In one of his harshest judgments on philosophy Wittgenstein observes at PI, 194: “When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.” He does not document the extent to which this actually goes on in philosophy, or where it goes on, if it does. When he makes the remark he has been discussing possibility. In that case perhaps he has a point. It might well apply as well to much of what is said in philosophy about thought, meaning, and understanding - in short, about the mind. When we reflect philosophically on those “mental” or “intentional”ways of speaking in which we describe so much of what we do it is easy to start down a path, no one step of which is exactly “savage” or “uncivilized,”but which ends up with something “queer” in the sense of being completely and irretrievably mysterious.

I want to look at one - but only one - way in which Wittgenstein thinks this happens, and what he does, or suggests, to counteract it. It can start with puzzlement over the meanings of words. Not with wondering what some particular word means, but with wonder at the very phenomenon of meaning. Words as we encounter them are sounds or marks, but obviously not all sounds or marks are meaningful. Leaves make sounds in the wind, and a snail makes marks in the sand. It is not even their being produced by human beings that makes sounds or marks meaningful. Humans also produce sounds and marks which have no meaning, and often do so intentionally. As Wittgenstein puts it, mere sounds or marks on their own seem “dead” (BLBK, p. 3).

The history of philosophy can partially be characterized by what Hilary Putnam has called the recoil phenomenon: an oscillation between two extreme positions, with each camp reacting to the untenable part of the other, resulting, finally, in two untenable positions. The current recoil ricochets across both analytic and Continental philosophy. On one side are those who deny objectivity in all fields in all ways,- there are only incommensurable narratives. On the other side are those who attempt to secure objectivity, but do so at the cost of clothing it in metaphysical mystery. The first side (justifiably) points out the illusions in the second's metaphysics, and then recoils to anarchy. The second (justifiably) shows the inherent contradictions in the anarchist position, and then recoils to building more epicycles in its metaphysical castle.

Wittgenstein argued against both sides. His ultimate achievement in the philosophy of mathematics was to stake out a defensible intermediate position between two untenable warring factions. This essay will explicate Wittgenstein's position by stressing his opposition to each side, emphasizing, as well, the unity of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mathematics with the Philosophical Investigations.

THE PROBLEM ABOUT PHILOSOPHY

It is one of the wonderful paradoxes of our time that the greatest and most stimulating philosopher of the century should identify his work with the stodgiest and dullest of school subjects. It is nonetheless the case that for the last twenty years of his life, the years of his greatest productivity and his profoundest work, Wittgenstein identified what he was doing, and what other philosophers really have been doing and should be doing, with grammar. This perspective is as carefully considered as it is puzzling. It emerged out of earnest and ongoing work, and its implications are felt throughout his later philosophical investigations. Although he settled into this general conception of philosophy soon after his return to Cambridge, probably in 1930, he never gave a clear and orderly account of what he meant. Nor did he succeed, in spite of the centrality of this idea from 1930 right through his last writings, in convincing all those who read his work sympathetically that he meant what he seemed to be saying; both Moore (PO, pp. 46-114) and Feyerabend, for example, expressed profound skepticism about it shortly after his death.

Wittgenstein's enigmatic conception of sentences as pictures and his attempt to recast logic in essentially truth-functional terms have long fascinated readers of the Tractatus. I hope in this essay to clarify the content and motivation of Wittgenstein's view of sentences as pictures and to relate this conception to his views on logic. At the beginning of the foreword to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein tells his readers that the Tractatus is not a textbook, that perhaps only someone who has had the thoughts it expresses will understand it. The foreword also suggests that the Tractatus is in large measure a response to and critique of Frege's and Russell's views. My strategy then is to examine how aspects of the Tractatus emerge against the backdrop of problems that Frege's and Russell's views posed for Wittgenstein.

THE OLD LOGIC

Wittgenstein rejected Frege's and Russell's universalist conception of logic - what he disparaged as the old logic - while retaining their inchoate but guiding assumptions first that logic frames all thought, and second that it is possible to give a clear, completely explicit, and unambiguous expression to the contents judged true or false. To begin with, let us survey some of the leading features of the old logic and then consider briefly some of Wittgenstein's dissatisfactions with it.

“NEITHER SUPER-IDEALIZED GUIDANCE NOR CAPRICE”

Terry Eagleton, in his script for Derek Jarman's film, Wittgenstein, takes up Wittgenstein's image of the “crystalline purity of logic”in contrast to the “rough ground”of what we actually say and do. A young man, we are told, dreams of “reducing the world to pure logic,” a dream he succeeds in realizing in a world “purged of imperfection and indeterminacy, like countless acres of gleaming ice.” That world, perfect as it is, is uninhabitable: “he had forgotten about friction.” As an older man, he “came to understand that roughness and ambiguity and indeterminacy aren't imperfections - they're what make things work.”He dug up the ice to uncover the rough ground, but, “homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute,” he was unable to live on the rough ground, and he ended up “marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither.”

The mid–seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries were times of tremendous change for the Native peoples of the Plains. They seized new opportunities presented by the arrival of Europeans and by the subsequent expansion of settlers from the United States and Canada into the trans-Mississippi West. Native peoples adapted new technologies to their own needs, elaborated and transformed their basic social and cultural institutions, and helped to create a multiethnic society in the West. For some Native groups the new opportunities enabled expansion and domination of neighboring peoples. The histories of others were shaped by a sometimes unsuccessful struggle to resist domination and dispossession. Through time, alliances shifted, as did the balance of power. Eventually, the Native peoples were overwhelmed by American and Canadian expansion and forced onto small reserves where they continued to struggle to hold on to the things they valued and to determine for themselves how they would change in adapting to new circumstances. Throughout the centuries, the decisions they made helped shape North American history.

Some of the Native peoples who occupied the Plains when Europeans first arrived in the mid–sixteenth century had been there for several hundred years or longer. Others were more recent immigrants. Over the next two centuries, more groups moved into the region, peoples who were fleeing wars among Native groups east of the Mississippi that had been brought on by European rivalries. The Great Plains region extended west from the lowland river bottom systems of the Missouri and Lower Mississippi, and gradually ascended in elevation through the grasslands, to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. There were two adaptations to the Plains region: riverine horticultural villages, situated along the Missouri and its tributaries and along the other rivers that flowed east into the Lower Mississippi, and nomadic hunting bands that ranged in the uplands west, southwest, and northwest of the Missouri as far as the Rocky Mountains.

The riverine horticulturalists included both speakers of Caddoan languages, who had come into the Plains from the southeast about A.D. 900, and groups whose languages belonged to the Siouan family, who had moved to the Missouri from the Upper Mississippi region subsequent to the Caddoan arrival. The Caddoan peoples, the Caddos, Wichitas, Pawnees, and Arikaras, were settled on the central and southern Plains along the tributaries of the Lower Mississippi and the Lower Missouri.

Few objects might appear more alien to traditional Native American cultures or more remote from Indian history than the steam locomotive. In nineteenth-century America, railroads symbolized the power of modern technology and the growth of non-Indian society. Railroads also traced the context in which Native life would be lived in the reservation period.

In 1880, if one were to superimpose a map of railroad lines over a map of North American Indian populations, the separation of most Native people from the bulk of the continent’s population would be clear. Native communities in present-day Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona lived beyond the reach of steel rails, while the Indians on both sides of the international border running west from Lake Superior to Puget Sound knew of the locomotive as only a distant rumor. In 1869, great celebration had accompanied the completion of a narrow line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, but little had been done in the depressionridden years immediately following to expand the total system. Even in the aftermath of the American Civil War (1861–65) and Canadian Confederation (1867), most Indian people, whether they were Creeks in Oklahoma, Assiniboines in Montana and Saskatchewan, or Ojibwas around the Great Lakes, had little contact with American and Canadian citizens.

In 1960, if one were to repeat the exercise of superimposing transportation lines on a map of Indian population, it would be clear how drastically Native life had been altered in the intervening eight decades. While many Indian people still lived in relative isolation in 1960, the non-Native majority in the populated regions of both the United States and Canada could reach most Indian communities and resources in a matter of hours. Rail lines, all-weather highways, and air transportation routes multiplied the available avenues of access. In the mid–twentieth century, most Na tive people outside the Far North could not avoid regular contact with non-Indians.

As telegraph and telephone communication supplemented face-to-face contact, the number and intensity of the cross-cultural meetings between Indians and outsiders increased. For government officials, missionaries, and business organizations, ready access to Indian people meant they could devise uniform approaches – or policies – to Native communities. Their ideas, their educational programs, and their economic interests crowded in on Native people and became an inescapable part of the Native environment.

In his philosophical writings Wittgenstein was mainly concerned with questions concerning language and its various uses. But he was also always aware of the fact that any account concerning the limits of meaningful applications of language has an impact on the limits and/or the foundations of what can be known (compare, for instance, TLP, 5.5561, 5.6, 6.51, 6.53 with OC, 80, 114, 369-70, 514, 528). As he never questioned the possibility of knowledge, his critical attitude toward traditional philosophical theories and problems included a skeptical attitude toward skepticism as well. This became obvious in particular in his notes of 1949-51 which have been compiled and published under the title On Certainty.

Due to an unhappily written preface by the editors of that text, many readers have come to believe that Wittgenstein admired G. E. Moore's Defense of Common Sense and Proof of an External World and that he was commenting in his notes on these two papers with the intention of showing Moore to have been right in his philosophical attitude, but wrong in the way he argued for it. This is, however, not the case. Norman Malcolm reports1 that while Wittgenstein liked Moore as a decent man and felt stimulated by “Moore's Paradox” (cf. PI, pp. 190-92), he was not at all impressed by Moore's attempts to refute or reject idealism and/or skepticism.

Ludwig Wittgenstein occupies a unique place in twentieth century philosophy and he is for that reason difficult to subsume under the usual philosophical categories.

What makes it difficult is first of all the unconventional cast of his mind, the radical nature of his philosophical proposals, and the experimental form he gave to their expression. The difficulty is magnified because he came to philosophy under complex conditions which make it plausible for some interpreters to connect him with Frege, Russell, and Moore, with the Vienna Circle, Oxford Language Philosophy, and the analytic tradition in philosophy as a whole, while others bring him together with Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard, with Derrida, Zen Buddhism, or avant-garde art. Add to this a culturally resonant background, an atypical life (at least for a modern philosopher), and a forceful yet troubled personality and the difficulty is complete. To some he may appear primarily as a technical philosopher, but to others he will be first and foremost an intriguing biographical subject, a cultural icon, or an exemplary figure in the intellectual life of the century.1 Our fascination with Wittgenstein is, so it seems, a function of our bewilderment over who he really is and what his work stands for.

Although Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of this century, there is very little agreement about the nature of his contribution. In fact, one of the most striking characteristics of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein is the overwhelming lack of agreement about what he believed and why. Over forty years after his death, despite the publication of over a dozen books from his Nachlass (the usual term for his unpublished papers), hundreds of books on his work, and thousands of scholarly articles, his philosophy remains unavailable to many of his readers. In part, that is because Wittgenstein's writing asks for a change in sensibility that many of his readers are unwilling or unable to accept. The continuing unavailability of Wittgenstein's philosophy is also due, in large part, to the expectations of those interpreters who disregard his way of writing, looking for an underlying theory they can attribute to him.

The experiences of the Native peoples of the Northwest were both similar to and different from those of other indigenous peoples of North America. The general patterns of adaptation and dispossession were not unlike the rest of the continent; yet there were variations on these themes that were distinctive and even unique. There was also great internal diversity within the Northwest. Geographically, the common denominators of this long, narrow region were the Pacific Ocean in the west and the mountains in the east. Otherwise the natural setting ranged from the arid, broken topography of central Oregon, through the wet, relatively rich environment of the Northwest Coast, to the cold, hard climate of the Alaskan coast and islands. Given this geographical range, it is not surprising that there was also a wide variety of indigenous cultures. Indeed there was greater cultural diversity in this region than in any other in North America. Adding to this complexity of original cultures, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Northwest was touched by most of the major imperial systems of the world. Russia, Spain, Britain, and the United States of America each had a profound influence on the region’s Native people.

THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

By the eighteenth century, when Europeans came to the Northwest, the Native people were no longer newcomers. Over 12,000 years of accommodating to the seasonal round, they had learned to exploit the region’s abundance and to survive its scarcity. From the Aleutian Islands in the north to Cape Mendocino in the south, and from the damp west coast to the semiarid plateaus of the interior, their traditions were strong and their cultures were rich and diverse. While they were not always constant, the boundaries between groups were well defined. The rights to harvest valued resource gathering locations were also clearly understood. In summer the people scattered over their land to hunt and gather food, in winter they congregated in larger villages and celebrated the spiritual side of life through ritual and ceremonial. Social patterns based on kinship and lineage were deeply ingrained. The extended family was the basic unit of social organization. Particularly on the coast, the societies were hierarchical and individuals knew their place in the order. Birth, wealth, and ability were the attributes of leadership; yet leaders had a mutual relationship with their people and also led by consent.

The North America volume of the Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas traces the history of the indigenous peoples living north of the Rio Grande from their earliest appearance in the New World into the 1990s. In the tradition of Cambridge histories, it seeks primarily to synthesize existing knowledge rather than to present the results of original research or to pioneer innovative approaches to the study of Native American history. Yet realizing this seemingly modest goal has been a formidable undertaking, lending credence to critics of the project who suggested that it might be premature and impossible to bring to completion. This volume draws upon the results of research by many generations of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, physical anthropologists, linguists, and Native cultural specialists. Nevertheless, partly as a result of biases that only now are beginning to be understood, much about Native history remains poorly known among professional scholars. The co-editors were selected to represent some of the diversity within the multidisciplinary field of Native American history. One editor is an American historian, the other a Canadian anthropologist. Their political views are also quite different. By helping to ensure that a wide range of viewpoints receive serious attention, these divergences have been sources of strength rather than weakness in editing this work.

The present volume does not attempt to compete with the multivolume Handbook of North American Indians, or with many excellent monographs, in presenting a series of “tribal histories.” Ethnic identities have shifted significantly over time in North America, as they have done in other parts of the world. Thus they do not provide a particularly useful framework for considering other important aspects of Native North American history, such as changing ecological adaptations, responses to European diseases and settlement, or the gradual development of a pan-Indian identity. In order to provide more flexible coverage, an approach has been adopted in which thematic concerns define some chapters, while regional coverage defines others.

Today no historical study can (or should) avoid self-reflection. Chapters I and 2 examine changing Native views of their history and the views of non-Native historians. These chapters put existing literature relating to Native American history into perspective and establish the nature, limitations, and biases of our current state of knowledge.

FIRST CONTACTS: NORSE AND THULE PEOPLES IN THE EASTERN ARCTIC

The Norse colonists

When Erik the Red (Eirikr Thorvaldsson) and his followers landed in southwest Greenland near the end of the tenth century, they discovered traces of previous inhabitants, including the remains of dwellings, parts of skin boats, and stone implements. Archaeologists agree that these were remains of people of the Dorset culture (see Chapter 3). Late Dorset people probably inhabited the west Greenland coast to the north of the Holsteinsborg region in the period A.D. 700 to 900 and thus preceded the Norse occupation by about 100 years. While Dorset people lived in other parts of Greenland during Norse times, there is little likelihood of meetings between the two groups.

The Norse settlers distributed themselves in two colonies, which were designated the Eastern Settlement and the Western Settlement, although both were located on the southwest coast of Greenland. They lived for up to five centuries a life which combined animal husbandry with hunting sea mammals and some terrestrial animals, fishing being a minor occupation. Chief domesticates were sheep and goats, though cattle, pigs, and horses were also kept. In the farms, scattered deep in the fjords, the Norse used meadows for grazing their animals and harvesting hay to feed them over the winter. It appears that they experimented with growing domesticated grain but were unsuccessful. Exports to Europe included hides, fats and oils, falcons, and walrus ivory. The Norse in Greenland clothed themselves in garments made from the wool of their sheep and partly in animal skins. Their houses were substantial structures with frames of driftwood and walls and roofs covered with sod. Population estimates for these colonies are 4,000 to 5,000 for the Eastern Settlement, and 1,000 to 1,600 for the Western Settlement at peak periods.

First contacts between Norse and the ancestors of modern Inuit of the Thule culture are usually assigned to about the beginning of the thirteenth century. Norse sagas and Inuit legends agree that these contacts took place around the Disko Bay region, some distance north of the Western Settlement, in the course of hunting trips. The historian Finn Gad notes that “The small History of Norway … tells mainly of bloody combats, but the archaeological finds reveal that peaceful contacts must also have existed.

“Think of a picture of a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it. - Someone asks 'whose house is that?' - The answer, by the way, might be 'It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it' But then he cannot for example enter his house” (PI, 398). Wittgenstein tells this mild joke in the midst of a discussion on the self, the I, or better: on the ways we use the word “I”.The gist of his discussion appears to be that there is no self to which the “I”might refer. But how does the jocular story fit in? Does it suggest that it is not I who imagines the landscape, house, and farmer? Does the farmer stand for the self even though there is no such thing? What does it mean that he can own but not enter the imagined house? What does the story tell us about the I and/or the “I”?There is a roundabout answer to all this.

Wittgenstein reflected on questions concerning the mind, mental states, processes, and acts throughout his life and in that context he came regularly back to the I, self, soul, or subject as he called it more or less indiscriminately. The first time he talks about the mind - in the middle of a difficult passage on the things that make up the world-he announces unexpectedly: “There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul. . .” (NB, p. 49) and a few weeks before his death, thirty-six years later, he writes in another notebook: “But it is still false to say: . . . I is a different person from L.W” (LWII, p. 88).

The notes to follow formed the basis of the first weeks of a lecture course on Philosophical Investigations initially given at Berkeley in 1960, then irregularly at Harvard and progressively amplified some half dozen times through the 1960s and 1970s. The last of such lectures, offered in 1984, was radically altered since by then my Claim of Reason had appeared. I would not have thought to present these notes without entering into a sort of uneven, late conversation with them, preceding, interrupting, and succeeding them with certain afterthoughts a decade after they were used in a classroom. Why this presentation was made in 1991, and to what purpose, will emerge. The lecture notes appear in italic type, the afterthoughts in upright. Of course - it is more or less the point of the enterprise - I begin with afterthoughts.

Until the 1960s, anthropologists and ethnohistorians paid little attention to North America in the sixteenth century. Although aware of European exploration at that time, they generally assumed that Native cultures had remained static until Europeans established direct and lasting contact with them, often in the seventeenth century or later. Most anthropologists believed that descriptions of Native cultures dating from the seventeenth century recorded ways of life that had persisted essentially unchanged from much earlier times. As a result, little was done to discover and explain the significance of what had happened to Native people in the century following the Columbian discovery of the Western hemisphere. Even in the southeastern United States, where it has long been recognized that European entradas and diseases might have had a major impact on indigenous cultures at that time, there was little systematic investigation of the nature and extent of these changes. Today it is generally acknowledged that the sixteenth century was a time of major changes over large areas of North America. Yet it is far from agreed how geographically extensive or far-reaching were the transformations brought about by European contact.

The sixteenth century is a difficult period to study from the point of view of Native history. Much of the written documentation takes the form of maps or lists of place names, accompanied by a few notes containing material of historical and ethnographic interest. Only a small corpus of written documents furnishes detailed eyewitness accounts of contacts between Native North Americans and Europeans at that time.