozen other books), although widespread criticisms of Wittgenstein are examined and refuted. It does not attempt to examine all the major themes in the Investigations – but only those that, in my judgement, are the most likely to interest beginners. So, for example, I have not discussed Wittgenstein's important scrutiny of the concept of following a rule, for that is too difficult and unlikely to excite the imaginations of those I wish to guide around select landmarks in his book. What I have written is directed at open-minded readers, who know no philosophy but who are willing to grapple with Wittgenstein's radical arguments in order to gain insight into subjects that are of concern to any thinking person.

In order to be able to pass an accurate judgement on this new product of the Kantian genius—which is more than a mere reworking of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals—and on its relation to the doctrines of other philosophers, it is necessary to uncover the main principles on which the author builds, and by means of which he proceeds, and to accompany them individually with comments. In order to make the occasionally necessary reference to them easier, I will number them.

Johann Friedrich Flatt (1759–1821) was a lecturer in theoretical philosophy in Tübingen from 1785–1791. As the resident Kant expert, during this time Flatt was responsible for reviewing both pro- and anti-Kantian works in the local academic journal, the Tübingische gelehrte Anzeigen. Flatt also reviewed Kant’s works themselves, including the Groundwork, translated into English in this chapter for the first time. The main theme of the review is Kant’s inconsistency, but Flatt also makes a claim that is repeated by other early critics, such as Tittel and Pistorius, namely that Kant’s own examples reveal that the categorical imperative cannot determine concrete duties without referring to experience, despite what Kant might say to the contrary. We have good reason to believe that Kant read Flatt’s review of the Groundwork, and Kant likely has Flatt in mind at 5:4.28–37n and 5:5.24–6.11 when discussing various alleged inconsistencies in his writings.

What thelematology is. Before I turn to the guide to living rationally itself, it is necessary that I issue the doctrine of the human will as preparation in advance, without which one cannot possibly succeed in the following. For, since the guide to a rational life includes solely those rules that are prescribed to the will, and which must therefore be derived, for the most part, from the constitution of the will, it is easy to see that one must first know how the will is constituted and works by nature before one can sufficiently explain how it ought to be. One can justifiably call this doctrine thelematology or the doctrine of the will, a name by which I mean nothing other than a theoretical science of the properties, powers, and effects of the human will. The idea is therefore that we here seek out, as far as possible, the causes [4] of that which we perceive in the will through experience with the intention of learning to both better recognize and judge good and evil as well as promote the former and eradicate and hinder the latter. Why it is treated here. I believe that this is the correct place to treat this important subject. It is indeed known that many tend to include it in metaphysics. It seems to me, however, that this is not done correctly, in that metaphysics must without a doubt lose all determinate boundaries if one is also permitted to treat contingent truths in it, concerning which one has no assurance that they cannot be otherwise in a different world, and which one cannot know a priori on the basis of the necessary essence of a thing or of a world in general. Nonetheless, one can simply grant each scholar their own freedom on this matter.

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was a profoundly important philosopher during the eighteenth century. ‘Wolffianism,’ broadly defined as adherence to Wolff’s teachings, was taught and promoted at all the major German universities for decades. Kant was educated and began his career within an environment that was dominated by discussion between proponents of and opponents to Wolff’s philosophy. This chapter contains a complete translation of Chapter 1 of Part 1 of Wolff’s ‘German Ethics’ (1720), in which Wolff gives a general overview of almost all the core features of his ‘universal practical philosophy.’ The translation contained in this chapter therefore serves as a concise introduction to Wolff’s ethics in general, and one that is especially helpful for better understanding Kant’s explicit reference to Wolff’s principle of perfection in the second Critique (see 5:40), among other things.

In this work the author further elaborates on the ideas, to which he had given an introduction in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and which at the same time can serve as a brief outline of his doctrine of morals, insofar as he here thoroughly deals with the following questions: whether and in what way pure reason is practical, whether it has any relation to the faculty of desire, what kind of relation this is, and how we can conceive of the relation as possible and actual.

One of the most significant philosophical events during the final decades of the eighteenth century was the so-called ‘pantheism controversy.’ An important event during the controversy was the initially anonymous publication of Thomas Wizenmann’s 1786 book entitled The Results of the Jacobian and Mendelssohnian Philosophy, Critically Examined by A Neutral Party. Kant responds to this book in his essay ‘What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?’. This chapter contains a complete translation of Wizenmann’s subsequent response to the ‘Orientation’ essay, written in the form of an open letter to Kant. The most important claim of the letter is Wizenmann’s example of the lover who infers the existence of their beloved’s reciprocal love, simply because the lover needs this to be the case. Kant responds to Wizenmann, and this example, primarily in the second Critique’s chapter ‘On Assent from A Need of Pure Reason’ (5:142–6)

I come to the final and, indeed, most important aid [Hülfsmittel] of patience, which is related to the preceding one—conviction of its accord with duty—in the most precise way. This aid is religious virtue, resignation to the divine will, which emerges from belief [Glauben] in God and from the hope of a better future.

Hermann Andreas Pistorius (1730–1798) was a pastor and frequent contributor to the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, an important journal of the German Enlightenment. Pistorius reviewed nearly every one of Kant’s major works for the journal as well as many texts by both Kant’s defenders and critics. This chapter contains Pistorius’ review of Johann Schultz’s Elucidations of Herr Professor Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the first book-length commentary on the first Critique. In the review, Pistorius uses Schultz’s Elucidations as the occasion for examining some of Kant’s own doctrines directly, such as his theory of space and time and the distinction between appearances and things in themselves. Particularly relevant to the second Critique are Pistorius’ criticism of Kant’s solution to the third antinomy, his claim that the first Critique is inconsistent with the Groundwork, and the claim that Kant is illegitimately biased towards moral ideas.

The third and final review authored by Pistorius in this volume is his review of the second Critique. The review completes a fascinating exchange between Pistorius and Kant that begins with the former’s early review of Schultz’s Elucidations and the Groundwork, among others, continues with Kant’s responses to these reviews in the second Critique, and ends here with Pistorius’ review of the second Critique. In the review, Pistorius returns to some of the same points made in his previous reviews, such as the ‘priority of the good’ objection, the charge of empty formalism, and Kant’s conception of freedom. A major theme of the review is Pistorius’ inability to accept Kant’s distinction between the empirical and intelligible character of human beings, and other topics include a discussion of the highest good and Kant’s relationship to Stoic moral philosophy.

I consign myself to a new investigation of some of my statements, not to even further disturb the spirit of the philosophical Israelite, nor to reignite a conflict that burned so brightly once already, but solely and entirely with the intention of discharging a duty of deference that I owe. I had resolved to keep myself out of this affair from that time onwards, and to question in silence what I had justly or unjustly been accused of. For, I too am convinced that every truth must and will support itself, and even I could [117] not expect to be understood as I wanted, given so many different interests of so many different parties, even after many explanations. Unfortunately, my weak health supported this decision strongly enough and I would have stuck to it had you, venerable Kant!, not spoken out against me.