Ludwig Wittgenstein
1889–1951, Vienna and Cambridge
Analytic philosophy
Philosophical problems are confusions about how our words are working.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
The life
Born in Vienna into one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Three of his four brothers died by suicide. He studied aeronautical engineering in Manchester, became preoccupied with the foundations of mathematics, and went to Cambridge in 1911 to work with Bertrand Russell, who within a year regarded him as his successor.
He served in the Austrian army through the First World War, volunteering for forward positions, and finished the Tractatus while a prisoner of war in Italy. Believing he had solved philosophy's problems, he gave away his entire inherited fortune and spent the 1920s teaching in remote Austrian village schools, working as a monastery gardener, and designing an austere house in Vienna for his sister.
He returned to Cambridge in 1929 and spent the next two decades dismantling the book that had made his reputation, in lectures attended by students who later published their notes. During the Second World War he worked as a hospital porter and a laboratory assistant. He died of cancer in 1951; his last words were reportedly that he had had a wonderful life. The Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953.
What shaped the ideas
The Tractatus belongs to the logical revolution begun by Frege and Russell, which had shown that the grammatical form of a sentence can conceal its logical form. The hope was that a precise logical notation would dissolve philosophical problems as artefacts of ordinary language.
The later work arrives after the Vienna Circle had built an entire programme on a reading of the Tractatus that Wittgenstein thought missed the point, and after he had spent years teaching children. It is anti-theoretical in a way that irritated professional philosophy: rather than replacing one account of meaning with a better one, it argues that the demand for such an account is itself the disease.
Core arguments
- 01
The picture theory
A proposition means by sharing a logical form with the state of affairs it depicts.
Reportedly prompted by a Paris court using a model car and dolls to represent an accident. The model works because its parts stand in the same arrangement as the real ones. A proposition pictures in the same way (not by resemblance but by shared structure) which is why a false proposition is still meaningful: it depicts a possible arrangement that does not obtain.
- 02
The limits of language
Ethics, aesthetics and the meaning of life cannot be said, only shown.
If meaningful language pictures facts, then anything that is not a fact in the world cannot be pictured. Value is not one more item in the inventory of what exists. So it falls outside what can be stated, which Wittgenstein took to mean it is the most important thing there is, and the positivists took to mean it is nonsense.
- 03
Meaning as use
The meaning of a word is its role in the practice it belongs to.
Language is not one uniform mechanism hooking onto reality. It is a vast collection of activities (ordering, describing, joking, praying, measuring) and a word's meaning is its part in one of them. Asking what a word really names, outside any practice, is what produces philosophical puzzles.
- 04
The rule-following paradox
No interpretation can fix what counts as continuing a rule correctly.
Teach 'add 2' by examples and someone writes 1000, 1004, 1008, insisting they are doing as taught. Nothing in the examples excludes it, and adding an interpretation only defers the problem, since it needs interpreting too. The regress ends not in a further rule but in a practice: there is a way of grasping a rule exhibited in what we call obeying it.
- 05
The private language argument
A language whose terms only the speaker could understand is impossible.
Such a language would have no check on correct use: there would be no difference between following your own definition and merely seeming to. Where that difference collapses, talk of correctness has no content. The argument bears directly on the picture of the mind as a private theatre nobody else can enter.
Commonly got wrong
- The Tractatus is not a positivist manifesto. The positivists read 'cannot be said' as 'is worthless'; he meant the opposite.
- The two philosophies are not a contradiction to be resolved. The later work treats the earlier as the clearest possible statement of a temptation he was trying to cure.
- 'Meaning is use' is not a theory of meaning. It is advice about where to look, and the Investigations explicitly disclaim putting forward any theory.
- The private language argument is not solipsism or behaviourism. He is not denying inner experience; he is denying that private ostension could establish meaning.
Works
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1921
Seventy-five pages of numbered propositions. The only book he published in his lifetime.
Philosophical Investigations 1953
Posthumous. Remarks rather than chapters, and it demolishes the Tractatus.
On Certainty 1969
Written in his last eighteen months, on hinge propositions that doubt cannot get behind.
The Blue and Brown Books 1958
Dictated lecture notes from the 1930s. The transition, in progress.
Philosophical Investigations, sections 1 to 80. Read slowly, and do not expect it to build to anything; it circles on purpose.
Why they still get taught
Two philosophies, each of which founded a school, and a permanent suspicion (in philosophy, linguistics and increasingly in computer science) that a long-running dispute may be a symptom of how a word is being used rather than a question about the world.
Chapters
- The Picture Theory and its Limits · Knowing, and Saying
- Language Games and Rule-Following · Knowing, and Saying