Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe
To steal a description from Existential Comics, Wittgenstein solved philosophy in 1921 with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and then unsolved it again in 1953 with Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical Investigations is primarily concerned with what we mean with our language. Many 20th century philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) have tried to translate our language into something more precise, as if to uncover what we really mean. Philosophical Investigations argues that meaning is much more complicated, deriving from practical use.
I have a book queue that consists mostly of queer mystery and romance novels, but Philosophical Investigations was an oddball among them. I’ve been interested in Wittgenstein largely as a result of my husband. He has a degree in philosophy, and his seminar on Wittgenstein was particularly impactful. If you want to know what our banter sounds like, it’s not altogether unlike the text of Philosophical Investigations. I had never actually read it though, so I thought to correct that.
Wittgenstein is one of those subjects covered extensively by experts, and I’m definitely not one of those. I’m reading this casually. I’m in the habit of writing a bit about each book in my queue, so I’ll describe my experience and takeaways.
The reading experience
The majority of Philosophical Investigations is structured as a numbered series of points, about 700 of them. In the introduction he explains that he wanted to make it flow better but couldn’t manage, and he needed to publish in its current form lest it never get published. That seems to sum up why philosophy writing is so bad, generally.
Wittgenstein is, as philosophers go, fairly engaging—much of it is a litany of silly thought experiments. Like what if we say “There is a chair”, but then the chair vanishes. Then it reappears again, then vanishes. It’s a decidedly mid as a thought experiment, but now I’m into the absurd drama of whether there is a chair or not. I read this out loud to my husband and we’re both into it. This is what reading Philosophical Investigations is like, over and over.
But the book also lacks organization, and it would be difficult to lay out his main points. He often doesn’t really make arguments, but rather asks a lot of questions. Some of the questions are implicitly arguments, but some seem to be genuinely asking questions, as if to say, “This should be what we ask of philosophy!” Another barrier is that I’m not that familiar with the contemporary philosophies that Wittgenstein is largely responding to.
It helps a great deal that I do not need to understand him. If Wittgenstein says something that doesn’t make sense, I just move on with my life. The next item in my queue is a silly graphic novel and I’d like to get to that this lifetime.
Language Games
Wittgenstein describes how we use language as a “language game”. What is a language game? Wittgenstein deliberately refuses to define it. He compares it to “game”, which includes Chess to basketball to Ring Around the Rosy. It’s difficult to define, and there is no single property shared by every game, but it’s a category we nonetheless recognize. So too, language games are varied, playing by different sets of rules under different circumstances.
One example I think a lot about (though Wittgenstein doesn’t bring it up) is Theseus’ ship. Replace all the components of Theseus’ ship—is it still the same ship? There’s no clear answer, because it’s an outlandish scenario that it’s not covered in the rulebook, so to speak. On the other hand, humans cycle through most of their molecules over time, and we don’t worry that this makes them a different person. Our concept of object permanence obeys different rules depending on which language game we’re playing.
Wittgenstein discusses what it means for Moses to have existed. For example, if there was a man called Moses but he didn’t do all the things attributed to Moses, does that count? And what if he did all the things, but wasn’t called Moses? We could lay out a set of rules to determine whether someone does or does not count as Moses. But perhaps we prefer not to lay out any rules, and to lay out rules would be unfaithful to our deliberately ambiguous meaning.
One mustn’t think that “language game” means that anything goes. Perhaps there are some implicit rules about what it means for Moses to exist (in absence of explicit clarification), and it may be a fruitful philosophical project to try to describe them. My husband is fond of the “causal theory of reference” (from Saul Kripke, postdating Wittgenstein). This theory says that “Moses” refers to the entity that started a causal chain leading to our current reference to Moses. Isn’t that an interesting way to think about it? Wittgenstein would ask: does that describe how the language is used in practice?
Private sensations
Wittgenstein shows a particular interest in language games that concern our mental states. For example, how do we tell that someone is reading, as opposed to simply reciting the correct words from heart? We seem to have this sense that the text is guiding us, or is causally connected to what we say. But the sensation of reading is not itself what reading is, and one could imagine having the wrong sensation due to drugs or dreaming.
And what about declarations of capability, intent, expectation, thinking, understanding? If I intend to say something, what does that mean? Is it a description of the state of affairs? How do I know it? Is it possible to be wrong about it? How can intent refer to an action that doesn’t occur? Is intention an ongoing state of affairs, or could it be hidden even from oneself?
I suppose the conventional viewpoint is that we have private sensations of our own mental state, and are speaking about these sensations. However, Wittgenstein argues that there’s an important language layer. There are many different ways to experience intent, expectation, thinking, or remembering. And we have no real way of knowing that your private sensations and mine are the same. The commonality between your sensations and mine is the shared language we use to describe both. And the language isn’t really governed by the particulars of our private experience, it’s governed by practical use.
Philosophers have been interested in making our language more precise, to make our meaning unambiguous. But “meaning” also seems to rely on private sensations. For example, if I say, “This will stop soon”, I might mean that the music will stop soon, or that a pain in my arm will stop soon. How do I know which one I meant? How do others know what I mean? Meaning is often inferred from context and behavior.
Private Language
Famously, Wittgenstein argues against the possibility of a private language. This a hypothetical in which a person creates a language to describe their private sensations, but this language cannot be understood by anyone else, and bears no relation to our public language. This would be like playing a game of Chess in a world where no rules of Chess have been established. How, exactly, in this situation, could one ever play Chess right or wrong?
This is famously known as Wittgenstein’s private language argument. My husband says it was important because it conflicted with other contemporary philosophies at the time; however, I am not familiar with the other philosophies, so it’s not much use to me. He remarked that the weakness of the private language argument is that there isn’t much of an argument, and Wittgenstein mostly just asserts the conclusion.
Independent of whether I agree with the private language argument, I find it fascinating to compare to various real world scenarios. When people have aphantasia, perfect pitch, synaesthesia, these all concern variations in private sensations. And people don’t necessarily realize they have them, because the language we use to talk about our mental states is a shared language that creates an illusion of commonality across personal experiences. For people to identify variance in a private experience, we need to change our language.
Dear readers, do you have any thoughts on Wittgenstein?
Thanks for the summary: I would never have read it myself. My own book queue is filled mostly with light fantasy and popular science. I’ve been drawn to fantasy in the past years because good always prevails Real life has enough problems.
I have aphantasia: I was one of the many people who emailed the scientist who reported that a man lost his mind’s eye after a surgery. We reported that we never had one, thus spurring the research. At least since my 20s I wondered if other people did have a mind’s eye, because of a series of novels where visualization is key to magic use. I concluded that there was probably a continuum.
Interestingly, in about 2005 I was a participant in the Healthfraud mailing list, and the topic came up. The late Dr. Harriet Hall didn’t think anyone had an actual mind’s eye. She described remembering where on a book page a particular passage was, and thought that everyone remembered like that but just spoke as if they “saw” things.
Someone else was possibly hyperphantasic and described their experience. The discussion was limited, as it was off topic, but I remember it well.
This summer I told a friend that I don’t have a mind’s eye, and she asked how I think, in a very surprised tone. I told her with words, and I can remember spatial relationships without seeing anything.
The funny thing is that the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is known for the “picture theory of language”. …I’m pretty sure it’s just a metaphor, and doesn’t actually require that everybody thinks in pictures. But I wasn’t going to read that one to find out.
My mental images can be a bit tenuous, and tend to collapse if I actually try to draw them. Nonetheless, they are so ubiquitous that it’s really hard for me to imagine how aphantasics think.
First off, I would submit that private languages can exist, because there is a community of speakers: your past and future selves. If you go far enough forward and back, these are (or at least can be) quite different people from one another and from your present self. Which also shows that “the same person” and “not the same person” must exist on a continuum, rather than be a discrete binary. Which in turn exposes the conservatives’ outgroup/ingroup distinctions as incoherent (just like all other conservative stuff).
Second, as far as games are concerned, I would suggest that a game is a temporarily-adopted, socially-agreed-to set of rules and consequences, distinct from the unvarying laws of physics in that it is contingent and socially constructed.
Of course, by that definition, many things we don’t think of as games are games, including countries with their legal systems and statute books, as well as the economy and a number of activities including the conducting of science.
What makes a drawing a map? It corresponds to some territory; moreover, this correspondence is not accidental, but deliberate on the cartographer’s part. All maps are drawings, but not all drawings are maps. In like fashion, all histories are stories, but not all stories are histories (and which ones are is at the root of “truth vs. falsehood”). There’s some way that these things “correspond to some territory”.
The games that produce functioning civil societies, or edifices of scientific knowledge, or the production of enough food to maintain a population of billions instead of mere hundreds of thousands, likewise must have some “correspondence to some territory” that sets them apart from chess, Go, or Quake IV. But where the other things provided models of aspects of reality, these things provide adaptations that get useful results, similarly to biological evolution. A map looks like a lower-detail, shrunken copy of the territory; but an evolved beast like a bear or a wasp fits into its ecological niche like a key in a lock. It’s a negative, in a sense, instead of a straight copy. So is a useful-game like science, which I suppose you might call a “praxis”. Unlike most games (or most random key-like objects), praxes fit certain aspects of reality (certain locks).
A further implication is that the ability to invent new praxes necessarily requires the ability to invent and subsequently play arbitrary games, much as a keymaker must be able to make any arbitrary key, whether or not any particular such shape will ever happen to fit any lock in actual practice. It follows that any species capable of developing a technological civilization will exhibit social structured play, i.e., games. The development of that ability is a prerequisite, likely along with language, for developing a civilization; and perhaps the prime role of language is to transmit games, much as the prime role of DNA is to transmit (via gene expression) proteins and, in the large, phenotypic traits more generally. So, game-playing and its handmaiden, language, made us what we are.
There is also a political angle to this, and it ties in with that recent book The Dawn of Everything. There, it is noted that archaeological evidence indicates that the forming of oligarchic and coercive societies started out with, essentially, LARPing before people in some sense forgot they were just playing a game and began seeing it as an unalterable part of the fabric of reality instead. (This, also, seems to be the core point of the first “Matrix” film.) We ceased to be free the moment we forgot that some of the games we play are, in the end, just games (albeit, like models, some games are useful) and as such are contingent on ongoing social agreement to keep playing, and to keep playing by the current set of rules.
We should remember: any rule that’s not a law of physics is a game rule, and thus socially amendable. It is the duty of every citizen to apply critical thinking to these games and their rules, as surely as to view media messages with a critical eye. Call this “critical game theory”. Some of the games we play-seriously are generally useful — tax-paying keeps our roads paved and our defenses against armed invasion shored up, for example, and science continues building a hugely useful edifice of knowledge — but some are useful to only a few, at the expense of the rest of the players. Look for games that are rigged like a carny’s; the economy is replete with these, unsurprisingly, as with politics. This doesn’t mean those games should always be thrown out entirely, but they absolutely should be un-rigged, and that requires a critical mass of people recognizing that, and how, they are rigged — and that this rigging in the end requires their ongoing tacit acceptance to continue, consent that can be withdrawn once you are conscious of it.
I’ll have to put this on my reading list. Not that I’m completely unfamiliar with Wittgenstein’s ideas, but I’ve always felt when reading translations of German authors that I’m missing something. I can never put my finger just on it, but I’ve read translations of Goethe, Nietzsche and and Mann and always felt there were indications in these translations of ideas beyond what the translations could convey. I’m sure it was just me, but I put aside German authors as being somehow not quite satisfying. Which is strange because I don’t get that same feeling from translations of French, Italian, Spanish, or even Russian and Chinese works. I’ll have to give it another shot. Is there a translation someone recommends? And why they would recommend it?
While I can’t speak with any direct authority from reading his works, I have read a good deal in the field of semiotics, which Wittgenstein obviously had a huge influence on. I get the impression that either a person agrees with Wittgenstein, and even thinks his ideas are largely self-evident (although it took a genius to formulate them as clearly as he did). Or that Wittgenstein’s ideas don’t make any sense and he is trying to tear down the elaborate structure of philosophical thought created over the last few millennia. I’m not certain I fall into either camp, but that just may be that I’m not as familiar with his work as I should be. Or more probably, the structure of philosophy is far more durable and better able to withstand blows against it’s foundation than thinkers at the time thought it was. I suspect Wittgenstein’s ideas will probably eventually be one of the foundation blocks that ethicists construct their theories on.
I do like being inspired to read books I’ve only read of in other books. Thanks for that.
With regard to internal language of the brain, and then the translation of that language into sounds and symbols where we can communicate ideas to other brains, I believe Wittgenstein touches on the very basic problem of consciousness. The only method we have of evaluating independent agency in other creatures (including other human), is through translating their mental language into a form we can understand. There has been a long running argument about how the development of complex language among early hominids may have stimulated further complexities leading to the type of consciousness we have today. Did the creation of language terms for past, present, and future, allow our brains to conceive of those concepts or did those concepts develop in our brains prior to a common language to communicate them? Or, is it even possible that one Neolithic genius developed the concept of the passage of time and then created language to communicate those concepts and infect others in their clan with that concept? There are some fascinating observations with dogs recently, now that we have more widely available tools to allow them to indicate their mental states to us. Will this over generations lead to dogs with larger vocabularies and consciousness which we can communicate more freely? And at what point do we recognize that artificial intelligence has been achieved? That may not happen until after we find that the networks have developed an internal mental language they can use to communicate with other machines. We might not ever notice. Would an AI have to learn to slow themselves down far enough to communicate with humans? Would an AI having a conversation with a human feel like it is saying one word every two years while the human thinks they are speaking normally? Could we have a conversation that slow?
Personally, the phenomena which I consider to be my consciousness works with language, not images. I construct my thoughts in audible English as I type and I am thinking several words, even the occasional paragraph, ahead of my typing. I do not see the words spelled out in front of me, I hear them in my mental space as if they were spoken. I attempt to think logically and orderly, although I recognize that I am not a good judge of that. But while my mental world appears to me as if I was talking to myself in the English language, I also acknowledge that there is cogitation occurring below the conscious world of English words I think in. Our individual mental states certainly vary. Other people think very differently.
If the language we think in alone generates consciousness then there would be few differences in our conscious states. Communication between people would be simple. At the extreme there would almost be an gestalt consciousness where everybody had the same thought at the same time when exposed to the same environmental stimuli. To be honest, I think some part of our brains does act that way, and individual thought becomes less possible as crowd size grows. But at the same time, there are underlying traits which are unique to each individual, and create the private language which Wittgenstein was writing about. A language which must be translated into a common tongue to communicate with others, but of which some facets of an idea always get lost in that translation.
Which brings us back to why I stopped trying to read English translations of German texts. I will try again.
Oh this is great, I love this.
“My husband is fond of the “causal theory of reference” (from Saul Kripke, postdating Wittgenstein). This theory says that “Moses” refers to the entity that started a causal chain leading to our current reference to Moses.”
Intuitively, I think this is what people mean when they talk about if someone “really existed”- but how meaningful is it if it’s defined this way? Is there really a meaningful difference between “the original Moses was just a story and didn’t really exist” vs “the original Moses was a real person who is completely different from every idea that people now have about Moses”?
OR WHAT IF the original Moses was just a fictional character that someone made up, but by SHEER COINCIDENCE there also existed a person named Moses who did all the things that people now think Moses did. But with no actual connection to the passing-down of cultural ideas about Moses.
“If I intend to say something, what does that mean?”
Related to this, I often wonder what it means when people hear about something bad that happened to some stranger, and respond by saying “I hope they’re okay” or something along those lines. What does “hope” mean in this situation? It’s someone you’ve never met, whatever bad thing happened has no effect on your life at all, and you’re never going to actually find out what happened to them afterward and whether they were okay or not.
Statistically, bad things happen to people at a certain average rate every day. If I say “I hope they’re okay” does it mean I hope that the specific one I happened to hear about on social media is not in the group that died from whatever their problem was? (And therefore, other people, who I haven’t heard about, died instead.) But, why would that matter to me, I don’t know this person at all. Or does it mean I want the overall statistical average rate of this bad thing to decrease. Or does it mean I only want people to post on the internet about the cases where a bad thing happened but everyone was fine in the end?
There is an actual emotion being expressed when people say “I hope they’re okay” about some bad news about a stranger on the internet- but what does it actually mean?
(btw your link to Existential Comics is broken)
@Perfect Number,
The causal theory of reference allows you to attribute properties to Moses that were previously not known. e.g. it could be (hypothetically) discovered “Moses was a woman” or “Moses was two people”. If you take “Moses” to just be a person fitting the description of our stories, then it would not make sense to assign any conflicting description.
The interesting thing about this is how the meaning of “Moses” depends on an external chain of causation and *not* on a private sensation. This contrasts with the other example, “This will stop” (also taken from Wittgenstein).