Table Of ContentWITTGENSTEIN’S PHILOSOPHICAL
INVESTIGATIONS
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Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – Roger M. White
WITTGENSTEIN’S
PHILOSOPHICAL
INVESTIGATIONS
A READER’S GUIDE
ARIF AHMED
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© Arif Ahmed, 2010
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CONTENTS
Preface vi
1. Context 1
2. Overview of Themes 8
3. Reading the Text 11
Section 1. The Augustinian picture 11
1.1. Unity of function 12
1.2. Ostension 16
1.3. Referentialism 22
1.4. ‘Sentences are combinations of names’ 34
Section 2. Family resemblance and the ideal
of precision 40
2.1. Family resemblance 40
2.2. Vagueness 45
2.3. The nature of philosophy 61
2.4. PI 134–7: The ‘general form of the proposition’ 67
Section 3. Meaning and understanding 69
3.1. The cube 70
3.2. Dispositions 76
3.3. Understanding and guidance 84
3.4. The paradox 94
Section 4. Privacy 107
4.1. Private language 108
4.2. The inner and the outer 129
4. Reception and Influence 150
5. Guide to Further Reading 154
Notes 156
References 161
Index 165
v
PREFACE
This book is aimed at second- and third-year undergraduates
who are coming to Wittgenstein for the first time. It doesn’t cover
all of Philosophical Investigations, but it does cover everything
in it that you would expect to find in any course on the later
Wittgenstein: that is, the criticisms of the Tractatus, the material
on rule-following, and the material on private language.
I wrote the book in the summer of 2009 but it is based upon
lectures that I gave, in the Michaelmas terms of 2007 and 2008,
to those Cambridge students who were taking the Special
Subject paper (‘Wittgenstein’) in Part II of the Philosophy
Tripos. I am grateful to those students for their comments
and questions. And I am grateful to Prof. Michael Luntley of
Warwick University for helpful comments on Chapter 1.
Quotations from Wittgenstein use single quotes and double
quotes exactly as he does.
vi
CHAPTER 1
CONTEXT
If you are going to get anything at all out of Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations then you must come to it with some
knowledge of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. That earlier
work is by far the single most important influence upon this later
one; for instance, the first 100-odd sections of Philosophical
Investigations constitute a direct and extended attack upon the
central theses and presuppositions of the Tractatus. Here I say
something about the background and content of that earlier
work. The first of these tasks involves a brief discussion of the
two most important philosophical influences upon it: Russell
and Frege.
RUSSELL
In the late nineteenth century the dominant position on the
British philosophical scene was idealism. A crude sketch of that
position is this: one can never have direct access to reality itself;
on the contrary human experience and thought themselves
interpose a sort of distorting lens between us and it, so that one
could never know reality as it is in itself but only as it appears to
us. This view derived ultimately from the transcendental idealism
that Immanuel Kant had first stated in his Critique of Pure
Reason (1782).
Russell rejected idealism; the nature of his alternative view
is set out with his usual clarity in The Problems of Philosophy
(Russell 1912). For anyone who is completely new to this whole
area, that book is probably the best place to begin.
Russell thought that we could have direct knowledge of reality;
the relation by which we achieved this he called acquaintance
(Russell 1912: 23). In particular that relation connects a knowing
subject to the immediate objects of its sensory knowledge: these
are not enduring physical objects like tables, mountains, and the
like but sensations themselves: colour-patches, sounds, smells,
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WITTGENSTEIN’S PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
and the like. These Russell called sense data (ibid. 4). Acquaintance
also connects the knowing subject with universals or concepts
like whiteness, diversity and brotherhood (ibid. 28).
He extended this account to the problem of intentionality:
that is, the question of how thoughts and language could
be about objects other than themselves. Russell thought that
acquaintance gives the answer: ‘Every proposition which we
understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which
we are acquainted’ (ibid. 32). Thus the relation of aboutness
becomes that of identity: your thoughts just are the things
they are ‘about’; and they are your thoughts by virtue of your
acquaintance with them. And ‘you’ here denotes not your body
but the non-sensory subject of acquaintance, which can however
also be its object, since one is probably acquainted with oneself
(ibid. 27–8).
But surely many propositions do not describe items of sensory
acquaintance or universals – for instance, most of one’s everyday
thoughts or utterances. If, for instance, I have the thought that
Henry Kissinger was an astute diplomat I am surely thinking
about a particular object – Henry Kissinger – with which I am
not acquainted, since (a) he is an enduring flesh-and-blood
object and not a sight or a smell; and anyway (b) I have never
met him.
Russell’s answer may be presented in two stages. The first stage
notes that although ‘Henry Kissinger’ appears to correspond to
some element of my thought – when I think that Henry Kissinger
was an astute diplomat – what really occurs there corresponds
more precisely to an associated definite description, that is, a
phrase of the form ‘The so-and-so’ (ibid. 28). So the thought
that I express in English by the sentence ‘Henry Kissinger was an
astute diplomat’ is more precisely rendered by one of the form
‘The so-and-so was an astute diplomat’, in which ‘The so-and-so’
should get replaced by whatever description I associate with
‘Henry Kissinger’, for example, ‘The last Secretary of State in
the second Nixon Administration’.
The second stage is to note that sentences containing definite
descriptions may themselves be replaced with sentences that
contain only expressions for universals. Russell himself provided
the manual for making such replacements with his famous
theory of descriptions. That theory translates a sentence of the
2
CONTEXT
form ‘The F is G’ into this: ‘At least one thing is F, no more than
one thing is F, and whatever is F is G’ or in formal notation
∃x∀y ((Fy ↔ y = x) & Gx). So the next stage in our rewriting of
that sentence, which supposedly expressed a thought ‘about’
Henry Kissinger, is as follows: ‘At least one person was the last
Secretary of State in the second Nixon Administration, at most
one person was, and whoever it was was an astute diplomat.’ All
reference to Henry Kissinger has now dropped out; a suitable
repetition of these stages will also eliminate all reference to
Nixon. The resulting sentence contains only reference to univer-
sals; and this reveals the true contents of the thought or
proposition that the initial sentence so misleadingly expressed.
We can thus see that after all that proposition does contain only
objects of my acquaintance, that is, universals. This process of
translating sentences into a form that reveals the true contents
of the underlying thought is what Wittgenstein called its analysis
(TLP 3.2–3.201).
FREGE
The formal analysis of definite descriptions to which I have just
alluded would not have been possible without the seminal work
of Russell’s German contemporary Frege. It was he who intro-
duced what is essentially the same quantifier-notation that is
taught to all first-year philosophers and mathematicians to
this day; doing so enabled him to give a systematic account of
arguments of a complexity that was well beyond the scope
of traditional logic. In particular it allowed for a systematic
treatment of arguments involving mixed quantification, that is,
those in whose formal renditions a universal quantifier ∀ occurs
within the scope of an existential one ∃ or vice versa. ‘Everyone
is taller than someone’ is a simple instance of this; so too are
sentences in which definite descriptions take the position of the
grammatical subject, for example, ‘The last Secretary of State in
the second Nixon Administration was an astute diplomat.’
Here I should also mention three more of Frege’s many
important contributions to philosophy.
The first was the distinction between sense and reference.
A simple way to think about names is to suppose that they just
mean what they stand for, or as I shall sometimes say refer to or
denote (cf. PI 11). But ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ were names
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