The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

Marie McGinn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136170690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Wittgenstein is one of the most important and influential twentieth-century philosophers in the western tradition. In his Philosophical Investigations he undertakes a radical critique of analytical philosophy's approach to both the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations introduces and assesses:

• Wittgenstein's life
• The principal ideas of the Philosophical Investigations
• Some of the principal disputes concerning the interpretation of his work
• Wittgenstein's philosophical method and its connection with the form of the text.

With further reading included throughout, this guidebook is essential reading for all students of philosophy, and all those wishing to get to grips with this masterpiece.

1

Style and Method

Philosophical Investigations §§89–133

Introduction

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is concerned with two principal topics: the philosophy of language and philosophical psychology. As soon as we open the book it is apparent that Wittgenstein’s way of treating these topics is quite unlike that of any other philosopher. First of all, the form of the book is quite unique. Instead of the usual chapters with titles indicating the topics to be discussed, the work is made up of distinct, numbered remarks, varying in length from one line to several paragraphs. Moreover, instead of presenting arguments and clearly stated conclusions, these remarks reflect on a wide range of topics – many of which recur throughout the work – without ever producing a clear, final statement on any of them. The punctuation that Wittgenstein uses is complex and distinctive; many of the remarks take the form of a conversation between Wittgenstein and an interlocutor, and it is not always clear whether we are to take the words on the page as an assertion of Wittgenstein’s, or of his interlocutor, or simply as the expression of a thought to be considered. Remarks often include questions for which Wittgenstein appears to provide no answer, or analogies whose point we cannot immediately see. Many more remarks include descriptions of concrete examples, both real and imaginary, which are quite unlike the examples in other works of philosophy, and which Wittgenstein never seems to use as the basis of a generalization.

It is Wittgenstein’s unique way of treating the topics he deals with that makes the Investigations so difficult to understand. It is not that his style is technical or abstract, but rather it is just not possible to see, in the style of the book, what Wittgenstein’s method is or how it is supposed to work. Yet understanding Wittgenstein’s method and its connection with the form of the text is the key to understanding the Investigations. This is so not merely because it is only by means of such understanding that we can know how to read the remarks that make up the work, but because Wittgenstein himself emphasizes over and over again that it is a method or a style of thought, rather than doctrines, which characterizes his later philosophy. It is, moreover, his insistence that his philosophical aims do not involve him in putting forward ‘any kind of theory’ (PI §109) that makes the question of method, and of how to read his remarks, such a difficult one, for it suggests that we cannot approach the book in the usual way, with a view to finding and extracting the claims which are made in it.

Wittgenstein himself is alive to the difficulty involved in understanding the remarks that make up the Investigations. In the Preface to the book, he expresses pessimism as to its being understood, and he frequently speaks of our being somehow resistant to thinking or approaching problems in the way he recommends:

I am trying to recommend a certain sort of investigation … [T]his investigation is immensely important and very much against the grain of some of you.

(WL, p. 103)

One difficulty was that [his method] required a ‘sort of thinking’ to which we are not accustomed and to which we have not been trained – a sort of thinking very different from what is required in the sciences.

(WLFM, p. 44)

We should not be surprised, therefore, if on first reading the book we cannot see the point of Wittgenstein’s remarks, or if we cannot see how we are supposed to make use of the examples he presents. At first sight, the book may well seem fragmentary and diffuse, so that it remains obscure precisely how Wittgenstein’s observations are to be brought to bear on the sort of problems about language and subjectivity which we are familiar with from traditional philosophy. The same sense of difficulty and disorientation is described by students who attended his lectures, in which the pattern of discussion closely mirrored the form of Wittgenstein’s written remarks:

The considerable difficulty in following the lectures arose from the fact that it was hard to see where all this often rather repetitive concrete detailed talk was leading to – how the examples were interconnected and how all this bore on the problems which one was accustomed to put oneself in abstract terms.

(Gasking and Jackson, 1978:51)

Faced with these difficulties, it may be tempting to treat the apparent fragmentariness of the text as a defect which we must overcome, by discerning, behind the individual remarks, an implicit or burgeoning theory of how language functions, of how our psychological concepts work, or of the nature of psychological states. The price of this is that we must then assume that the form which Wittgenstein was so careful to give to his work is irrelevant to his philosophical aims, and reflects nothing more than a stylistic preference, or even his inability to present his views in a more conventional format. Such an approach also means that we are no longer able to make sense of the large number of remarks in which Wittgenstein insists that ‘we may not advance any kind of theory’ (PI §109), that philosophy, ‘neither explains nor deduces anything’ (PI §126), that ‘[a]ll explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place’ (PI §109).

Some interpreters have clearly been willing to pay this price. For example, A.C. Grayling expresses the following view:

Wittgenstein’s writings seem to me not only summarizable but in positive need of summary … Nor is it true that Wittgenstein’s writings contain no systematically expressible theories, for indeed they do. It is the difference between what Wittgenstein says and the way he says it which is relevant here; the fact that his later writings are unsystematic in style does not mean that they are unsystematic in content.

(Grayling, 1988:v–vi)

I shall, however, take the opposite view, and assume that any convincing interpretation must succeed in making sense of both the form of the Investigations, and Wittgenstein’s remarks on the nature of his approach to philosophical problems; any other attitude is at odds, not only with his remarks on the nature of his investigation, but with the well attested care he took in both writing and arranging his remarks.

The Idea of Grammatical Investigation

Wittgenstein himself, as I’ve already remarked, is perfectly aware of the difficulty that faces us in trying to understand his work, and even of our resistance to his way of thinking. He sees this difficulty ‘not [as] the intellectual difficulty of the sciences, but the difficulty of a change of attitude’ (BT, p. 300). He wants us to undertake a new sort of investigation, one that directs itself, not to the construction of new and surprising theories or explanations, but to the examination of our life with language. For he believes that the problems that confront us in philosophy are rooted in ‘a misunderstanding of the logic of language’ (PI §93); they are ‘not empirical problems’, but are misunderstandings that ‘are solved through an insight into the workings of our language, and that in such a way that these workings are recognized – despite an urge to misunderstand them’ (PI §109).

Language is, for Wittgenstein, both the source of philosophical problems and the means to overcome them:

Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language.

(PI §109)

We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.

(CV, p. 11)

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.

(BB, p. 27)

The power of language to mislead through false analogies and misleading, surface similarities must be countered by our coming to see more clearly into the actual workings of language, that is, into how we operate with words, into how the concepts that make up the different regions of our language actually function. He suggests, in particular, that we have a general notion of the meaning of a word as something that is correlated with it, as something towards which we can direct our attention when we ostensively define a word, and that this picture of meaning ‘surrounds the working of language with a haze which makes clear vision impossible’ (PI §5). He believes that the ‘fog’ is dispersed by our coming to command a clear view of our employment of expressions, which we achieve through a careful study of our actual use of words in the context of our everyday lives.

In PI §90, he describes the kind of investigation he is engaged in, by which philosophical problems are solved through the clarification of our use of expressions, as ‘a grammatical one’. The idea of a grammatical investigation is central to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and it is the key to understanding his work. The Investigations can be seen as a large collection of particular grammatical investigations, which aim to resolve specific philosophical problems and paradoxes through a detailed examination of the workings of our language. These investigations of how a particular region of our language works are invariably subtle and complex, and how Wittgenstein uses them as a means to unravel philosophical problems can properly be understood only by looking at how his method works in practice. One of the principal aims of my exposition of the Investigations is to follow the line of Wittgenstein’s particular grammatical investigations very closely, in an attempt to show exactly how his grammatical method both diagnoses, and attempts to counter, philosophical confusion, through coming to command a clear view of our use of words. The general remarks on the grammatical method that follow are, therefore, intended to provide no more than a general indication of how Wittgenstein approaches philosophical problems, and of the way his approach confronts traditional philosophy.

Wittgenstein describes a grammatical investigation as one in which ‘we call to mind the kinds of statement that we make about phenomena’ (PI §90). This does not mean, however, that Wittgenstein is interested in what he calls ‘the construction of sentences’ or ‘the part of [a word’s] use … that can be taken in by the ear’ (PI §664). His use of the concept of grammar relates, not to language considered as a system of signs for the construction of well-formed sentences, but to the actual use or application of expressions, to how words are employed in our life with language. He calls this the ‘depth grammar’ of a word (PI §664), and it is something that can be discerned only if we attend to how we operate with words; not merely to the connection between one expression and another, but to the circumstances in which we use expressions, the circumstances in which we learn to use them, to the way their use is woven in with other activities, and to the criteria by which we judge whether someone has understood them.

The idea of a grammatical investigation is intended to draw our attention to what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game’, which he describes as ‘the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven’ (PI §7). Wittgenstein’s grammatical method is one in which ‘we call to mind’ the details of the distinctive patterns of employment – the grammar – of expressions, which constitutes their role in our life with language. The techniques that Wittgenstein uses to describe the grammar of our concepts are various. They include imagining a variety of circumstances in which we would use a given expression, asking how we teach its use to a child, asking how we know he has learned it, asking for the criteria on the basis of which we judge that it applies in a particular concrete case, looking at how it connects with other expressions, asking whether it would still be usable if certain facts of nature were different, imagining what we would say in a variety of peculiar cases, comparing our use of an expression with an example that Wittgenstein makes up, and so on. By using these techniques he attempts, not to systematize or regiment the rules for our use of words, but to evoke our life with signs; it is by making ourselves aware of the distinctive ways in which we employ expressions, as revealed in our life with language, that we clarify what Wittgenstein calls ‘the grammar of our concepts’.

The purpose of Wittgenstein’s evocation of the details of our practice of employing the different expressions of our language is twofold. On the one hand, he uses it to make us aware of the clash between our philosophically reflective idea of how a concept works and the way it actually functions, and on the other, he uses it to draw our attention to the profound differences in the patterns of use that characterize the expressions of our language. Wittgenstein labels the latter differences in use ‘grammatical difference[s]’ (PPF §62); making us aware of these differences is central to his grammatical method. When he speaks of our need for ‘an overview of the use of our words’ (PI §122), he is thinking both of our need to uncover the conflict between our philosophical notions and the way our concepts actually function, and of our need to become aware of the grammatical differences between concepts.

However, while he believes that it is only by achieving this sort of clarity concerning our employment of expressions that philosophical problems are diagnosed and overcome, he also recognizes that it is difficult for us to accept this switch of attention away from the construction of theories, or a concern with explanation, towards describing the details of our ordinary practice of employing expressions. We have certain intellectual habits that stand in the way of our undertaking the detailed, grammatical investigations that he is recommending, for we simply cannot see the point of describing how we operate with words:

We are not at all prepared for the task of describing the use of the word ‘to think’. (And why should we be? What is such a description useful for?)

(Z §111)

One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its application and learn from that.

But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing so. It is not a stupid prejudice.

(PI §340)

Wittgenstein is also aware that his idea that ‘we may not advance any kind of theory’ (PI §109), and his insistence that we are exclusively concerned with the clarification and description of our use of words, will create a sense of dissatisfaction and frustration:

Where does this investigation get its importance from, given that it seems only to destroy everything interesting: that is, all that is great and important? (As it were, all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.)

(PI §118)

The ve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface to the second edition
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Style and method
• 2. Wittgenstein’s critique of Augustine
• 3. Rules and rule-following
• 4. Privacy and private language
• 5. The inner and the outer
• 6. Intentionality: Thinking, imagining, believing
• 7. Intentionality: Thinking, expecting, intending
• 8. Seeing and seeing aspects
• Bibliography
• Index