Philosophy 104: History of Western Philosophy
The Contemporary Period

Course Notes: Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Wittgenstein children were given classical educations in the home, at the father's direction. For Ludwig, this did not work out well, and at 14 he was unable to make the transition into Gymnasium. He stumbled along through various lesser schools and was finally sent to a technical college, in Berlin, where he hoped to study engineering. In 1908, he traveled to England and enrolled in Manchester University, where he hoped to study aeronautical engineering.

Struck with various mathematical and logical problems in his engineering education, Wittgenstein became increasingly interested in mathematics and, then, with the foundations of mathematics in general. Russell's Principia Mathematica was recommended to him and he read it with excitement. In 1912, then, he went to Cambridge to study with Russell.

Wittgenstein spent only five terms at Cambridge and did not finish a degree but it was a period of tremendous development. He was strongly influenced by both Russell and Moore, though he was perceived as a disciple of Russell. Russell himself wrote, "[Wittgenstein] is the ablest person I have come across since Moore."

When the First World War broke out, Wittgenstein was home in Vienna and he wasted little time in enlisting. He served from 1914 through the early part of 1918 but was captured by the Italians when the Austro-Hungarian war effort collapsed. He spent more than a year in an Italian prisoner-of war camp. Throughout the War, Wittgenstein had continued to think through the logical problems that had dominated his interests at Cambridge. The result was a manuscript for his book Tractatus Logico Philosophicus which he finished while in Italy. After the War, he managed to get the manuscript to Russell who finally succeeded in getting it published, along with an introduction by himself. It appeared in German in 1921.

The War experience had a great impact on Wittgenstein. First, he gave up the life of a millionaire's son and embraced a simple life without much regard to material well being. Second, since his Tractatus seemed to have solved all the problems of philosophy, he gave up philosophy. (It is noteworthy that Russell, too, at one time in his life, thought he had solved all of philosophy's issues and went on to other things.) The Tractatus remained Wittgenstein's only published book throughout the remainder of his life.

From 1920 through 1926, Wittgenstein taught in a succession of appointments to primary schools in small communities surrounding Vienna. Each position came to an end because of growing friction with parents. In 1926, he gave up the schools and returned to cosmopolitan Vienna. In the next three years, his life was turned around by two sets of events. First, he became involved in the construction of a large house for one of his sisters, first helping the architect and then taking over completely the design and fabrication. This brought him back into his engineering education. Second, Moritz Schlick, who had been assembling a circle of scientists and logicians to discuss scientific method (the beginning of Logical Positivism in the so-called Vienna Circle), arranged a number of meetings with Wittgenstein to go over the Tractatus in detail. This brought him back into philosophy.

The result of this period was Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge where he completed a year of residence requirement and passed his Ph.D. Examination on the basis of his book. In 1930, he began a five-year fellowship at Cambridge and, in 1939, he succeeded Moore in his chair as Professor of Philosophy. But WWII broke out almost immediately and Wittgenstein's teaching was delayed until 1945 when the War ended. He taught only two academic years and then resigned. Life at head table was distasteful to him.

From 1947 until his death in 1951, Wittgenstein worked through his final philosophical positions. In spite of the fact that his health was declining throughout the period, he completed (though did not publish) his Philosophical Investigations. Other works "by Wittgenstein" are either notebooks taken as dictation or written out later as notes or they are fragments of work in his own hand that were later put together and organized by his students. An example of the former is the Blue and Brown Books; an example of the latter is a book that bears the name Zettel. In German, this literally means "scraps of paper." This book was created quite literally from scraps of paper that were found in Wittgenstein's possession, in boxes, at the time of his death. His book, On Certainty, was found in manuscript form, unfinished, at his death.

One of the most telling of Wittgenstein's observations was written in the Preface to Tractatus, where he declared that he had dealt in a definitive way with all that which can be said, but on the other hand whatever can be said (that is, is capable of expression) seemed to be very little indeed. Of far greater philosophical significance was that about which language could say little. In the work of his second period at Cambridge, he attempted to address these more essential issues that simply had earlier seemed to escape expression at all.

After his return to philosophy and Cambridge, Wittgenstein was launched on a passionate philosophical adventure which left little time, or inclination, for polished publication. His style, accompanied by a few students, was to sit in his college quarters, where there was only a chair and a small writing table, and to think his way through one problem after another, pausing (sometimes insufferably long, according to student recollections) for long periods of silent introspection and reflection. Toward the end of his life, Wittgenstein suffered from ill health due to cancer and spent decreasing amounts of time teaching. He was protected by his older students who also became the guardians of his thought.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the 20th Century's greatest and most important philosophers.

Reflections on Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein's philosophy is uncompromising. He wastes no time rehearsing the typical problems and issues of the philosophical tradition; he simply assumes that we are aware of those problems and the people who dealt with them. He dwells, instead, on examples and counter-examples --- an intimidating mass of them.

As suggested above, Wittgenstein's work in philosophy breaks into two periods. In fact, the early and late periods seem so different from each other, at first reading, that many people suppose that Wittgenstein made a complete turn-about in his philosophical views. This, however, is far from the case. There is good evidence to indicate that Wittgenstein held a consistent view about philosophy, language, and logic throughout his career. Central to this view is the assumption that philosophical questions must be thought or expressed and, hence, that language is always the medium in which philosophical questions are considered. From that starting point, Wittgenstein adopted the critical stance that philosophical problems arise from language errors. If we could only get language right, philosophical problems would dissolve away! In fact, Wittgenstein never changed this opinion.

In his early phase, writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed the problem lay in misunderstanding the logic of language. Therefore, if we could just analyze the logic of language with sufficient care and certainty and then apply that understanding consistently, we would eliminate philosophical dilemmas. In his later phase, he altered this strategy in a single but crucial respect; he dropped the implicit assumption that there is a single logic of language. Thus, his focus throughout the later years turned to the multitude of diverse languages with which we deal with the world and the equally diverse logics through which each is constructed. Let us examine this in some detail.

Russell suggested that there are really just two types of meaning that are possible for language --- coherence and correspondence. And, when we look at the possibilities for a coherence theory of empirical language use, that is, stating things about the world around us, the weaknesses of arbitrariness, etc, seem obvious. Thus, Russell's conclusion is that language is meaningful by virtue of correspondence with the world. Wittgenstein himself, in his Tractatus, fully developed the correspondence theory of language as a picture (mirror) of objects and relations in the world. In that sense, the logic of language is that atomic propositions denote objects of the real world and compound propositions denote objects in relation to each other, or events. Logically consistent language use accurately pictures the real world. There can be nothing problematic about this. When we carefully guide language use, philosophical problems will simply disappear from the scene. In his preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote, "I . . . believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. [meaning the problems of the logic of language and, hence, thought] And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved." [my emphasis] That is, when we believe that all we can really talk about is the objects of the world and the events that transpire for them, we actually find the discourse quite barren and uninteresting.

One of the factors that changed Wittgenstein's directions was his involvement with the Vienna Circle [Logical Positivists] in the late 1920s. Desperate to find a grounding of empirical science, the Circle was attempting to use Wittgenstein's logic of language to demonstrate that science, and only science, was meaningful discourse about the world and was also claiming, incidentally, that no other discourse had meaning. While engaged in conversations with members of the Circle, Wittgenstein began to see the unreasonableness of pressing this point of view. In fact, couldn't language be constructed in different ways, depending on how it was to be used and in relation to what it was to be used?

Most of Wittgenstein's examples, in Zettel, call our attention to ordinary language uses that (a) are commonly meaningful to us and (b) are clearly not meaningful because we can identify and elevate some object or set of relations in the world that the language use pictures. People understand me when I say, "It was my intention to stop by the Post Office but I became distracted by something else." Yet, what object or relation in the world are we supposed to make reference to as the corresponding picture? It is far too simplistic to claim that language is meaningful just because (and just in so far as) it pictures a single real world.

What, then, is Wittgenstein's answer? How should we understand meaning? It is, Wittgenstein claims, a matter of viewing language in the context of use. In particular, we have various purposes in using language and these determine how we will use it and what our meanings are. For convenience, Wittgenstein calls these Language Games. The name is "directive" in the sense that, if we recognize that something going on is a game, we know that we need to proceed by learning the rules and objectives of the game. Thus, if I want to know what a group of language users are saying to each other, what they mean, I need to learn the rules and objectives involved in defining the context of their language use, their Language Game.

Suppose I come into a room, late at night, and find the television on. I say, sharply, "Why is the TV on in here?" My 14-year-old son says, "Well, Dad, the household is connected through some very low-resistance wires to the continental US power network and the TV is directly connected through an unbroken series of conducting wires to this primary household hookup and, furthermore, a specific switching device on the TV has been set in the ON position, which enables electron flow." After I threaten his life, he admits that he turned it on (the explanation I wanted) even though he was supposed to be studying in his room. What is an explanation? Clearly, in this Wittgensteinian example, there are different explanation Language Games which depend, at the very least, on the context in which the Why question is asked and, hence, the purposes we have in asking them.

One of the great benefits of Wittgenstein's analysis is that we now see that some questions we ask are systematically misleading. The question has the appearance of being meaningful because all of the words are commonly known. The sentence in which the question is asked may be entirely correct grammatically; however, it is misleading because crucial words in the question, or subordinate propositions, come from different Language Games. Thus, unless it is possible to form a hybrid Language Game from the two separate contexts of language use, we are stuck in actually determining what the question means. Gilbert Ryle called this a category mistake. The old "two-tables paradox" is easily solved by viewing it as a category mistake. There is no interesting paradox between the two views --- a solid mahogony table versus a "porous" assemblage of atoms --- since the two descriptions come from two entirely different Language Games that are not required to co-exist in any uniform description. If we want to play one game, that is fine; but we should do it consistently.

For Wittgenstein, much of traditional philosophy consists of category mistakes. We should look skeptically at philosophical questions and always ask whether we are confusing ourselves by mixing Language Games. In what context, Wittgenstein asks, does it make sense to say, "I know that I see a chair." In one context, I easily say this because I also see a desk, books, a wall, and a carpet; I do not, however, see a cat. It is a typical inventory of things I can see and discuss with other people. But this is not the Language Game the philosopher supposes; that Language Game is supposed as a context in which the chair is construed to be a physical object separate from me, as observer. Yet what is the contrast class; that is, what would it be that gives sense to this Language Game by being something I might see, normally, and that would not be a physical object separate from me? When G. E. Moore held up his two hands, in a Cambridge lecture on philosophy, what did he mean when he said, "I know that I have two hands." Does the philosopher ever succeed in making clear what he/she means by questions/statements like this?

On Certainty

The Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations are the only books that Wittgenstein himself published. All the rest of his philosophical work has dissipated in the memories of those who made personal contact with him or has been literally pasted together from his extensive collection of notes. This book is no exception. It is, however, unique in two respects. First, Wittgenstein was still at work on it when he died; second, all the pieces were clearly organized around a single theme --- Moore's confident claim to certain knowledge regarding a largish number of common-sense propositions.

In his "Proof of an External World," Moore held up one of his hands and said to his audience, "I know that here is one hand." Wittgenstein suggests that, "if you do know [this], we'll grant you all the rest." The issue, then, is with the word 'know'. Usually, when I say that something is known, there is a definite sense in which others could doubt what I say, and I am saying that these grounds for doubt are lacking here. This is the way the word 'know' fits into the language-game. Later (11), Wittgenstein says, "we just do not see how very specialized the use of 'I know' is." The question is whether Moore's use of 'know' makes sense.

At the end of this first section (61), Wittgenstein suggests that "a meaning of a word is a kind of employment of it . . . What we learn when the word is incorporated into our language." He uses the expression language-game for at least two reasons. First, it suggests that, like games, there are several languages. Second, also like games, it suggests that each language has particular objectives and rules. The meaning of a word becomes clear when we watch how its employment fits into the game we are playing. If we change the game (65), then the meanings will change also. Similarly, we cannot remove a word from one language-game context and expect that its meaning will transfer into its use in a different language-game.

Since Moore claims to be playing the language-game of common sense, Wittgenstein holds up his use of the word 'know' to the common-sense rules of knowing. That is, how do we normally employ the word 'know'? And does Moore's use correctly follow these understandings?

The second section (66-192) clarifies Wittgenstein's criticism of Moore considerably, by examining the internal structure of language-games --- especially common sense --- more thoroughly. Crucial to this analysis is #94 --- "But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false." From #95 through #100, he suggests that these propositions are rather like a mythology, a world picture. We can't begin to doubt, make judgments, and know things until we have a picture within which to work. Acceptance of this picture supplies us with and makes sense of the rules and procedures for further study.

This position that Wittgenstein takes means that no system of knowledge can be verified right down to its fundamental grounds. "At some point one has to pass from explanation to mere description." (189) And, "the difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing." (166) Doubt, finding grounds for belief, and knowing are all things that occur within a context or world picture. It is the character of that context that subtly tells us how we are allowed to doubt.

How do we learn the common-sense picture of our world? As children, we learn it from adults. Only after we have the picture, can we begin to doubt various things; the picture teaches us how to doubt. The problem with Moore's statements is that they are descriptions of his world picture and do not fall within the range of things we can know, which are by nature dependent on that picture.

In the third section (193-299), extends essentially the same analysis to the question of "certainty." If we suggest that we are absolutely certain about something, meaning that there is absolutely no doubting of it, then we are expressing what Wittgenstein calls "subjective certainty." In effect, we are just reciting one or another part of our world picture. But is there such a thing as "objective certainty"? Can Moore mean his "I have two hands" in any way that is not merely an expression of subjective certainty? (245)

Note #205: "If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false."

Wittgenstein suggests, "'I have telling grounds for my certitude.' These grounds make the certitude objective." (270) Nor, he says, are these telling grounds anything I decide. (271) Such grounds, in other words, are agreed upon by the users of the language-game. Uncertainty means that we can raise doubts about something; but doubting means understanding how we can inquire further. After inquiry into something along these lines, we either do or do not have grounds for certainty on the issue. The objectivity of certainty stems from the guidance that language users give to this whole undertaking.