The Third Leg of the Three-Legged Stool

The idea that our language is private inasmuch as its words refer to what only the speaker can have and to what only he can know is, as we have already noted, akin to a three-legged stool. Two of these legs – namely the idea of private and inalienable ownership of subjective experience and the idea of private and privileged knowledge of subjective experience – have been shown to be rotten. Today we shall deal with the third leg – private ostensive definition.

We shall focus on the manner in which words signifying subjective experiences, such as ‘pain’, are supposedly given a meaning by the private linguist. Our critical task is to examine the cogency of the accounts of language and linguistic meaning given by philosophers who assume that words have a meaning by virtue of standing for ideas in the mind or ‘internal representations’. Our constructive task is to remind ourselves how words signifying subjective experiences are actually used and explained and to give a surveyable representation of this domain of the grammar of our language. We shall touch on this today and discuss it at greater length in the next lecture.

Saddam Hussein: American Client

By the 1950s, the masters of the American regime and its exploding military-industrial complex were growing in their interest in Southwest Asia alongside their increasing interventionist stance in the Southeastern corridor of that continent. In Iraq, the U.S. intelligence community bullied its way into a direct role in the internal politics of the state. There, in the summer of 1958, a military dictatorship arose under the leadership of ‘Abd al-Kareem Qassim, an army general who assumed power by overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, one of the few remaining regional governments established by British colonial policies during the interwar years. Assuming control in what came to be called the July Revolution, in one grisly stroke at the Royal Palace in Baghdad on July 14, 1958, Qassim loyalist Abdul Sattar Sabaa Al-Ibousi murdered King Faisal II, Crown Price ‘Abd al-Ilah (the king's first cousin once removed), several members of the Crown Prince's family, and the king's prime minister, Nuri as-Said. A number of valets and servants attendant to the royal family were killed too, serving notice to those in the country who still maintained loyalty to the Hashemite monarchy or to the old order of the Iraqi state. By the end of the month, Qassim assumed the position of prime minister, claiming publicly that he had been elected to the post. In order to maintain strict control over the military, the very institution that promoted him to political power, he also assumed the post of Iraqi defense minister. Promised constitutional and social welfare reforms were few and far between, though, as Qassim's government quickly descended into autocracy.

In fulfillment of his nationalist promises, Qassim quickly moved to seize control over Iraqi oil revenues, which had been consigned primarily to American and British interests vis-à-vis the foreign-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Qassim's Public Law 80 immediately limited the operational purview of the IPC while at the same time restoring a number of previously shared oil fields to exclusive state control.

Note to the Reader

As with previous case study chapters in this work, the news articles cited in this Appendix constitute a small sample set of roughly a thousand news articles examined in this work's Chapter 5 entitled “America in Vietnam.” Given the longevity of the American political and military commitment in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s, it is understood that the sample provided here, like the articles examined in Chapter 5 in this work themselves, represents only a small fraction of print news coverage of the American war in Vietnam. As such, the citations provided below are intended to point the reader in the direction of the authoritative news articles analyzed for discursive constructions in Chapter 5 of this work, but they are not meant to represent an overall sample of printed news during the Vietnam era. Given the media attention and length of time of this particular American war, it is this author's contention that such a sampling would be unwieldy in the extreme should its collection be undertaken. Instead, what is provided below is a list of news items whose texts were investigated for discursive frames, narrative tropes, or frames of representation, which then, within themselves, helped to construct particular forms of public knowledge and distribute information about the role of the U.S. military in Vietnam. As with previous case study chapters and as with those to come, the overall assessment in this chapter is a focused effort at discerning the presence of a given discourse formed about the U.S. military by the authoritative print and news media and distributed to attendant readership across America. Conclusions about the form and structure of that discourse, or at least an intellectually significant part of it as the Vietnam War was waged in Southeast Asia, are to be found in Chapter 5 of this book.

Print News Articles

Aarons, Leroy. (1969, April 17). “Protesters in Army Are Increasing: Servicemen's Rebellion: Sharp Divisions, but One Goal Eight Demands Primarily Antiwar Drummed Out of Army Expansion Is Aim.” Washington Post, F1.

Alsop, Joseph. (1968, May 12). “Press Can't Win in Vietnam War: Dismissed Westmoreland.” The Washington Post, B1.

Prolegomenon

‘I destroy! I destroy! I destroy!’, Wittgenstein wrote in one of his pocket notebooks in the early 1930s.

His destructive side is manifest in his criticisms of a wide range of philo-sophical conceptions of language and linguistic meaning. It is seen in his critique of metaphysics, and it is evident in his demolition of dualism, behaviourism and mentalism in the philosophy of mind. The upshot of these critical investigations is the destruction of what he called ‘houses of cards’. His aim was to expose philosophical illusions, to undermine grand theories modelled on theories in the natural sciences and to reveal the chimerical character of metaphysical systems. He did not show these theories and systems to be false but to be nonsense. By ‘nonsense’ I don't mean stupid rubbish. It is very important to be clear about this. I mean that such philosophical theories and systems subtly transgress the limits of language and bounds of sense. The task of philosophy, Wittgenstein held, is to transform latent nonsense into patent nonsense – to make it clear exactly where and why the bounds of sense are transgressed.

Nevertheless, there is also a constructive side to Wittgenstein's later phi-losophy. Side by side with the exposure of nonsense, Wittgenstein gives us, from one domain to another, an overview of the network of concepts that make up the ways in which we think. We have seen this first, in the domain of language, meaning and linguistic understanding. There he displayed for us the warp and the weft of the concepts of word and name, sentence and description, the meaning of words and the meaning of sentences, use and practice, explanation of meaning and definition, meaning of something by words and understanding the meanings of words and so on and so forth. We have also examined aspects of his philosophy of psychology in which he gives us an overview of psychological concepts, their first-person present-tense use and their third-person ascription, their asymmetries regarding knowledge, doubt and belief, their link with behavioural criteria, the concepts of mind and of body, the misleading pictures of outer and inner and so on through a broad and ramifying weave of interlocking concepts.

Late in the documentary film Courage directed by Aliaksei Paluyan, actor Pavel Haradnizky, who has been cleaning his apartment and contemplating emigration, thinks about the role of theatre in the midst of the political protests that erupted in Belarus following the 2020 Presidential elections. He considers the state of Belarus, saying it is no longer just a dictatorship, but a “complete tyranny.”

Filmed amidst the turmoil surrounding the elections, the documentary captures the shifting emotional states and trauma of alienation through the eyes of three actors of the Belarus Free Theatre. Despite Haradnizky's skepticism about the usefulness of performance and art in such a crisis, the film itself makes the case for the power and value of such work. Throughout the unnarrated film, built on a series of fragmented scenes of daily life and footage from scenes of mass protest, Paluyan also depicts segments from Belarus Free Theatre performances. Glimpses of these plays, themselves built on documentary events of the Belarusian past, reveal the ways in which these performances invited audiences to commune, remain engaged, remember, mourn, and heal. While the performances help mobilize communities, they also make lives grievable that the State otherwise designates as disposable. The film and the performances it features strip away romantic notions of revolution while portraying the ongoing struggle for human rights, dignity, and democracy in Belarus. This chapter analyzes both the film and the theatre performances it captures as part of documenting the resistance. Looking both at the documentary material depicted along with the aesthetic choices of presentation in their historical contexts, the chapter reinforces the particular value of theatre in a time of crisis.

In the previous four lectures, we introduced the idea of a private language, the words of which purport to refer to subjective experiences, which only the speaker can have and only the speaker can really know about. We showed that the two notions of privacy: private ownership of experience and private knowl-edge of experience are both incoherent. We also showed that the idea that names of experiences are given their meaning by association with the experiences which they name and that the form of association is a private analogue of a public ostensive definition is likewise incoherent. So much for demolishing houses of cards.

Our present task is to complement the destructive analysis with a constructive account of the logical character of words signifying subjective experiences. This is an important task. For clarifying their logical character is simultaneously to clarify the nature of subjective experiences. Our account must highlight the logical differences between first-person avowals and reports of experience, such as ‘I have a pain’, on the one hand, and third-person ascriptions of experience, such as ‘He has a pain’, on the other. Moreover, it has to weld these two aspects of use together into a single unified concept of experience and experiential attributes. For we must, at all costs, avoid finding ourselves in the position of arguing that the word ‘pain’ or ‘joy’ means something different when it is applied to oneself from what it means when it is applied to others.

Other Minds

We feel sensations and emotions, perceive things and have desires and appetites. Being mature language users, we can give expression to our subjective experiences in linguistic form. We can also express our purposes and intentions, our thoughts and beliefs, which, of course, are not experiences. Being self-conscious creatures sometimes given to introspection, we can reflect on our experiences, as well as on our intentions, dispositions and tendencies, and express our reflections in words.

On traditional philosophical views, each of us has special privileged knowledge about his or her subjective experiences. We have seen that Wittgenstein disputed the claim that when one is in pain one knows that one is, and the further claims that such knowledge is unique, certain and indubitable.

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.

As events were still unfolding in Belarus, playwright Andrei Kureichik turned to documentary theatre following the 2020 fraudulent election and vicious crackdown against protestors in an effort to share the story and compel an international community to press for action against Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime. As a member of the Coordination Council created by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to publicly challenge the election results and hold Lukashenka's government accountable for unlawful actions, Kureichik left Belarus when he was called before an investigative committee shortly after the election. On August 20, 2020, according to the BBC, the Prosecutor General of Belarus opened a criminal case against the Coordination Council, a representative body made up of a core group of 110 Belarusian leaders in a range of disciplines organized by Tsikhanouskaya and her team, for its efforts to “seize power” and harm national security. Kureichik was advised to leave immediately or face indefinite imprisonment.3 Despite what he felt were absurd allegations, he knew there was no rule of law in Belarus and left his home on August 21, 2020.

In exile, still in shock from the severity of Lukashenka's violence toward the opposition, Kureichik immediately went to work using the only tools at his disposal—his playwriting skills and network of theatre workers. In September 2020, he wrote the play Insulted. Belarus., which directly represents the clash between Lukashenka's regime and the pro-democracy resistance in 2020, using real names and verbatim texts along with fictional, metaphorical material that captures the feelings, as he experienced it, of the August events. The following year, Kureichik wrote the play Voices of the New Belarus, an entirely verbatim piece based on the real texts of real political prisoners in Belarus.

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.