Ludwig Wittgenstein

Born: 1889, Vienna, Austria

Died: 1951, Cambridge, England

Major Works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Major Ideas:

• Language and the world share a common logical form.

• Sentences are logical pictures of the world: The logical relations between the
elements of a sentence reflect the relations between the elements in the world.
• Sentences can show their form but they cannot say it; Sentences that attempt to say
what can only be shown are pseudo-sentences or nonsense.
• Language consists of "language games" that reflect forms of life.
• For many expressions, the meaning is the use: To grasp the "meaning" of such an
expression is to know how to use it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is distinguished among philosophers for developing two very different
philosophical theories, a feat that attests to his reputation as a man both brilliant and
eccentric. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1889. By 1912, an initial interest in engineering
had brought Wittgenstein to England to study the foundations of mathematics with Bertrand
Russell. He completed his dissertation while serving in an artillery unit of the Austrian army
during World War I. After the war, believing he had solved fundamental philosophical
problems, Wittgenstein returned to Austria to teach in village schools until 1926. Over the
next few years, conversations with members of the Vienna Circle led Wittgenstein to
reconsider his early work. In 1929, he was back at Cambridge and he lectured there until
1946. He died of cancer in 1951.

Questions about the relationships between language, thought, and reality preoccupied
Wittgenstein throughout his career. His project was critical. Like Kant, Wittgenstein sought
to define the limits of thought. Unlike Kant, he took language as his starting point. In his
early work, Wittgenstein argued that sentences "picture" the world by reflecting its logical
structure, that is, the arrangement of simple objects in a state of affairs. According to the
theory of meaning developed in this period, most traditional philosophical problems lie

-1-
outside the limits of what can be sensibly said. Wittgenstein's later work rejects the
systematic aspirations of his early theory. A new understanding of language as first and
foremost a product of social convention replaces the early realism. This new understanding
of language in turn implies a new conception of meaning and philosophical method, both of
which are perhaps most prominently displayed in what has come to be known as the private
language argument.

Wittgenstein's major works are notoriously obscure and dense. His writing style is austere,
almost epigrammatic. Two works in particular represent Wittgenstein's two distinct
conceptions of philosophy. The Tractatus, Wittgenstein's dissertation, was the only book he
published during his lifetime. He left instructions that his second major work, Philosophical
Investigations, should be published after his death. The investigations contains the core of
Wittgenstein's refutation of his own early theory. In addition to these two authorized works,
collections drawn from Wittgenstein's lectures and notebooks have been published by
colleagues and friends.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicas

The central feature of the Tractatus is the distinction Wittgenstein draws between "showing"
and "saying." On the one hand, in a sequence of numbered sentences Wittgenstein develops
his picture theory of meaning. This picture theory defines the limits of what can be said But
it is a consequence of the theory that the sentences of the Tractatus itself cannot sensibly be
said Instead, the limits they describe can only be shown. Wittgenstein's distinction between
saying and showing turns the book from a treatise on the logical foundations of language to
a work on metaphysics and, Wittgenstein himself claimed, ethics.

The basic intuition behind the Tractatus is Wittgenstein's conviction that all languages share
a common logical form, a form they also share with the world. In fact, this shared form
makes it possible for sentences to "say" something. What a sentence says is just the logical
picture it presents of the world It is the understanding that sentences are pictures that leads
to the distinction between showing and saying. Sentences give pictures of the world but they
cannot give pictures of themselves. They show the logical form they share with the world,
but they cannot say it. Sentences can only show their logical form, because trying to make
them say it pushes language beyond the limits of sense.

When he wrote the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had a very particular understanding of what
"sense" could be As he saw it language is made up of names arranged in sentences. The
names have meaning because they stand for objects in the world These names can be
arranged in sentences in certain ways and the possible ways of arranging them define the
limits of sense. For Wittgenstein, then only a sentence has sense, and its sense is the
arrangement of names that pictures a possible arrangement of elements in the world.

The problem as Wittgenstein saw it, is that sentences lose their sense when they try to do
more than picture a possible state of affairs in the world. Wittgenstein never gave an
example of what he meant by a "name" or the kind of objects names stand for (sense data or
ordinary objects, for instance) but a rough sketch of his ideas might go as follows:

-2-
That the world is as it is a purely contingent matter. "The cat is on the mat" describes one
possibility. "The cat is not on the mat" describes another. To know which sentence is true,
one would compare the picture with the world. But now consider the sentence "Either the
cat is on the mat or the cat is not on the mat." This sentence is what logicians call a tautology
It is a special kind of sentence in that it must always be true; it cannot be false. The either-or
sentence does not give a picture of the world. Instead, it tries to give a picture of the
relationship between the sense, or form, of two sentences.

According to the Tractatus, sentences like tautologies are not really sentences at all. They are
pseudo-sentences. Pseudo-sentences transgress the bounds of sense because instead of just
showing their sense in a picture of a possible state of affairs, they try to say something
necessary about the forms and limits of sense. But if sentences say something and have sense
only by presenting pictures of the world, then pseudo-sentences, which do not present such
pictures, say nothing. They are nonsense.

Like tautologies and contradictions, all of the sentences in the Tractatus lack sense. By
describing the limits of what can be said, they go beyond them. Wittgenstein's attempt to
describe the limits of language from within marks his project as Kantian. Wittgenstein
recognized that there is no vantage point outside language from which to describe the limits
of language, just as Kant had tried to show that there is no vantage point outside experience
from which one can describe the limits of all possible experience. And just as Kant
emphasized that reason constantly and inevitably seeks to transgress its limits, so
Wittgenstein believed that we constantly try to say what cannot be said.

According to Wittgenstein's early view of sense and meaning, most philosophical theories,
and in particular ethical discussions, come out as nonsense. It was for this reason that he
thought he had solved philosophy's problems. However, calling them nonsense did not for
Wittgenstein mean that they are unimportant. On the contrary, Wittgenstein thought that
some nonsense, like the Tractatus, could be illuminating. This is the source of Wittgenstein's
so-called "mysticism."

By 1929, when he returned to Cambridge, Wittgenstein had begun to revise his conception
of meaning and language. He no longer thought that language primarily reflected the logical
structure of the world. Instead, he now saw language as a product of social convention.
There were several reasons for Wittgenstein's change of mind, one of the most important
being his new sense of what is necessary to learn a word, or grasp a concept.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of a name is the object for which it
stands. The intuition here is that the paradigm for learning the meaning of a word is
ostensive definition-the teacher points at the object while saying the word and the student
learns to associate the two together. But how does the student know what is being pointed
to? For instance, if the teacher says "red" while pointing at an apple, how does the student
know she means its color, and not its shape or taste?

-3-
Philosophical Investigations

The analogy of a chess game is often used to illustrate what Wittgenstein saw as the problem
with thinking we learn a language by way of ostensive definitions. Someone who just knows
that the king is the tallest piece on the board does not yet understand the meaning of the
king. He does not understand even if he knows in addition how the king moves. To
understand the meaning of the king is to understand its function in the game as a whole.
Similarly, Wittgenstein argued in the investigations, to grasp the meaning of a word is to
know how to use it in a given context, that is, a particular "language game," a linguistic
procedure. Meaning is use. Learning a language is like learning a game or, more accurately, a
multitude of related games.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein asserted that the sentences of a language reflect the logical
structure of the world in a kind of systematic unity. The investigations rejects this view.
Language is, instead, made up of interrelated language games that reflect "forms of life." It is
not as though each game has definite boundaries and a distinct identity. It is not even
possible to say precisely what a game is. Rather, language games are knit together by
resemblances like those that mark the members of a family.

The rules of the games are embedded in the grammar of the language. By "grammar,"
Wittgenstein meant more than just how words are combined correctly in a sentence. He also
meant to refer to the kinds of contexts in which certain words and sentences make sense. In
the Tractatus, philosophical problems arise when language transgresses the limits of sense.
In the Investigations, they arise when philosophers transgress the limits of grammar by
confusing the limits of a language game. For instance, one speaks of having an
understanding as though this were like having an apple, and one may then begin to wonder
where the understanding is located (thus confusing the game of mental processes with that
of material objects). In such situations, Wittgenstein claimed, meaning is lost, language is
idling.

The new purpose of philosophy is to combat such confusion. The Philosophical

Investigations is a kind of dialogue. The author speculates and raises questions designed to
show an opponent where he or she has gone astray This is nowhere more true than in the
passages of the private language argument, where Wittgenstein argues against the sophist,
who believes it is possible, and even unavoidable, to speak a language and live in a world of
ones own. The author of the Investigations corrects the sophist of the Tractatus.

Further Reading

Hacker, P. M. S. Insight and Illusion: Wittgenstein on Philosophy and the Metaphysics of

Experience. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. A thorough and
sophisticated study of the evolution of Wittgenstein's philosophy The revised edition
contains a response to Kripke's interpretation of the private language argument.

Janik, Allan, and Stephen Toulmin. Wittgenstein's Vienna. New York Simon and Schuster,
1973. This work details the influence of the Austrian intellectual climate on the development
of the Tractatus, correcting earlier, more narrow interpretations.

-4-
Kripke, Saul A. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1982. An original and provocative interpretation of the Investigations'
private language argument.

Pears, David Francis. Ludwig Wittgenstein. New York: Viking Press, 1970. A clear and
accessible introduction to Wittgenstein's philosophy.

Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius. London: Cape, 1990. The most
complete biography on Wittgenstein available to date.

Kenny, Anthony (editor). Wittgenstein Reader (Blackwell Readers). London: Blackwell Pub.,
1994. A wonderful place to start reading the works of Wittgenstein. It contains selections,
arranged in a topical way, from both the Tractatus and the Investigations.

__________________

This article is by Constance Creede and was taken from Great Thinkers of the Western
World, Annual 1999 p511. COPYRIGHT 1999 HarperCollins Publishers.

-5-