The later Wittgenstein
- Also called:
- linguistic philosophy
- Key People:
- Saul Kripke
- Sir Isaiah Berlin
A crucial turn that initiated developments that were destined to have a lasting and profound effect on much of contemporary analytic philosophy occurred in 1929, when Wittgenstein, after some years in Austria during which he was not philosophically very active, returned to England and established his residence at Cambridge. There the direction of his thought soon shifted radically away from the doctrines of the Tractatus, and his views became in many ways diametrically opposed to logical atomism. Because he published none of his writings from this period, his influence on other English philosophers—and ultimately on those in all of the countries associated with analytic philosophy—was exerted through his students and others to whom he spoke at Cambridge. His style changed too, from the semirigorous and formally organized propositions of the Tractatus to sets of loosely connected paragraphs and remarks in which ideas are often conveyed not discursively but by suggestion and example. One result of this transformation was a major division within the ranks of analytic philosophers, between those who practiced philosophy in the manner of the later Wittgenstein and those who preferred the Tractatus.
Although Wittgenstein’s thought ranged over almost the entire field of philosophy, from the philosophy of mathematics to ethics and aesthetics, its impact has perhaps been felt most where it has concerned the nature of language and the relationship between the mental and the physical.
Language and rule following
For the logical atomists, language was conceived as having a certain necessary and fairly simple underlying structure, which was expressible in terms of symbolic logic. In other words, the underlying structure of language is reflected in the logical rules that govern the construction of molecular propositions out of atomic ones. The later Wittgenstein, however, rejected this assumption. Language, he now thought, is like an instrument that can be used for an indefinite number of purposes. Hence, any effort to codify its operation in some small set of rules would be like supposing that screwdrivers, for example, can be used only to drive screws and not also to open jars or to jimmy windows. Language is a human institution that is bound only by what its speakers consider to be correct or incorrect. And that, in turn, is not really a matter for a priori theories to consider.
The conception of language as a logical calculus leads naturally to the idea that meaning is a kind of naming, or referring. Prior to Wittgenstein’s work in the 1930s and afterward, many philosophers, especially those influenced by logical atomism, held that, for at least a large class of terms—proper names and noun phrases, for example—the meaning of the term is just the particular entity in the world that it names. This view, according to Wittgenstein, ignores the huge variety of ways in which words can be meaningful, and more generally it assumes that meaning is fixed independently of the ways in which language is used and the activities in which it is embedded. Wittgenstein’s later conception of meaning is expressed in his well-known observation (which, however, he did not make without qualification) that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
The conception of language as a logical calculus was misleading in other respects as well. It suggested, for example, that in learning a language one learns the rules first and then goes on to apply them in speaking and understanding. But, in fact, one does not first learn the rules and then use the language; indeed, prior to learning the language, one would not know what to do with rules. Mathematics and logic are, in this sense, bad models for language, because they aim at setting out beforehand the rules and principles that are subsequently to be used. The “rules” that one might plausibly discern in the language that one speaks are not, as rules, already there, in a ghostly way, guiding what one says; they are either generalizations from the finite data of what is counted as correct or incorrect, or they are rules that, as Wittgenstein metaphorically expressed it, one puts away in the archives—one adopts the rule, but only after the fact.
The notion of following a rule was wrongly analyzed in many classical views about language, according to Wittgenstein. He cast irrevocable doubt on the prevalent theory—typified best, perhaps, in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)—that to use an expression meaningfully is to have in one’s mind a standard or a rule for applying it correctly. Against this theme, Wittgenstein’s point was that a rule by itself is dead—it is like a ruler in the hands of someone who does not know how to use it, a mere stick of wood. Rules cannot compel or even guide a person unless he knows how to use them, and the same is true about mental images, which have often been thought to provide the standard for using linguistic expressions. But if rules themselves do not give life to words but require a similar explanation for what gives them life—if there must be, in effect, rules that tell one how to apply the rules—then there is a useless regress and no philosophical or explanatory value in the assumption of an apparatus of internal rules and standards.
Relation between mental and physical events
In some respects Wittgenstein made significant breaks with the empiricist tradition, especially in his views about language and the explanation of the rigour of the deductive sciences. His treatment of the relationship between mental events and physical events also represents an important departure. Empiricists generally have started from the important assumption that what a person is immediately acquainted with is his own sensations, ideas, and volitions; that these are mental and not physical; and, most important, that the things he knows immediately are essentially private and inaccessible to others. For both Moore and Russell there then arose the problem of how, in view of the privacy stressed by the sense-datum theory, the world of physical objects could be known. Wittgenstein’s attack on this viewpoint, which has come to be known as the “private language” argument, has been much discussed, partly because it was in this area that Wittgenstein presented what could most easily be identified as a more or less formal argument—one that could then be analyzed and criticized in an analytic manner. Even in this case, however, his style of writing was such that the proper formulation of the argument has become a main source of controversy. Wittgenstein argued that the notion of an utterly private experience would imply: (1) that what goes on in the mental life of a person could be talked about only in a language that that person alone could understand; (2) that such a private language would be no language at all (this has been the main source of controversy); and (3) that the widely held doctrine that there are absolutely private mental events cannot be intelligibly stated, because to say that there are such events is to speak in a public language about things that supposedly can be referred to only in a private language understandable by just one person.
The fact that Wittgenstein’s argument against private language depends essentially on the question “What is it to follow a rule?” illustrates a common characteristic of his writings, viz., that themes developed in one area of philosophy continually emerge in apparently quite divorced areas. His extraordinary ability to see a common source of difficulty in philosophical problems that seem to be unrelated helps to explain his style of writing, which seems at first sight to be a somewhat chaotic arrangement of ideas.
For a time, analytic philosophy was attracted to a behaviouristic view of mental phenomena according to which apparently private mental events, such as the feeling of fear, are not really private and in fact are definable in terms of publicly observable patterns of behaviour. Empiricism’s orientation toward science, which is founded on observation, together with the view that the evidence one has of what goes on in the mental lives of other people must derive from what one sees of their behaviour, has often warred against another inclination of empiricism, which is to regard the starting point of all knowledge of the world, for each person, as being essentially private sense experience. Wittgenstein was tremendously influential, however, in suggesting that these two extremes are not the only alternatives. Yet attempts to state how Wittgenstein could deny the privacy of experience without espousing some form of behaviourism—which treats emotions, desires, and attitudes as dispositions to behave in certain ways—have not been very successful. Sympathetic interpreters have taken up the notion of “criteria,” which Wittgenstein used but did not develop in any detail. The idea is that, for mental states such as fear, outward behaviour (e.g., running away, blanching, or cringing) does not constitute what it is to be in that state, as behaviourism would have it, but neither is such behaviour merely evidence of some completely private event. The problem has been to characterize the relation between behaviour and mental states in such a way that the two are neither identical nor evidence for each other while still allowing that knowledge of a person’s characteristic behaviour is essential to understanding the notion of a certain mental state.
The “therapeutic” function of philosophy
For the later Wittgenstein and many philosophers influenced by him, the proper role of philosophy is not, as it was for Russell, to develop theories in answer to philosophical problems but to clear up the conceptual confusions through which philosophical problems arise in the first place. These confusions invariably come about through misunderstandings of the complicated ways in which terms with philosophical import—such as know, believe, desire, intend, and think—are used in everyday life. Philosophers who are thus “bewitched” by language have been led to wonder, for example, how one can know what is going on in another’s mind or how desires and emotions can produce physical changes in the body, and vice versa. Examination of the actual workings of psychological language would, on this way of looking at philosophy, “dissolve” rather than solve the problems, for it would reveal features of the psychological concepts involved that philosophers, in their original formulation of the problems, had ignored or misunderstood. Philosophy is thus not an avenue to discovering philosophical truths but a kind of conceptual “therapy.” As Wittgenstein observed in the Philosophical Investigations (1953), the aim of philosophy is “to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”
Critics have argued that this way of looking at philosophy reduces the discipline to a sterile, inward-looking, and ultimately uninteresting enterprise. However, the confusions that philosophy, thus conceived, seeks to clear up need not be only those of philosophers. Scientists, for example, sometimes produce or presuppose philosophical theories that affect how they conduct their research—which, therefore, may be a fitting subject for philosophical therapeutics. Behaviourism in psychology seems to presuppose a philosophical theory and perhaps to be based on a general confusion about psychological concepts. More recently, some philosophers have suggested that contemporary cognitive science—and in particular the field of artificial intelligence, which views the human mind as a kind of computer—also is based on conceptual confusions created in large part by misunderstandings of the complexities of psychological speech. On this view, therefore, philosophy can have a therapeutic value beyond the sphere of philosophy itself.
