Ludwig Wittgenstein · Philosophy
Wittgenstein returns to philosophy and overturns his own first book. Meaning is not a picture and words do not mean by labelling objects; the meaning of a word is its <em>use</em> in the practices of life. Language is a motley of ‘language-games’ woven into ‘forms of life’, with no single hidden essence.
Having written, in the Tractatus, a book he believed had solved philosophy, Wittgenstein gave up the subject entirely. He gave away his inherited fortune, worked as a village schoolteacher in rural Austria, as a gardener at a monastery, and designed a severely modernist house for his sister - convinced there was nothing left for philosophy to do. But in the late 1920s he was drawn back, partly through conversations with members of the Vienna Circle and the mathematician Frank Ramsey, who pressed objections he could not answer. He returned to Cambridge in 1929, and over the following two decades he developed a second philosophy so different from his first that the two can seem the work of different people. The later philosophy, contained chiefly in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), is not a refinement of the Tractatus but its systematic dismantling - a sustained attack on the very assumptions that had made the first book seem necessary.
What changed his mind? At the deepest level, Wittgenstein came to see that the Tractatus had been held captive by a single seductive picture of how language works: the picture that words mean by standing for objects, that a proposition means by picturing a fact, that beneath the surface diversity of language lies one hidden, crystalline logical structure, one essence of the proposition. This picture, he now thought, was not a discovery but a prejudice - a distorting lens through which language had been forced into a shape it does not really have. The later philosophy begins by setting this picture aside and looking, instead, at how language actually works in the countless concrete activities of human life. The result is a revolution: meaning is relocated from a mysterious relation of picturing or naming to the public practices in which words are used, and philosophy is transformed from a quest for hidden logical foundations into a patient therapy that cures us of the confusions our own language creates. The man who had drawn the limits of language from the inside now showed that there were no such fixed limits to draw - only the endless, shifting variety of what we actually do with words.
In place of the picture theory, the later Wittgenstein offers a slogan that captures his new account of meaning: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. To know what a word means is not to know what object it stands for (most words do not stand for objects at all - think of ‘and’, ‘perhaps’, ‘ouch’, ‘hello’, ‘five’, ‘the’), but to know how it is used - the role it plays in the practices and activities of a linguistic community. Wittgenstein offers a powerful image: words are like tools in a toolbox. ‘Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.’ Just as it would be absurd to ask what all tools have in common (some fasten, some cut, some measure, some hold) or to think they all work the same way, it is absurd to think all words work by naming. Words do different jobs; their meaning is the job they do, the use to which they are put.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that the later Wittgenstein rejected the picture theory: meaning is not a label or a picture but the use of a word in practice; language is a motley of ‘language-games’ embedded in ‘forms of life’, and concepts are united by ‘family resemblance’ rather than a common essence. Explain meaning-as-use and lang…
Leads to Augustine of Hippo.
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