Wittgenstein's Toolkit

One rough but helpful way of considering the structure of the Investigations might be as follows: §§1-133 specify a new role for philosophy and introduce the necessary tools for the job. The rest of the book then gets on with actually putting those tools to work. Our understanding of them certainly grows richer as we see their application, but substantially everything needed for the task is there in the book’s first quarter.

With this in mind, it’s perhaps useful to take stock of the “tools” provided. The comments below are not intended to supplant my earlier posts. Hopefully, though, they’ll highlight the positive aspect of the Investigations and show that it’s not simply about taking a hammer to traditional philosophy.

Language-Games

If I had to sum up the central philosophical insight of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, I’d say it was this: language is an activity. More specifically, it is a rule-governed activity performed by agents in particular circumstances. As he says at §25, “Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.” This consideration stands behind all the strands of his later philosophy and it’s the reason he seized upon the analogy between language and games.

Viewing language in this way highlights its active and varied role. Language is something we do, and we do it in many different, yet subtly interconnected situations. To understand it properly, therefore, it must be considered in context. Attempts to abstract language in the hope of discovering its essence merely falsify the phenomenon. Indeed, the whole urge to produce explanations sub specie aeternitatis is misguided because explanation is itself a language-game that only makes sense when viewed in situ: “If we say, ‘Every word in the language signifies something’, we have so far said nothing whatever; unless we explain exactly what distinction we wish to make” (§13). In such cases language is no longer working; it has gone on holiday. And the only result is nonsense.

Another benefit of likening language to a series of games is that it brings out the importance of two related features: training and rules. Language, like a game, is something we learn. We learn it in a variety of ways: sometimes we’re required to memorise a formal set of rules (at school, for example), but often we work out correct usage from observing others, and sometimes we just copy what everyone else is doing. This is all part of what Wittgenstein calls “mastering a technique” (§150).

Learning and application are intrinsically linked. We can’t do things with language until we’ve grasped the rules (mastered the technique), but the whole process of learning is shaped by the application. This is another way of saying that language can’t be understood when detached from its context. The rules and definitions which are supposed to explain meaning seem mysterious or puzzling when they’re extracted from the situations that give them purpose. Returning them to their rightful home dispels the mystery, and this is the intention behind Wittgenstein’s assertion at §43 that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”.

Meaning is Use

Clearly, approaching meaning in terms of use is in keeping with the idea of language as an activity. Its philosophical advantage is that it brings the question of meaning down to earth. By deriving meaning from practice we are less prone to abstracting the concept and viewing it as something occult. In particular, we avoid the temptation to think meaning must be a thing – either the physical object correlated with a word or some kind of mental picture.

More generally, we’re able to trace the complex grammatical rules governing concept-words (including “meaning”) as they are applied in our lives. We see distinctions and similarities that are usually overlooked, and this prevents us from reaching for limited or partial definitions (eg, “knowledge is justified true belief”) and then being puzzled when they conflict with what actually happens.

What is less clear, however, is the precise status of the claim that meaning is use. Wittgenstein cannot be proposing it as a theory (unless he’s made a shocking blunder), and yet as a description of the use of “meaning” it is hardly self-evidently true. This, presumably, is the reason for the caveat in §43 (“For a large class of cases […] though not for all”). But the caveat in itself is troubling because it seems like he’s saying “in some cases the meaning of a word is an object rather than use” and yet (a) he elsewhere brings forward powerful arguments to show that meaning cannot be an object and (b) use does appear to play some part in all explanations of meaning (eg, the difference between “This→● is red” as a definition and as a complaint (because I’d asked for something orange) is a matter of context, although this raises a further question as to how far “use” and “context” are synonymous).

Further thought is needed. For now, though, I think we can say this: Wittgenstein invites us to consider meaning in terms of use because (a) we often do explain meaning by describing the use of a word and (b) from a philosophical viewpoint it helps avoid certain temptations that are more strongly exerted in other forms of explanation – and it does this because it keeps language fixed in the human activities that give it its life.

Family Resemblance Concepts

It is easy to suppose that all items falling under a particular concept must have something in common in virtue of which they qualify as examples of that concept. Wittgenstein maintains, however, that if we look at the way concepts function in our lives (ie, derive their meaning from use) we will see that this is not always the case. Sometimes concepts exhibit a family of affinities that have developed over time, “as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” (§67). The requirement for commonality is a hasty assumption that often leads to confusion.

For example, if we consider all the different instances of what’s called “understanding” we may become puzzled as to how these varied items all fall under the same concept. Here it’s tempting to posit a phenomenon (perhaps some kind of mental act) that will provide the unity we think we need. But far from solving the problem, the phenomenon creates a host of further puzzles and our confusion only deepens.

The notion of family resemblance concepts frees us from this impasse. It shows how concepts can retain integrity without commonality: they do it by remaining useful. Thus our preconceived need for unity is trumped by our actual behaviour and we no longer have to invent what we do not see.

Forms of Life

[NB: consider this section a “first go” at describing the importance of forms of life. I’m making some pretty contentious claims here and absolutely reserve the right to change my mind later on.]

Approaching language from the point of view of use inevitably brings the agent into the picture. If language is something that gets done then who is doing the doing? Wittgenstein’s favoured term for this “doer” is the strikingly non-specific “form of life”. Why choose this expression?

Well, for one thing, using “form of life” rather than “person” or “human being” discourages us from dragging in any distorting preconceptions we might have about ourselves. Nothing is assumed. Rather, the form of life is whatever happens to emerge from descriptions of linguistic activity. This allows for distinctions and connections both within and across any particular species, as well as change over time in the practices of individuals and linguistic communities. We might link the term to language-games here and say that insofar as two individuals share a language-game they share a form of life.

This non-presumptive generality of form arises out of the focus on use, and is linked to the very nature of philosophy as Wittgenstein saw it. The philosopher’s task is to outline the concepts we have. To go further and ask why we have them is to cross the boundary between a conceptual investigation and an empirical one. For the philosopher, therefore, the form of life represents a terminus (PPF §345: “What has to be accepted, the given, is – one might say – forms of life”). It is here we find the foundation of our concepts, not in theories about the a priori structure of the world, nor in theories about the a priori structure of experience. We simply have to accept the form of life as manifested through activity. “This is how we think. This is how we act. This is how we talk about it.“ (Zettel, §309). We can go no further; the buck stops here.

The Descriptive Method

A major source of philosophical error involves faulty presuppositions (or theories) about the way language is actually used. We assume commonality, essence, similarity, and so on. The only way round this is to get a clear view of language. In other words, we must abstain from theory and simply describe its use (§66: “don’t think, but look!”). Perhaps surprisingly, this description is not preparation for developing better answers to our problems; it is the answer itself.

Why does description resolve philosophical problems? Because it brings our attention back from a situation where a concept is puzzling (ie, philosophy) to one where it is not (ie, our lives). The concept of knowledge, for example, puzzles philosophers. Is it possible? And if it is, then how? And yet every day we use the term without any difficulty at all. Wittgenstein suggests the problem arises when we lose sight of the position that such concepts occupy in our day-to-day affairs. “The civic status of a contradiction, or its status in civic life – that is the philosophical problem” (§125). Description restores clarity, and “the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear” (§133).

¶

Apologies for going over (mostly) old ground, but I’ve been keen to do two things: first, to highlight the fundamental importance of §§1-133 with regard to the rest of the Investigations; and secondly, to show the unity of approach behind the positive aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.

Speaking from personal experience, it’s tempting to gloss over §§1-133. Arguments about logical atomism and propositional form can seem more relevant to historians than anyone engaged with philosophy today, and it’s easy think, “When do we get to the sexy stuff? When do we get to rule-following or the private language argument? That’s where the action is.” But the discussion of the “sexy stuff” flows directly out of the approach and methodology developed in the book’s opening quarter. If you don’t have a clear grasp of that then it’s going to be next to impossible to see the later arguments in their right light. (For now I shall merely flag up the additional point that you probably can’t get a clear grasp of §§1-133 until you’ve read the rest of the book.) If my experience here is atypical then: good. If, however, it reflects a more general trend then: be warned.

Regarding the unity of Wittgenstein’s approach, I think it’s a corollary of its radical nature; the whole thing points away from more traditional philosophical methods. For me, this puts a deep question mark over attempts to cherry-pick his ideas or blend them with other approaches. How far, for example, can you pray-in-aid family resemblance while maintaining a broadly naturalist approach? Family resemblance ramifies into notions such as “meaning as use”, grammar and the descriptive method – and these notions work against the fundamental thrust of naturalistic analysis. The reason why such cherry-picking happens is interesting and (I believe) often has as much to do with disarming the threat of Wittgenstein as anything else. But that’s for another post.

Wittgenstein’s New Philosophy: A “No Theory” Theory?

According to Wittgenstein, the bewitching allure of metaphysics has proved empty (§§89-108). It has led to a collection of a priori theories concerning how the world must be, but such theories are founded upon illusions brought about by misunderstandings of, and misrepresentations of, our forms of expression. The result has not been to create a body of philosophical knowledge but to generate a series of seemingly intractable problems – problems that trap us between what must be the case (according to the theories) and what is the case, so far as our everyday lives are concerned.

Thus philosophy is left with the task of revealing the illusionary nature of these problems. They are not to be solved but dissolved: “The results of philosophy are the discovery of some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language” (§119). Obviously, the proper technique for achieving this cannot itself be theoretical – that would just repeat the process that caused the problem in the first place. Instead, Wittgenstein proposes an altogether different method:

[…] we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place.

Philosophical Investigations §109

Such description will be tailored according to the problem at hand; we will be “marshalling recollections for a particular purpose” (§127). And the results will not be new facts about the world but a clearer understanding of what we already know, in the same way that a map might give us a clearer understanding of our home town.

This, basically, is Wittgenstein’s New Deal for Philosophy, as set out in §§109-133. It was a radical and controversial idea when the Investigations was published in 1953, and it remains so today. It’s an idea that even some who admire his philosophy find a step too far (John Searle, for instance). And although many of the arguments in the Investigations have been recognised as hugely important, I think it’s fair to say that the philosophical community as a whole has declined to take Wittgenstein up on his offer.

I’ll discuss their reluctance in a future post. For now, however, I want to address an obvious question raised by the rejection of theory, namely: how the hell can you do philosophy without theories?

It seems that such an approach would make it impossible to state any conclusions, because that (surely) involves stating a theory. When, for example, Wittgenstein says “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (§43), isn’t that a theory? Indeed, isn’t it a counter-theory to “A name means an object. The object is its meaning” (TLP 3.203)? Might we not go further and say that any general statement (eg, “cats are more intelligent than dogs”) makes a theoretical claim about the world? And if that’s true, it’s hard to see how theories can be avoided.

The first thing to point out is that actually not every general statement can meaningfully be called theoretical. A theory operates in an area of contention – there has to be something that’s up for grabs. So “cats are more intelligent than dogs” could be considered theoretical because it is by no means obviously true. There is something to be tested here. On the other hand, “giraffes have longer necks than swans” is not (for us) theoretical. It merely states an established truth. Likewise, it is not theoretical to point out that “losing my mind” is unlike “losing my hat”. We would all admit that I cannot look for my mind or offer a reward for the person who finds it; someone can’t have taken my mind because he mistook it for his own, and so on. Such statements are not contentious and therefore not theoretical.

There is, however, an important distinction between the above two examples. The non-theoretical status of the giraffe/swan statement is a posteriori; it is a contingent truth that we have established about the world. We could imagine a situation where this truth was still up for grabs, and there the statement would be theoretical. We would need more facts about giraffes or swans to settle the issue.

The mind/hat statement, on the other hand, works differently. It does not remind us of an established empirical truth, but a grammatical one. We didn’t discover it by encountering hats and minds; we learnt it when we learnt our language, and the truth it expresses partly constitutes what minds and hats are. The only way it could be “up for grabs” would be if someone didn’t know how we use the words “mind” or “hat”. And that person would require linguistic instruction rather than new empirical facts. In this sense, the mind/hat statement is a priori. I don't mean that it's "true for all possible worlds" or anything like that, but that it is about the concepts we need to master in order to make empirical statements such as “your hat is bigger than my hat” or “your mind is sharper than my mind” (perhaps it would be better to call it a grammatical truth rather than an a priori one). And part of mastering such concepts involves realising that it’s nonsense to say “I’ve lost my mind, stop what you’re doing and help me look for it”.

Since these grammatical observations are not theoretical, it is possible to derive general statements from them which are also not theoretical. Such statements are summaries. They do not rely on deduction and do not express hypotheses. They can be verified, not by experiment, but simply by looking and seeing whether they correctly reflect the established facts.

This highlights the important distinction between TLP 3.203 and §43. “A name means an object” is a dogmatic expression of an a priori theory – it must be so, given the requirements of the Picture Theory of Meaning. By contrast, “The meaning of a word is its use in the language” asserts what we will all admit to be true if we look carefully at our forms of expression and, in particular, at the way the word “meaning” is generally explained (be warned, however, that this is a highly controversial claim). Wittgenstein does not say it must be so (indeed, he explicitly says it is not always so), merely that – most of the time – it is so. And it is precisely this sort of statement he has in mind when he says, “If someone were to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them” (§129).

Here we might admit that we can draw non-theoretical conclusions, yet still wonder why theories must be ruled out altogether. After all, couldn’t we use our new-found linguistic insights to construct better theories? No. The suggestion misunderstands the flaw at the heart of philosophical theories.

A philosophical theory looks like it’s making an a priori claim about how the world must be, but actually its a priori nature comes from its use of conceptual rules. Determinism, for example, flows from reflections on the fact that every event has a cause. But “every event has a cause” is not an empirical fact (unlike, say “every child has a penny”); it is a conceptual precondition for certain types of activity – scientific investigations, for example. It provides a rule legitimising these activities and guarantees that, given an event, you can always ask “what caused this?” That is the nature of its “must”. It does not, however, guarantee anything about what is or isn’t the case.

It is illicit, therefore, to move from “every event has a cause” to “free actions do not exist” because that is making an unsanctioned existential claim about the world. What you can do, however, is examine the conceptual underpinning of “free will” together with the concept of causation to see how they relate to each other. This involves no illicit move because everything remains at an a priori level. It does not, however, save the theory by getting rid of its mistakes – it gets rid of the theory. That is because we are no longer deducing what must be the case, but consulting the rule-book to see how things are. It’s as if we had a theory that castling is impossible in chess because the king can only move one square at a time. Then we look up the rules and see that under certain circumstances it is perfectly legitimate. We cannot now seriously have a theory that the rules of castling don’t exist, nor that castling is invalidated by the game’s other rules. It is part of the game, and that’s that.

Wittgenstein’s rejection of philosophical theories is not based on the notion that they’re unlikely to yield results. His argument is that they cannot yield results because they are conceptually incoherent. They attempt to deduce a priori truths about the world based on rules that provide no justification for such deductions. Dispensing with them is not (pace Searle) an unnecessary piece of philosophical extravagance; the need flows directly from Wittgenstein’s ideas about meaning as use, language-games, the nature of rules, and family resemblance concepts. If those are accepted then ditching theory is mandatory, not optional.

Finally (and at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious) it is also not itself a theory. It is a proposal offered as the only way of avoiding the endlessly repeated mistakes of the past and providing us with a way to see the world aright when we become entangled in conceptual confusion. The price to pay consists in renouncing philosophy as a heroic endeavour – one where the next great mind might finally hit upon the correct theory and explain things to everyone’s satisfaction. (Two and a half thousand years and still waiting….) Instead it would be a more humble matter of “marshalling recollections for a particular purpose”. It would require patience and skill rather than god-like genius.

For many that price is too high.