childhood home a meeting place for artists, musicians and writers, including Gustav Klimt,. Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel ...
Chris Routledge & S. Chapman (eds), Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, Edinburgh University Press, 2004–2005. Word count: 2788
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (Josef Johann); (b. 1889, d. 1951; Austrian, naturalised British 1938), philosopher, engineer, teacher, architect, war prisoner. Fellow of Trinity College (1929); Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge (1939). Philosopher in the analytic tradition who introduced the idea of language both as the source of error and delusion concerning philosophical problems and as the method of getting rid of such errors. (See Also: *Austin, J.L.; *Grice, Paul H.; *Malinowski, Bronislaw; *Moore, G.E.; *Peirce, Charles S.; *Russell, Bertrand; *Searle, John.)
Wittgenstein was born in Habsburg Vienna to one of Europe’s wealthiest and most cultured families. His father Karl, who owned a large iron and steel company, made Ludwig’s childhood home a meeting place for artists, musicians and writers, including Gustav Klimt, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel and Arthur Schnitzler. All seven of his older siblings were artistically and intellectually gifted; three of his four brothers committed suicide. A contemporary of Adolf Hitler at a Realschule in Linz in 1904–5, Wittgenstein went on to study mechanical engineering in Berlin (1906), aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester (1908), and mathematical logic and philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Trinity College, from 1911 to 1914. From 1929 until 1947 he was a member of faculty of Trinity College, with sabbaticals in Norway and Ireland. From 1941 to 1944 he was given leave of absence to work at Guy’s Hospital, London, and at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Published in 1921 (German ed.; 1922 English ed.), his early work Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, written in part in the trenches of the First World War and sent to his
instructor *Russell from an Italian prison camp in 1919, presented a lively argument for the interconnectedness of the logical structure of the world, language and thought. The work was submitted as his doctoral degree, defended at Cambridge in June 1929 and swiftly approved by Russell and *Moore. It consists of seven principal propositions divided into further sub-propositions. For instance, Wittgenstein asserts in his characteristically terse style that the world is everything that is the case (§1); what is the case — a fact — is the existence of atomic facts (states of affairs) (§2); the facts consist of independent atomic facts (§ ), and the atomic facts are connexions of objects and things (§2.1). Set against the backdrop of Russell’s theory of knowledge, these propositions present the idea of simple objects, which are given in direct experience and in immediate awareness of one’s sensedata, and are represented in language by names. While still a student, in 1913, Wittgenstein retreated from philosophy and moved to Skjolden, where he lived as the reclusive — or frustrated — Mr Ludwig. When the war broke out shortly afterwards he immediately volunteered. Soon after the war ended he took a job as a primary school teacher in Trattenbach and in Ottenthal, lower Austria. Following this somewhat disastrous episode, he first worked as a gardener, and then in 1926–8 designed and built a brilliant but decidedly strange house for his sister Margaret Stoneborough–Wittgenstein. Meanwhile his Tractatus had become a subject of much interest in philosophical circles, especially in Vienna. Only in 1928 did Wittgenstein return to academic life. Orchestrated by Karl Menger, Friedrich Weissman and Herbert Feigl persuaded him to attend the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer’s lecturers for the Vienna Circle. Even though Wittgenstein never entirely accepted Brouwer’s original ideas about language, it is clear that he became preoccupied with them and with Brouwer. Wittgenstein’s transition phase, as it has come to be known, may be viewed as a reaction to Brouwer’s non-mathematical discussion on the
interconnections between mathematics, science and language. The encounter with Brouwer encouraged Wittgenstein to step out from the shadow of the Tractatus, and to repudiate, for instance, the earlier importance he assigned to the logical independence of elementary propositions. During his transition phase, he quickly embraced the view that meaning is not mediated in motionless naming but in dynamic, goal-directed and purposeful activities, most conspicuously illustrated in the processes of customary, habitual and institutionalised ways of using language. This new view is evidenced in the best known of his works, Philosophical Investigations, which was published two years after his death. The earliest versions of Part I go back to The Blue and Brown Books circulated at Cambridge in 1932–3, while the material in Part II was selected by the editors, G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, from manuscripts written in 1946–9. Both in substance and chronologically, the clippings included in the posthumously edited and organised Zettel (1967) may be regarded as representing an intermediate phase in his thought between the two parts of Investigations. Wittgenstein’s style of writing and dictating to a typist accords with his singular ineptitude in language, which was largely due to his dyslexic symptoms. His poor writing and reading skills did not deter him from attempting unified presentations and argumentative structures of his most remarkable and original philosophical ideas, even while these attempts were continuously frustrated not only by his extraordinary standards for philosophical rigour, intellectual honesty and self-criticism, but also by the difficulty of maintaining the complex network of his philosophical ideas in proper order and at easy recall. Among his considerable innovations in philosophy was his view of language as a goaldirected and use-governed system of communication. In this context, he coined the idea of a language game serving as the mediator between language and the world. The first pages of the Investigations show that the words of a text (or a complete primitive language) derive
their meaning from the role they have in certain non-linguistic activities that he called games. The fundamental purpose of games was not something residing in logic or language. He considered games conceptually prior to such symbolic codes, activities from which logic and language derived their meaning. Through an analysis of the workings of a language one might hope to dissolve philosophical problems, or to show that they are pseudo-problems endlessly dissipating along further cycles of analysis. His Nachlass (1998–2000), only recently published, has turned out to be invaluable in all aspects of his philosophy. For instance, it confirms that the notion of language game in his philosophy is not as ambiguous as often thought. Perhaps the most influential field of study in advancing views on language games has been the theory of speech acts (see *Austin, *Searle), a major topic in pragmatics. Yet, there are reasons to believe that the most intriguing forms of language games have little to do with speech acts or the related interpersonal communicative acts and modes of language in social contexts. The most interesting games that Wittgenstein advocated appear to be intralinguistic, and to work in the way they do because language has to function in a certain way, and has to acquire its meaning from different but interrelated processes and procedures as one game transforms to another. The key to meaning is the contextual shift, by which an expression gains and loses its meaning as the old language game gains credit or loses its point, just as a position or a move in a game gains and loses its power in the context of the game in which it is situated. This adoption of game was not accidental. Nachlass has revealed that game theory was not unknown to Wittgenstein: “The theory of the game is not arbitrary although the game is” (Wittgenstein, 2000, item 161, p. 15r, 1939). Apart from some isolated remarks concerning decisions and mathematical proofs, Wittgenstein did not show any particular interest in taking game-theoretic concepts further. This is not the end of the story, however. In 1937,
two years before the statement above, Wittgenstein had drawn an intriguing analogy between an application of economic theory and communications consisting only of words and commands. The analogy was followed by an explication of the idea of language games. The impact of game theory on economics was in its early stages in 1937 when Wittgenstein drew this analogy, but it shows that his idea of language games was by no means isolated from advancements elsewhere. Wittgenstein’s view of language marked a considerable step towards the science of pragmatics. To see the origins and growth of this view throughout his thinking we nevertheless need to go back to Wittgenstein’s Tractarian era. In 1914 (Notebooks 14–16), Wittgenstein was of the opinion that all propositions are unasserted, and assertions are merely psychological. His early conception of assertion revolved around this psychological view of assertions, as distinguished from strictly binary truth-valued propositions. The idea of extracting assertory elements from statements was maintained until after the final revisions to the Investigations, by which time the idea had taken a linguistic turn towards what later developed into the theory of speech acts. He considered and rejected possibilities, suggested by *Frege whom he had met in 1911, that sentences contain an Annahme (assumption) that is being asserted, or that there would be some special assertion signs, for instance question marks or signs pertaining to intonation, delineating the part of the sentence that is assigned a truth-value. Along with speech acts, Wittgenstein nonetheless repudiated the philosophical relevance of assertions signs. As the published version of the Investigations argues, what people say or assert is true or false, and they agree on what they say in that very same language, not some other language. Such language is an example of a life form of human beings, because any assertion turning out to be of contrary truth value than what was expected in intending it is an infringement of agreements made in the language. By uttering
false assertions, or by committing a material breach of what soon after Wittgenstein were formulated as conversational maxims (see *Grice), one runs a risk of penalties. Looking beyond Wittgenstein on this point, such penalties may actually be implemented by imaginary quantities deducted from the payoffs of a language game assigned to the overall conversational strategies of the parties engaged in communication. The idea of language as a form of life provides us with what has often been referred to as the common ground of language users. Forms of life are ways of experiencing, and the various ways of enjoying shared events in experience are what we all have and are mutually known and agreed to have by others. This formed the arena for one of the most important activities of language games according to Wittgenstein, namely the game of showing and saying what one sees to be the case in the context of the assertion. What Wittgenstein took use of language in ordinary life to presuppose is exactly these kinds of games. Language games function by way of roles in our ordinary life. One cannot call using language a game at all unless it is tied to what experience has provided, understood in the broad sense of encompassing all that can be communicated, given away or narrated by these games. Nurturing the common ground there needs to be a complex system of presuppositions and other related material in these forms of life. According to Wittgenstein, the moves in language games rest on tacit presuppositions, including the mutually agreed existence of the presuppositions themselves. Just how tacit these presuppositions and rules of language may be is shown by the fact that, under many circumstances, they are recognised and followed blindly, without intervention of conscious or aware interpretation. This is witnessed by such diverse issues as the implicit/explicit distinction uncovered in neuroscientific experiments and the habitual and non-consciously rational character of strategies ascribed to populations in evolutionary game theory. Further, it has turned out that spelling out the structure of
mutually agreed presuppositions along with the system of propositional attitudes involved in presuppositions may be extremely hard. Wittgenstein was influenced by a number of linguistically-minded philosophers, even though he referred to them sparingly. The difficulty of ascertaining particular influence is made more problematic by his habit of adopting the terminology of others for his own purposes, typically without acknowledgement. A good example is *Malinowski and his contextual theory of speech, which purported to show the essence of language by charting the invariants that are preserved through the range of linguistic variations, including linguistic forms influenced by physiological, mental, social and cultural elements. Malinowski thought that such an investigation would reveal the nature of the correspondence between meaning and form. Despite appearances, this project may not have influenced Wittgenstein. Even though he at one point played with thought experiments concerning what a tribe with a different culture might have meant by an expression that is recognised by us, his philosophical concept of a language was not grounded on sociological, anthropological or ethnographic investigations as was Malinowski’s, and he showed little regard for such empirically established contexts of language use. Another difference is that, for Wittgenstein, to talk about language or to give explanations of its use or function is something that can be done only in the same language, not in some preparatory or provisional language devised for that purpose. Whether a comparable view on the universality of language is found in Malinowski’s work is suspicious, since he endorsed the pragmatic definition of meaning as an effective change in the context of utterance. Typically, such pragmatic leanings are allied with the view that the semantic relations between the language and the world can be varied from a metalinguistic perspective.
Because of his own difficulties in understanding language, Wittgenstein was led to the search for other media, such as pictures. Already in the Tractatus, he had argued that a picture has the same logical form of representation as with what it pictures (§2.2), and that the logical picture of facts is the thought (§3). This view morphed into the language game idea of meaning as action that is in constant flux, dispensing with the earlier claim that representations could sustain the logical forms of the facts by a picture-like interior of elementary propositions, while preserving the pictorial character of the structure of the thought. Among the earlier dichotomies that Wittgenstein no longer wished to maintain was the distinction between saying and showing. Whereas under the Tractarian rule the relations between simple objects and names were given not by attempting to define the objects but by pointing at them and using demonstratives, his later more pragmatic account of meaning for complex propositions considered such relations across the varying contexts of assertions and shifting environments, including the intended meaning of the proposition possessed by the utterer. It is unfortunate that Wittgenstein did not have the analytic diagrammatic logic of *Peirce at his disposal to facilitate a precise logical analysis of the content of thought. The reason why Wittgenstein was not entirely happy with the picture theory of language was the imprecision and qualitatively imperfect character of pictures, which served badly the needs of understanding general assertions. By contrast, language games were conveniently subservient to those human activities that create such pictures, and hence the static link between pictures and the world came to be replaced by language games as the primary media of all communication. Among the precise analytic tools that Wittgenstein lacked but nevertheless recognised the need for were the tools for geometrical account of negation, for dealing with polarity in general assertions, for determining indefinite and vague pictures and
for interpreting non-literal meaning. All these residual problems would be amenable to a rigorous logical analysis in Peirce’s diagrammatic system of logic. In rejecting the view of naming relations as accounting for the meaning of objects, Wittgenstein took the idea of private language off the board. Understanding an utterance is not equal to contemplating some mental entity not publicly accessible to others than the interpreter of that utterance. Understanding language is something that the interpreter shares with the community of interpreters but does not need to be ultimately judged against the opinions of the others. Another of Wittgenstein’s famous concepts was the idea of rule-following. In trying to find their way in their environment, humans are remarkable in learning, habituating and mastering all kinds of rules. These rules Wittgenstein took to stand for the many signs, including linguistic and mathematical symbols, that are presented to the learner. To act according to a rule does not presuppose its understanding, however, because such acts are simply what humans do. During the last two years of his life, after retirement from Cambridge and having lived in Ireland, Wittgenstein worked incessantly on On Certainty (1969) and Remarks on Colour (1977). The former work serves to confirm that he did not espouse the notions of forms of life, or language games, to be culturally or socially relative notions by which language is learned, used and cultivated. Rather, the only way to ascertain the reliability or certainty of linguistic assertions, or beliefs, must come from considerations internal to language or the network of interconnected beliefs. This view committed Wittgenstein to universalism, in other words to the view that language and its meaning relations with the world cannot be observed from an outside perspective (Hintikka, 1996), but it did not lead to the relativistic and functional Weltanschauung of the Malinowskian kind, according to which such immutable meaning relations are viewed differently depending on the perspective and the
purpose of a single language user or a society of language users (Gellner, 1995). Moreover, recent research has unearthed evidence that Wittgenstein’s later views of language were anticipated by, or are to some extent consistent with, some of the chief elements of American pragmatism (see *Peirce) and the normative character of language espoused early on, among others, by Erik Ahlman (1892–1952) in 1926. Wittgenstein died of cancer on 29 April 1951, and is buried in Cambridge, Britain, in St Giles’s churchyard, off Huntingdon Road.
Primary Works
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Kegan Paul. (Trans. C. K. Ogden and F. P. Ramsey; trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinnes, London: Routledge, 1961.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell. (Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1956). Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Oxford: Blackwell. (Ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958). The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1961). Notebooks 14–16, Oxford: Blackwell. (Ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1967). Zettel, Oxford: Blackwell. (Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969). On Certainty, Oxford, Blackwell. (Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1974). Philosophical Grammar, Oxford: Blackwell. (Ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. Kenny.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1975). Philosophical Remarks, Oxford: Blackwell. (Ed. R. Rhees, trans. R. Hargreaves and R. White.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980–1992). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Oxford: Blackwell. (Vol. 1 ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 1980; vol. 2 ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue.)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1977). Remarks on Colour, Oxford: Blackwell. (Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. L. L. McAlister and M. Schättle.) Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1998–2000). Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, The Bergen Electronic Edition, The Wittgenstein Trustees, The University of Bergen, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Further Reading
Ahlman, Erik (1926). Das Normative Moment in Bedeutungsbegriff, Helsingfors: Druckerei der Finnischen Littetaturgesellschaft, B XVII: 2. Canfield, J.V. (ed.) (1986–8). The Philosophy of Wittgenstein, New York: Garland Publishing Company. Gellner, Ernest (1995). Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hintikka, Jaakko (1996). Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Hintikka, Jaakko and Merrill B. Hintikka (1986). Investigating Wittgenstein, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kenny, Anthony (1973). Wittgenstein, London: Allen Lane. Pears, David (1987). The False Prison, Oxford: Oxford University Press. von Wright, Georg Henrik (1982). Wittgenstein, Oxford: Blackwell.
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
