, ,

In philosophy, as in most other fields of

human activity, the merits of the living are
, ,
much more controversial than those of the
dead. If you took a worldwide poll today among
, ,
professors of philosophy on the question who
is the best living philosopher, I'm pretty
, ,
sure no candidate would get an overall majority.
So any list of the so-called great philosophers
, ,
could only end with the latest of the generally
acknowledged dead.
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And today, for us, that is Wittgenstein. Ludwig
Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in . His
, ,
father, from whom he was to inherit a fortune,
was the biggest steel magnate in Austria.
, ,
Wittgenstein was fascinated by machinery from
boyhood, and his education was strongly weighted
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in the direction of mathematics, physics,
and engineering.
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After studying mechanical engineering in Berlin,
he spent three years at Manchester University
, ,
as a postgraduate student in aeronautics.
During this period, he became absorbed in
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fundamental questions about the nature of
mathematics. Bertrand Russell's book, The

, ,
Principles of Mathematics, inspired him to
give up engineering and go to Cambridge to
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study the philosophy of mathematics under
Russell himself.
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He soon learned all that Russell had to teach,
and went on to do the original research that
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was to produce his first book, the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, published in , and
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usually referred to just as the Tractatus.
Wittgenstein genuinely believed that in this
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book he had solved the fundamental problems
of philosophy. So he turned away from philosophy
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and did other things.
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Meanwhile, the Tractatus acquired enormous
influence, stimulating further developments
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in logic at Cambridge, and on the continent
becoming the most admired text among the famous
, ,
group of logical positivists known as the
Vienna Circle. But Wittgenstein himself came
, ,
to feel that it was fundamentally in error,
so he went back to doing philosophy after
, ,
all. In , he returned to Cambridge, where
in he became professor of philosophy.

, ,
During this second period at Cambridge, he
developed a completely new approach, quite
, ,
different from his earlier one. During the
rest of his life, its influence spread only
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through personal contact, since apart from
one very brief article, he published nothing
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more before his death in . However, in
his book Philosophical Investigations
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came out posthumously, and proved to be the
most influential work of philosophy that's
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appeared since the Second World War, at least
in the English-speaking world.
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So here we have a most remarkable phenomenon-a philosopher of genius producing two incompatible
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philosophies at different stages of his life,
each of which influenced a whole generation.
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These two philosophies, although incompatible,
do have some basic features in common.
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Both are focused on the role of language in
human thinking and human life, and both are
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centrally concerned to demarcate between varied
and invaried uses of language-- or as someone
, ,
once put it, to draw the lines at which sense
ends and nonsense begins. For me, the earlier

, ,
of Wittgenstein's two main books, the Tractatus,
remains hauntingly readable.
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But it has to be said that it's the later
one, the Philosophical Investigations, that
, ,
has made him a cultural figure of international
significance during the period since his death.
, ,
Here to discuss Wittgenstein's work with me
is John Searle, professor of philosophy at
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the University of California in Berkeley.
, ,
Professor Searle, since Wittgenstein himself
repudiated his early philosophy, and since
, ,
in any case it's now the later philosophy
that's far and away the more influential,
, ,
I don't think we ought to spend too much of
our discussion on the early work. What is
, ,
it about that that we really need to know?
, ,
I think the key to understanding the Tractatus
is the picture theory of meaning. Wittgenstein
, ,
felt that if language was to represent reality,
if sentences were to represent states of affairs,
, ,
then there had to be something in common between
the sentence and the state of affairs. And
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he saw the way to describe that on the analogy

with the way that pictures represent states

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of affairs. He thought there had to be some
structural similarity that just as the sentence
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was made of a sequence of words that stood
for things-- names, so the arrangement of
, ,
words in the sentence pictured or mirrored
the arrangements of objects in the fact.
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Now this gave him a remarkable sort of lever
of a metaphysical kind, where he could then
, ,
read off, he thought, the structure of reality
from the structure of language, because he
, ,
thought that the structure of reality had
to determine the structure of language. language
, ,
mirrored reality in some way, it would be
impossible for sentences to mean.
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So the crucial point here is that we are able
to talk about reality not just because we
, ,
use words that stand for things, but because
those words have a relationship to each other
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within the sentence that corresponds to the
relationship that things have to each other
, ,
in the world.
, ,
Right.

, ,
So that's what he called the logical structure.
And the world and sentences have that structure
, ,
in common.
, ,
Right. But it's important to emphasize now
that we're not talking about ordinary language,
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of the sort that you and I are discussing,
which he thought concealed the logical structure.
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He thought if we took ordinary sentences and
did an analysis of how they mean, we would
, ,
get down to the ground floor sentences, what
he called the elementary sentences.
, ,
And there, there would be this strict picturing
relation between the structure of the sentence
, ,
and the structure of the fact. Now he inherits
from Frege the idea that the fundamental unit
, ,
of meaning isn't the word, but the word only
functions, the name only means in the context
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of the sentence. And as you said, it's the
concatenation of the words in the sentence
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that is itself a fact that enables the sentence
to picture the structure of facts in the world.
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I think people will see quite easily how that
can be the case when the sentence is picturing

, ,
a true fact. If I say, there's a cat on the
mat, and there is a cat on the mat, I think
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that relationship is easily understandable.
But suppose I say there is no cat on the mat.
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How can that sort of sentence said to be picturing
something?
, ,
Well, Wittgenstein thought that words like
"not" and "and" and "or" and "if"-- the so-called
, ,
logical constants-- that they actually didn't
picture. They were not part of the picturing
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relationship. As he said, my fundamental idea
is that these logical constants don't themselves
, ,
represent. There are ways we have of stringing
pictures together. And it's not so unrealistic,
, ,
if you think about it.
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For example, across the street from my house
in Berkeley there's a little park, and there's
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a picture of a dog with a line through it.
Now I take it that's not supposed to pick
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dogs that have stripes painted on them. The
line is the negation sign, and that's a Wittgensteinian
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sort of picture. That is, the "not" symbol
there is a way of operating on the picture
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but it isn't itself part of the picture.

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And he thought that what we say about the
world can be analyzed down into basic sentence
, ,
structures, basic sentences, which picture
the world and are linked together or negated
, ,
by particular operators-, ,
--By the so-called logical constants.
, ,
By the logical constants, which have this
function. Now in my introduction to this discussion,
, ,
I said that throughout his career, Wittgenstein
was concerned to demarcate talk that made
, ,
sense from talk that didn't make sense. How
was that demarcation done in the early philosophy?
, ,
Well, in the early philosophy, in the Tractatus,
Wittgenstein thought that the only language
, ,
which, strictly speaking, made sense was this
fact-stating language. Now, unlike the positivists,
, ,
he didn't relish that. He didn't think that
was wonderful. He thought that the really
, ,
important things were unsayable, were unstatable.
He thought that ethics, religion, aesthetics,
, ,
were in the realm of the unsayable.

, ,
And he once said about the Tractatus that
the really important part of the Tractatus
, ,
is the part that's left out, the part that's
not there at all. So he made a strict demarcation
, ,
of meaningful language as fact-stating language.
And the other parts of language, those parts
, ,
of language that are not used to state facts
he thought were, strictly speaking, nonsense.
, ,
And we couldn't really say anything.
, ,
Although ethics, religion, the arts, and so
on are of fundamental significance in life,
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we can't actually ever do them justice in
language.
, ,
As far as the Tractatus is concerned, they
are even-- it isn't that we can't do them
, ,
justice. Our attempt to do them justice is
meaningless. We can't say anything meaningful
, ,
about them.
, ,
Now, you've made the point very clearly that
central to the early Wittgenstein is this
, ,
picture theory of meaning. How did the later
Wittgenstein depart from that?
, ,
Well, again, though Wittgenstein's ideas are

very complex, there's a rather simple answer

, ,
to that question. He moved away from the picture
metaphor of the nature of meaning to the tool
, ,
or use metaphor as the correct conception
of meaning. He says, think of words as tools,
, ,
and the way to understand language, the way
to get a correct conception of how language
, ,
functions is to look at how words are used.
, ,
He says for most cases, not all but for nearly
all cases, the meaning of a word is just its
, ,
use in the language. Now this, just as the
Tractatus gave him a certain metaphysical
, ,
conception of the world derived from language,
so by changing from the picture metaphor to
, ,
the tool metaphor, he turns that metaphysics
upside down.
, ,
Now instead of saying that the structure of
reality determines the structure of the language,
, ,
now what he says is that the structure of
the language determines what we think of as
, ,
reality. We can't think of the world, we can't
discuss the world, we can't have a conception
, ,
of the world independent of the conceptual
apparatus that we use for that purpose.

, ,
You've raised a lot of very fundamental concepts
here, and I think we ought to take them one
, ,
at a time for the sake of clarity. Let's begin
where you began, with the distinction between
, ,
a picture theory of meaning and a tool theory
of meaning. The later Wittgenstein is no longer
, ,
saying that words or sentences picture what
they're about.
, ,
He's saying that a word or a sentence is like
a tool, and what it means is what you can
, ,
do with it, so that in fact the meaning of
a term is the sum total of its possible uses.
, ,
Now it's in the nature of a picture that it
does in fact picture any one thing-- pictures
, ,
an object or a state of affairs, where it's
in the nature of a tool, but it has many uses,
, ,
perhaps an indefinite number of uses. Now
that applies to his view of language, doesn't
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it?
, ,
Yes. Yes. Let me say a little bit more about
that. Wittgenstein is anxious to insist in
, ,
the Investigations that language is indefinitely
extendable, and that there isn't any single

, ,
thing that binds all uses of language together,
that there isn't any single essence that runs
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through all of language, and indeed for particular
words.
, ,
They're needn't be any particular essence
that marks the definition of that word. That
, ,
he says, words have a family resemblance of
their uses, so that-- he gives the example
, ,
of "game." He says, if you ask yourself what
is it that all games have in common-- and
, ,
he keeps insisting, don't think what they
all have in common, but look and see if you
, ,
can find anything. And then he says, if you
consider board games, Olympic games, gambling
, ,
games, games played with balls on fields and
so on, what you find is that there isn't any
, ,
single essence. There isn't any single thing
that all games have in common.
, ,
Not even the fact that they're pastimes, or
they're diversions, because some people [INAUDIBLE].
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Pretty grim, right.
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Make your living in a career.
, ,

If you've been to Las Vegas, it isn't that

those people are just amusing themselves.
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It's a pretty grim business to watch them
at the gaming, as they're called, tables.
, ,
But the idea he has is that the strength of
the words derives not from some underlying
, ,
essence, but from the fact that they-- there's
a series of crisscrossing relationships, similarities.
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And he compares that to the way that the various
members of a family resemble each other. And
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he calls this a family resemblance relation.
Now it might seem like Wittgenstein was just
, ,
saying sort of obvious points here, but remember
he is militating against a very powerful philosophical
, ,
tradition. He's militating first against the
idea of his own, that words get their meanings
, ,
by standing for objects.
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And then secondly, an even older tradition
that says words get their meanings by being
, ,
associated with ideas in the head. And he's
militating against a tradition that says-, ,
and this goes back to Plato-- that in order
for a word to have a meaning, there must be
, ,
some essence. There must be some essential

trait that the word marks. So the interest

, ,
of his remarks about language derives a lot
from their revolutionary or radical attack
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on a pre-existing tradition.
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He uses the term "family resemblance" so often
that I think it's worth saying just a word
, ,
or two about that. When we talk of a family,
different members of the family having a marked
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family resemblance to each other, it need
not be the case that there's one single feature
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that they all have in common. It need not
be the case that they all have the same nose
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or have the same chin.
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But there's no single feature that they all
have in common, just an overlapping and crisscrossing
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set of features from which they will draw,
as it were. Now Wittgenstein is saying that
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this is true of language and meaning. That
if we look at a term or a word, it's a great
, ,
mistake to look for the one thing that it
means, because there is no one thing that
, ,
it means.

, ,
The meaning of a word is like family resemblance
in that case. Namely, a word has several different
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meanings, like the several different members
of a family. There may be a crisscrossing
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and overlapping set of relationships between
those different meanings, but there's no one
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thing that the meanings all have in common,
which is, as it were, the essence of that
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word. That's what he's saying.
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He doesn't say that this is true for every
word in the language. No doubt there are words
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that have strict definitions. But he thought
that this was crucial for philosophers to
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see, because a lot of the words that trouble
us, especially in philosophy, in ethics and
, ,
aesthetics, words like "good" and "beautiful,"
which he was very suspicious of these words.
, ,
But he thought that part of our failure was
we were looking for some essence of beauty,
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or essence of goodness, whereas he insists,
just look at the various resembling, crisscrossing
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similarities in the use of these words.
, ,
So he's saying, for example, that we have

all sorts of different kinds of talk. There's

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scientific talk, religious talk, music talk,
everyday talk, philosophical talk, such as
, ,
you and I are having. And in each of these
areas of discourse, language is characteristically
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used in different ways. And the same words
will be used in different ways. So don't ask
, ,
yourself, what is the specific meaning of
this term. Ask yourself, how is this term
, ,
being used in that particular area of discourse.
, ,
That was one of his slogans. Don't ask for
the meaning. Ask for the use. And at this
, ,
point, he introduces another metaphor. Indeed,
it's one of his few technical terms. He introduces
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the notion of a language game.
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And the idea he has is that we should see
speaking a language on analogy with playing
, ,
a game, in that characteristically, it's rule-governed,
we aren't ourselves entitled to lay down the
, ,
rules, not everything is determined by the
rules, so there is a great deal of slack,
, ,
room for interpretation. But nonetheless,
we're engaged in rule-governed forms of activity.

, ,
Now this again is a disconcerting idea for
a lot of philosophers, because he wants to
, ,
insist that there isn't any foundation for
the language games, any more than there's
, ,
a foundation for football or baseball. These
are just human activities. And so he wants
, ,
to get out of the idea that these language
games, where the word has its home, where
, ,
words get their meaning from their role in
the language games, he wants to get out of
, ,
the idea that there must be some transcendental
justification or foundation of the language
, ,
game. Well, the language game has to look
after itself.
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We play a language game of ethical discourse,
of aesthetic discourse, of fact-stating discourse.
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A language game with the word "cause." A language
game of identifying spatial and temporal relations.
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So he's anxious to insist that there are these
sequences and series of human activities,
, ,
where the use of words is tied up with the
rest of our lives in a regular, ordered, but
, ,
not in any way predetermined fashion. And
that's really the task of the philosopher,

, ,
is to describe, not to justify or give a foundation
for, but to give just a description of how
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the language game is played.
, ,
I must say I think it's something of a disaster
that he fastened on this term "language game,"
, ,
because it sounds as if what he's talking
about is something frivolous. And in fact
, ,
it even feeds a certain prejudice against
philosophers that exists outside philosophy
, ,
that they're all just playing with words,
or that they're somehow superficially concerned
, ,
with language. This isn't so at all. He used
the word "game" for serious, intellectual
, ,
reasons.
, ,
Right. And let me just hammer home the reasons
for the analogy. First of all, it's an activity.
, ,
It isn't something sublime that just goes
on in our heads. And it isn't an abstract
, ,
set of relationships. It's an ongoing human
activity. And secondly, it's conventional.
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It's regular. There are rules involved.
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And those are the features that he wanted

to get, that we should look at language in

, ,
action. And we should see it as part of regular,
rule-governed behavior. And that sounds, I
, ,
think, pretty uncontroversial, at least to
us. But there is a more radical aspect of
, ,
this that I want to bring out.
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And that is, Wittgenstein thought that there
isn't any point of view outside of language
, ,
where we can, so to speak, stand back and
appraise the language game from a non-linguistic
, ,
point of view. He thought there wasn't any
Archimedean point from which we could get
, ,
away from operating inside a language game,
stand back, and appraise the success or failure
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of language in representing reality.
, ,
He thought that was impossible. We're always
operating within the language game. We're
, ,
always operating within some language game
or other. There's no conception that we have
, ,
of appraisal, or of getting at the world apart
from operating within a language game.
, ,
But now what has happened [INAUDIBLE]. For
me to be able to see this as a hand, or that

, ,
as a table, I must be in possession of the
concepts hand, and a table. As therefore what
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I see reality as being is constituted by a
whole conceptual structure that I have, which
, ,
can be articulated in language.
, ,
That is a great deal of it. But I think in
a way, it goes even deeper than that for Wittgenstein.
, ,
Wittgenstein is part of the movement in the
past years. It is a characteristic feature
, ,
of the th century that we no longer can
take language for granted.
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Language has become immensely problematic
to us, and it has moved into the center of
, ,
philosophy. And Wittgenstein is one of the
great leaders in that movement. So he would
, ,
certainly agree with what you've just said,
mainly that reality divides up the way we
, ,
divide it, that because-- we can only think
of this as a hand, or that is a table because
, ,
we've got the relevant concepts, the relevant
words.
, ,
But the point is deeper than that. The point
he wants to make is there isn't any such thing

, ,
as thinking. There isn't even any such thing
as experience as human beings have-- adult,
, ,
full-grown human being experiences-- that
cannot exist apart from language. Language
, ,
permeates that at every point.
, ,
A moment ago, you were saying that every language
game has to be understood from the inside.
, ,
One consequence of this is as follows, isn't
it. Whereas the old logical positivists who
, ,
had been influenced by Wittgenstein's early
philosophy were extremely dismissive of all
, ,
religious talk, for example.
, ,
And they thought that if I said something
like God exists, that was just meaningless
, ,
noise. Exhaust. The later Wittgenstein would
have not been intolerant in the same way.
, ,
He would not have dismissed religious talk
as being empty of meaning.
, ,
What he would have said is, well, let's first
of all examine how words are used in a religious
, ,
context, how they function. Let's look at
their use. Let's, as it were, get inside the
, ,
religious language game, as he would have

put it, and see how these terms are being

, ,
used. And then we can judge whether they're
being used legitimately, not legitimately,
, ,
or whatever it might be.
, ,
Well, you have to be very careful about that
last bit, you see. Because what Wittgenstein
, ,
would say is, it's not our task as philosophy
to appraise the success or failure of the
, ,
religious language game. All we can do is
describe how it's played.
, ,
And the important thing is to see that it
isn't played like the scientific language
, ,
game. It's ridiculous, he thinks, that we
should take religious utterances as if they
, ,
were sort of second-rate scientific utterances
for which there was inadequate evidence. He
, ,
was always anxious to insist what we ought
to look at the role that religion and religious
, ,
utterances play in people's lives.
, ,
That's the meaning of these utterances, to
see what sort of role they actually play in
, ,
people's lives. And he disliked the idea that
we should over-intellectualize this and make

, ,
it into some kind of a theoretical enterprise,
where what we were concerned to was to criticize
, ,
this and see if the evidence for the existence
of God was up to snuff by scientific standards.
, ,
He didn't like that.
, ,
W.G. Grace once jumped on a chair in a meeting
and said something Wittgenstein really approved
, ,
of. He thought this was one of-- Grace said
something like this. He said, God doesn't
, ,
want a head. Any old cabbage will do for a
head. What God wants is a heart.
, ,
Now Wittgenstein liked that, because he thought
that was the language game in action. That
, ,
was not trying to get outside it and do some
sort of pseudo-scientific appraisal.
, ,
But it is important, I think, for us to make
the point that he didn't take a sort of "anything
, ,
goes" attitude. He did think that philosophical
puzzlement is characteristically caused by
, ,
our using the terms from one language game
as if they belonged to another. By, for example,
, ,
trying to judge, as I think you just said,
trying to judge, say, moral talk, or religious

, ,
talk as if it were scientific talk. And having
got ourselves into these puzzles and problems,
, ,
the way to get ourselves out of them was to
pay very strict attention to the way the words
, ,
that we were using normally function in actual
human discourse.
, ,
I think that's right. And he does have various
ways that he summarizes this. He says philosophical
, ,
problems characteristically arise when we
take the word out of the language game, where
, ,
it's at home, and then try to think of it
as something sublime. We want to inquire into
, ,
the nature of the good, the true, or the beautiful,
instead of just looking at how these words
, ,
are actually used in the language game, where
they get their meaning. But there's something
, ,
you said that I want to take-, ,
--that Wittgenstein makes between games and
the use of language. There was one important
, ,
aspect of it that we didn't take up, because
we can't talk about everything at once. A
, ,
game is a rule-governed activity, and language
is a rule-governed activity, and has to be
, ,

because if I didn't follow certain linguistic

rules, what I said would be unintelligible,
, ,
and wouldn't communicate, or perform any of
the functions I want it perform.
, ,
So I have to follow certain rules. Now Wittgenstein
argued that because that was so, there could
, ,
be no such thing, even in theory, as a private
language. And his argument to this effect
, ,
has become one of the most controversial aspects
of his philosophy. Can you say a word about
, ,
that?
, ,
It sure has. Well, I would be glad to. In
a way I'm reluctant to get into this hassle,
, ,
because there's so much junk written about
the private language argument. But just let
, ,
me say a little bit about it. First of all,
you got to say something about rules. We've
, ,
been talking as if the notion of a rule for
Wittgenstein was unproblematic.
, ,
But it wasn't. His notion of a rule is itself
one of his important contributions to philosophy.
, ,
What he thought was, first of all, that rules
don't block off all eventualities, that language
, ,
isn't everywhere bounded by rules. Nothing

is everywhere bounded by rules.

, ,
There are always lots of gaps left open by
any system of rules. He gives the example
, ,
of throwing a tennis ball when you serve.
There's no rule how high you have to throw
, ,
it. But I suppose if somebody could throw
the thing five miles high and we had to wait
, ,
all day, they'd make a rule. The rules are
never final.
, ,
Another thing he said about rules is that
rules are always subject to different interpretations.
, ,
If you've ever been through the income tax
laws, you know this. I mean, the American
, ,
history of it is a series of different interpretations.
So it looks to Wittgenstein as if there's
, ,
a kind of skepticism that arises here, because
if anything can be made to conform to the
, ,
rule by some fancy interpretation, then anything
can be made to conflict with it.
, ,
And you wouldn't get either accord nor conflict.
The rule would then seem to drop out as irrelevant.
, ,
Now his solution to that is to say obeying
the rule is a social practice. It's something
, ,
we learn in society. Society just has ways

of making people and training people to conform

, ,
to rules.
, ,
Now he applies that to this whole private
language problem. The problem of the private
, ,
language is, could there be a language where
I just named my own private sensations in
, ,
a way that no one else could understand it?
The reason for all the fuss is, that a lot
, ,
of people in the history of philosophy have
thought that must be the basic use of language,
, ,
in the whole Cartesian tradition-, ,
That language must name inner experience.
, ,
That we get to the real world, to the external
world, by starting from our inner experiences,
, ,
by starting from inside and working outward.
Now Wittgenstein wants to say two things about
, ,
that. First of all, that isn't how the words
for our inner experiences actually function.
, ,
They don't name private objects.
, ,
Rather, they're used in conjunction with public
criteria, behaviors, situations. So we're
, ,

not, in fact, speaking of private language

when we use sensation language. But secondly,
, ,
and more controversially, he says we couldn't,
in fact, speak a private language. We couldn't
, ,
give a private, ostensive definition, where
we just sort of point inwardly to some private
, ,
experience and name that experience.
, ,
Because, he said, unless we can appeal to
some larger social gathering, there won't
, ,
be any difference between my thinking I'm
using the word right, and I'm actually using
, ,
it right. So his discussion of the rules,
and the social character rules, is really
, ,
what underlies his rejection of the idea of
a private language.
, ,
And it's important for him to reject the idea
of a private language, as you say, because
, ,
he's reacting against a whole tradition of
philosophy that goes back to, I suppose, Descartes,
, ,
but certainly includes Locke, Hume, the empiricist
philosophers who say that we start by cognition
, ,
of essentially private states of mind, and
infer the world, or build up a conception
, ,
of the world from that.

, ,
Now the later Wittgenstein seems to me to
be saying this, that because the sum total
, ,
of a word's possible uses constitute its meaning,
in the end, what language means and what words
, ,
mean depend on forms of life, on the social
context within which they're used. And in
, ,
fact, he uses that phrase "forms of life"
a great deal, so that all the ultimate criteria
, ,
of meaning are not personal, are not private
at all. They are essentially social, are they
, ,
not?
, ,
That's right. And it's important to emphasize
that the notion of use is itself a social
, ,
notion. It's something that I do in conjunction
with other members of a society. And it's
, ,
only because I'm trained to respond in certain
ways that we avoid this skepticism that says,
, ,
well, anything I do can be made to seem to
be in accord with some rule or other, or I
, ,
could always interpret the rule in such a
way that would come out in accord with it.
, ,
And he does emphasize the idea that a language
is a form of life, that we can't sort of carve

, ,
off the language and look at it apart from
the human activities, where it actually has
, ,
its meaning. Now one [INAUDIBLE] to read them,
I think they're often struck and surprised
, ,
straight away by what they find. Because these
books are not written in the way that ordinary
, ,
books are. They're not written in continuous
prose.
, ,
They're written in separate paragraphs, and
each paragraph is given a number. And very
, ,
often, it's not clear what the relationship
between a paragraph and the other two on either
, ,
side of it. And usually, there isn't much
in the way of connected argument, either.
, ,
You get these brilliant, metaphors, brilliant
examples, brilliant similes so that the writing
, ,
is wonderful, and yet it's difficult, usually,
to see what it is he's saying. Now why did
, ,
he write like that?
, ,
Well, several reasons. But first of all, I
do want to say I entirely agree with you about
, ,
the character of the prose, and it is both
entrancing and exasperating. I know I felt

, ,
that when I was preparing for this program.
I went and re-read acres of Wittgenstein.
, ,
And there just is a huge amount. And it is
enthralling.
, ,
You begin to start thinking that way yourself.
You begin to address your wife in Wittgensteinian
, ,
aphorisms, which can be very exasperating.
But also, you have this feeling that when
, ,
you take up one of these books and read it,
it's a bit like getting a kit for a model
, ,
airplane, with no instructions as to how you're
supposed to put all these pieces together.
, ,
And that can be extremely frustrating. It's
a sort of do it yourself book. But why did
, ,
he write like that? Well, first of all, I
think it was the only way he found natural.
, ,
I mean, he often says what a torture it is
for him to try even to put these paragraphs
, ,
together consecutively, much less to write
conventional prose-- articles and books.
, ,
But secondly, I think there is an element
almost of arrogance in this. Wittgenstein
, ,
wanted it to be different from the standard
ways of doing philosophy. He hated the sort

, ,
of standard articles that appear in journals,
and standard books that are written to be
, ,
read by undergraduates in philosophy.
, ,
By the way, he would have hated the kind of
thing you and I are now doing-- two professional
, ,
philosophers discussing his views on television.
But he did want to be deliberately different
, ,
from other people. And a third aspect of this
is that he honestly and sincerely was struggling
, ,
to say something new and different.
, ,
And he always had the feeling that he hadn't
said what he really meant, that he was struggling
, ,
to find a mode of expression, and that he
never really succeeded. And then lastly, I
, ,
think we need to say for English-speaking
viewers that though it looks strange to the
, ,
English eye to see books written in this way,
it's not all that unusual in German. There
, ,
is a tradition in German philosophy of writing
aphoristically. You see it in Nietzsche, it's
, ,
in Schopenhauer, and Lichtenberg, just to
mention a few.
, ,
And the writing is, at its best, wonderful.

I think we ought to do him the justice of

, ,
saying that.
, ,
He's a great stylist.
, ,
A great stylist. And some of the sentences
stay in your mind for the rest of your life-, ,
Forever.
, ,
--after you've read them. In my introduction
to this discussion, I mentioned the fact that
, ,
in the last-- I don't know how long one ought
to say, years, years, probably not much
, ,
more that-- he has become an international
figure of importance quite outside philosophy.
, ,
When one reads books and articles and journalism
that have nothing to do with philosophy, one
, ,
is beginning now, over and over again, to
come across Wittgenstein's name. Can you say
, ,
just a little about the fields outside philosophy
in which he is important, and indicate at
, ,
least what kind of an influence he appears
to be having?
, ,
Well, at present I think it's a kind of name-dropping.
It's an OK name, and he's certainly mentioned

, ,
in a lot of fields. But I think he would feel
himself that he has not been adequately understood,
, ,
and indeed has not been adequately understood
in philosophy. But some of these fields are
, ,
literary criticism and aesthetics generally.
, ,
Wittgenstein is now often referred to, and
I think will become more influential. There
, ,
is a great deal of mention of Wittgenstein
in social sciences, particularly anthropology,
, ,
because he thought of himself as doing a kind
of anthropology. There is books written about
, ,
the importance of Wittgenstein for political
theory.
, ,
So it's what the French would call the sciences
of man that Wittgenstein has been most influential.
, ,
Paradoxically, in a way, because he wrote
so much about the philosophy of mathematics.
, ,
But most of his influences now are in-- outside
of philosophy-- are in the social sciences.
, ,
It seems that the structuralists, who are
so fashionable, or have been fashionable for
, ,
so long, seemed to be claiming Wittgenstein
for their own, do they not?
, ,

The poststructuralists, I think, have probably

misunderstood him the worst.
, ,
The poststructuralists.
, ,
But that's another program.
, ,
Right. Well, then, we won't get into that.
But I think the point is worth making that
, ,
for example, if you read serious literary
criticism, you are going to come across constant
, ,
reference to Wittgenstein. What's your personal
evaluation of all this, of Wittgenstein as
, ,
a philosopher?
, ,
Well, I feel so strongly about this, I've
been restraining myself all along, just trying
, ,
to say what the guy meant, and not what I
actually think about it. But let me start
, ,
out negatively, and then I get to end on a
more cheerful note. There is a kind of exasperating
, ,
feature of Wittgenstein that I want to highlight,
I want to emphasize, and that is the anti-theoretical
, ,
bent in Wittgenstein, the idea that we mustn't
have a theory, that we can't have a theory
, ,
of language. We can't have a general theory
of language or of the mind.

, ,
Now when somebody says to me, when some guy
says you can't have a general theory of speech
, ,
acts, or you can't have a general theory of
intentionality of how words, how thoughts
, ,
relate to reality, my natural instinct is
to go out and write a general theory-- we'll
, ,
just see if we can't have a general theory.
And in fact, I have tried to make general
, ,
statements in both of these fields.
, ,
I think it's premature of Wittgenstein to
say we can't have general theories of language
, ,
of a philosophical sort, or general theories
of how the mind functions. We won't know if
, ,
we don't try. And the sheer diversity of the
phenomena should not, by themselves, discourage
, ,
us. Think of physics. If you think of Niagara
Falls, and a pot of water boiling, and an
, ,
ice skating rink, it looks like very diverse
phenomena.
, ,
And we could go on and on with the diverse
forms that water takes. But in fact, we've
, ,
now got a pretty good general theory that
can account for all of that, and I don't see

, ,
why we shouldn't seek general theories in
philosophy, in particular in the philosophy
, ,
of language and the philosophy of mind.
, ,
I almost think sometimes that Wittgenstein
thought since he had failed to get a general
, ,
theory, since the Tractatus failed, then any
general theory must be impossible. Roughly
, ,
speaking, if I can't do it, nobody can. And
a lot of people-, ,
Probably what he actually believes.
, ,
A lot of his disciples have said to me, oh,
well, since you reject this anti-theoretical
, ,
bent of the Investigations, you must believe
in the Tractatus, as if those were the only
, ,
two options. And I want to suggest there are
lots of other options. Now tied in with this
, ,
aversion to theory is a kind of waffling that
goes on in certain crucial areas.
, ,
Let's take religious discourse just as an
example of this. We were mentioning this earlier.
, ,
See, Wittgenstein himself obviously had a
deep religious hunger. It wasn't this sort
, ,
of middle-class English attitude about religion,

that it's just something for Sunday mornings.

, ,
No, he really had a religious hunger. There
are these constant references to God, and
, ,
getting himself right with God.
, ,
And yet, I think most people would say that
he was an atheist. Now in a way, you feel
, ,
almost that he wants to have it both ways,
that he wants to be able to say things like,
, ,
well, we just need to know the role that religious
discourse plays in people's lives. But of
, ,
course, you won't understand that role unless
you see that religious discourse referred
, ,
beyond, that the only reason that people pray
is because they think there's a God up there
, ,
listening.
, ,
And that's not-- whether or not God is listening
is not part of the language game. The language
, ,
game of religion can only be played the way
it is because people think there's something
, ,
outside the language game that gives it sense.
OK, now that's for the bad part. Let me say
, ,
what I think is really terrific in Wittgenstein.

, ,
Well, first of all, I think most philosophers-what I'm going to say right now is kind of
, ,
contemporary orthodoxy-- most philosophers
would agree with this-- he has made terrific
, ,
contributions in the philosophy of language
and in the philosophy of mind. His contribution
, ,
in the philosophy of language is that he really
mounted devastating attacks on the idea that
, ,
words get their meaning by standing for things,
or by being associated with some introspective
, ,
process, by standing for some mental thing
in the mind.
, ,
And he does knock those views pretty effectively.
And also, he is pretty good-- one, I think,
, ,
of the most powerful-- not the only one, but
certainly one of the most powerful expressions
, ,
of the view-- that speaking a language ought
to be seen as a form of human activity, that
, ,
words are also acts. Words are deeds. And
that is an important line of investigation.
, ,
Now in a way, his discussion in the philosophy
of mind is just as important as his work in
, ,
the philosophy of language. And it's a very
effective attack on the Cartesian tradition,

, ,
on the idea that we really live in two worlds-a mental world and a physical world. But his
, ,
attack on Cartesianism is so powerful precisely
because he doesn't make the mistake of most
, ,
anti-Cartesians of thinking, you just have
to reject the mind. Just say there isn't any
, ,
such thing as mental phenomena.
, ,
What he does is a painstaking analysis of
a whole lot of psychological concepts-- belief
, ,
and fear and hope and expecting. And he goes
through these, and what he shows you is that
, ,
the deep grammar of these expressions is quite
different from what you would think just looking
, ,
at the surface, where we have nouns like "mind"
and "body," and where it looks like they're
, ,
these two different things, minds and bodies.
, ,
What he does is, by carefully describing these
language games, he gets you to see that things
, ,
like hope and fear and expectation and belief
are grounded in situations, that we actually
, ,
use these word in such a way where we're not
inclined to think there must be some deep
, ,
Cartesian divide. We say things like he's

been groaning and in pain for the past two

, ,
hours. And we don't feel there-- oh my gosh,
she's mixed categories-- the physical groaning
, ,
and the mental pain.
, ,
It's a perfectly natural way of talking. And
he shows us that our natural way of talking
, ,
does not lead to any kind of Cartesianism.
However, the most powerful part of Wittgenstein,
, ,
from my own personal point of view, is not
his work in the philosophy of language and
, ,
mind, but it's an idea that really begins
to acquire momentum in his last work. It also
, ,
appears in his earlier work.
, ,
But in his very last work that he wrote when
he was dying on certainty, and it's a rather
, ,
subtle idea, but it's this. We have, in the
Western intellectual tradition going back
, ,
to Plato, we have the idea that any meaningful
human behavior must somehow be the expression
, ,
of a theory, an implicit theory that we hold,
that if you understand me and I understand
, ,
you, it can only be because we each have a
theory of the other.

, ,
Or, as you say, an implicit.
, ,
An implicit. Chomsky thinks this, that there's
an unconscious theory of language. And artificial
, ,
intelligence is based on this presupposition,
that there are these unconscious theories.
, ,
Now there's some truth in that, but Wittgenstein
is anxious to emphasize that a great deal
, ,
of what we do is both socially and biologically
primitive.
, ,
It's a way of responding. It's a way of acting.
We just act. We don't need to appeal to the
, ,
idea that there's some implicit theoretical
structure that enables us to act. As usual,
, ,
he gives very good similes. He says look,
think of squirrels storing nuts for the winter.
, ,
Now do they do that because they think Hume's
problem of induction has been solved, and
, ,
we now know that the future resembles the
past? No, they just do it. Now, he says, think
, ,
of yourself and putting your hand in the fire.
Is the reason you don't put your hand in the
, ,
fire, is it because you think you've refuted
Hume, or you think you've got very good inductive

, ,
evidence? No. You just don't do it. You couldn't
be dragged into that fire.
, ,
And he says a great deal of our human activity
has to be seen like that. We're just responding
, ,
in ways that are both biologically and culturally
conditioned. But his ground floor statement-, ,
he keeps repeating this-- is, we just act.
That's the way we do it. And this goes against
, ,
the whole tradition where we try to think,
well we can only do what we do because we've
, ,
got an implicit theory.
, ,
Do you think there's still a lot of juice
in this, or do you think that Wittgenstein
, ,
himself has made all of the really important,
the creative and constructive use of these
, ,
ideas that can be made?
, ,
Oh, no. I think there's a great deal more
to be said on this. Secondly, he didn't do
, ,
all the work. He just got started.
, ,
Thank you very much, Professor Searle. Excellent,
John.