Philosophical Investigations

Summary

Philosophical Investigations is the major work of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, published in 1953, two years after his death, in a bilingual German and English edition with a translation by his student G. E. M. Anscombe. It consists of numbered remarks, from a single sentence to a page long, in which Wittgenstein questions, imagines examples, answers an imaginary interlocutor and frequently turns against views he himself had held in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the preface he calls the book an album of sketches of a landscape, written over sixteen years. The book opens with a passage from Augustine's Confessions in which Augustine recalls learning to speak by watching his elders point to objects and name them. Wittgenstein takes this as the picture of language as naming: every word stands for an object, and its meaning is that object. To test the picture he imagines simple language-games, such as a builder calling out block, pillar, slab and beam to an assistant who brings them. Words, he argues, are used in many different ways, like the tools in a toolbox, and for a large class of cases the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Speaking is part of an activity, a form of life. Asked what all language-games have in common, Wittgenstein replies by looking at games: board games, card games, ball games and ring-a-ring-a-roses share no single feature but a network of overlapping similarities, which he calls family resemblances. He then examines what it is to understand, to read, and to follow a rule, such as continuing a numerical series. No interpretation by itself can fix what counts as following a rule, since any interpretation can be interpreted again; following a rule is a practice, grounded in training and agreement in how people act. A celebrated series of remarks considers whether there could be a private language, whose words refer to the speaker's own sensations and could be understood by no one else. Using examples of pain and of a diary in which someone writes a sign for a recurring sensation, and the image of a beetle in a box that no one else can see, Wittgenstein argues that such words would lack any criterion of correct use; our words for sensations are learned and used within public life. Later remarks treat thinking, imagining, intending, expecting and the nature of philosophical problems themselves, which he says arise when language goes on holiday. Philosophy, he writes, leaves everything as it is; its work is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The volume also contains a second part, called in the 2009 revision Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, which discusses seeing aspects, including the duck-rabbit figure. The book shaped ordinary language philosophy and later work in philosophy of mind and language. It is under copyright, and this record does not include a text.

Plot or Argument

• Preface

  Wittgenstein describes the remarks as the result of sixteen years of work, an album of sketches crossing a wide field of thought, and acknowledges grave mistakes in his first book.

• Sections 1-64: Augustine's picture and language-games

  The naming picture of language from Confessions I.8 is tested against the builders' language-game, ostensive definition, the variety of uses of words, and the idea of simple constituents.

• Sections 65-88: Family resemblance and vagueness

  Games share no common essence; concepts with blurred edges can still be used; an explanation of meaning need not remove every possible doubt.

• Sections 89-133: The nature of philosophy

  Philosophical problems arise from misunderstanding the workings of language; philosophy describes rather than explains, assembles reminders, and seeks a clear view of our use of words.

• Sections 134-242: Understanding and following a rule

  Understanding is not a mental state behind use; reading, continuing a series and obeying a rule rest on training, practice and agreement in forms of life.

• Sections 243-315: The private language argument

  Sensation words, pain behaviour, the private diary and the beetle in the box show that a language intelligible only to its speaker would lack criteria of correctness.

• Sections 316-693: Thought, intention and the mind

  Remarks on thinking, imagining, meaning something, expecting, intending and willing resist the picture of inner processes that accompany words.

• Second part: Philosophy of psychology

  Remarks on seeing aspects, such as the duck-rabbit, on the expression of belief, and on how far we can know another person.

Characters

• Ludwig Wittgenstein, author

  Questions himself and an imaginary interlocutor throughout the numbered remarks.

• Augustine, quoted author

  His account of learning language in Confessions I.8 opens the book.

• The interlocutor, imagined objector

  A voice that states the tempting philosophical views Wittgenstein examines.

• The builders, imagined example

  Two workers whose four-word language-game tests the naming picture.

Lessons

• Meaning as use

  Wittgenstein challenges the idea that every word names a thing. He asks readers to look at how words function in activities, like tools in a toolbox, and concludes that for a large class of cases a word's meaning is its use in the language.

  • Why does Wittgenstein begin with Augustine's account of learning to speak?
  • What does the builders' language-game show about naming?
  • Think of a word like hello or ouch. What does it name, if anything?

• Family resemblance

  Asked what all games have in common, Wittgenstein tells the reader not to think but to look, and finds overlapping similarities rather than one shared feature. The idea has been applied to many concepts that resist definition.

  • What kinds of games does Wittgenstein compare, and what does he find?
  • Can you define a game? Test your definition against examples.
  • Does every useful concept need a precise definition?

• Following a rule

  A pupil who continues a number series correctly up to a point and then goes wrong raises the question of what makes one continuation right. Wittgenstein argues that rules are followed in practices learned through training, not by consulting a private interpretation. Philosophers continue to debate how to read this argument, notably since Saul Kripke's 1982 interpretation.

  • What does the pupil adding two do after 1000, and why is it a puzzle?
  • Why can an interpretation of a rule not settle what the rule requires?
  • What role do teachers and communities play in learning to follow rules?

• Is my pain private?

  The private language remarks ask whether words for sensations could get their meaning from inner objects only the speaker can see. Wittgenstein's beetle in a box suggests that the private object drops out of the language-game, and that our sensation words are woven into shared expressions and responses.

  • What is the beetle in the box meant to show?
  • How, according to Wittgenstein, does a child learn the word pain?
  • Does his argument deny that sensations are real, or only a certain picture of them?

Context

In his early Tractatus Wittgenstein had held that language pictures facts through a logical form shared with the world, a view that influenced the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. After returning to Cambridge in 1929 he came to reject much of it, partly in conversation with the economist Piero Sraffa and the philosopher Frank Ramsey. His lectures and dictated notes, such as the Blue and Brown Books, circulated among students before his later views were published.

Composition

Wittgenstein worked on the remarks from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, arranging and rearranging them in a series of typescripts; he dated the preface January 1945 and continued revising. He did not publish the book in his lifetime. His literary executors, G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, published it with Basil Blackwell in Oxford in 1953, with Anscombe's English translation facing the German. A revised fourth edition by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (2009) renamed the second part Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment.

Reception

The Investigations is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophical books of the 20th century and shaped ordinary language philosophy at Oxford, later philosophy of mind and language, and work in the social sciences and theology. Interpreters disagree about its aims: some read it as offering theses about meaning and mind, others as a purely therapeutic method for dissolving confusions, and Saul Kripke's reading of the rule-following remarks as a skeptical paradox has been both influential and widely contested.

Comparisons

• russell-problems-of-philosophy

  Russell, Wittgenstein's first teacher in Cambridge, treats knowledge by acquaintance with sense-data, the kind of private inner object the Investigations calls into question.

• confessions

  The Investigations opens by quoting Confessions I.8 on how the infant Augustine learned words, and the whole book can be read as a long conversation with that passage.

• an-essay-concerning-human-understanding

  Locke holds that words stand for ideas in the speaker's mind; Wittgenstein's private language remarks test exactly this picture of meaning.

• meditations-on-first-philosophy

  Descartes begins from the certainty of his own mind; Wittgenstein argues that even our words for inner experience depend on a shared public practice.

• frazer-the-golden-bough

  In separate remarks on The Golden Bough, Wittgenstein objected that Frazer treated rituals as mistaken science; the Investigations' attention to forms of life develops a related view of practice.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The quotation from Augustine at the start and how often Wittgenstein returns to it.
• The builders' language-game in the opening sections and the toolbox comparison.
• The survey of games in §66 and the instruction to look rather than think.
• The pupil who continues a number series in an unexpected way in the rule-following remarks.
• The beetle in the box in §293 and the remarks on pain around it.

Key terms and names

Language-game

Wittgenstein's name for a simple or real practice of using words together with the actions it is woven into, such as giving orders or reporting.

Form of life

The shared patterns of human activity within which speaking a language makes sense.

Family resemblance

A pattern of overlapping similarities among things grouped under one word, with no single feature common to all.

Ostensive definition

Explaining a word by pointing to an example, which Wittgenstein shows already depends on understanding a great deal.

Private language

A supposed language whose words refer to what only the speaker can know, such as his immediate sensations.

Interlocutor

The imagined voice in the remarks that raises objections and states tempting philosophical views.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What picture of language does Wittgenstein find in Augustine's account of learning to speak?
2. Comprehension Describe the builders' language-game. What can its speakers do with their four words?
3. Interpretation Why does Wittgenstein compare words to the tools in a toolbox?
4. Interpretation What is the point of the beetle in the box?
5. Interpretation Why does Wittgenstein say philosophy should describe rather than explain?
6. Big Question Could a person who grew up entirely alone have a language?
7. Big Question If meaning depends on use within a community, how can words speak truly about God, who is beyond all human practices?

Faith Connections

• Augustine, Confessions I.8 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine recalls learning words as his elders named and pointed to things. Wittgenstein opens with this passage; Augustine's wider account also stresses the gestures, tones and shared life through which a child enters speech, which Wittgenstein's critique brings forward.

• Genesis 2:19-20 (Scripture)

  Adam names the animals as God brings them to him. The scene is often read as an image of language as naming, the very picture the Investigations examines, though in Genesis naming already takes place within a relationship and a task.

• Genesis 11:1-9 (Scripture)

  At Babel a shared language makes common work possible and its confusion ends it, a narrative counterpart to Wittgenstein's claim that language lives within shared forms of life.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 13 (Great Conversation)

  Aquinas asks how human words, learned from created things, can be said of God, and answers with analogy. Wittgenstein's attention to the many uses of words offers a different route into the same question.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If words got their meaning by naming objects, including private inner objects, then meaning would be fixed by what the speaker privately has in mind. But a private sign could have no criterion of correct use, and words are in fact used in many ways within shared activities. Therefore meaning is not a private object behind the word but, in a large class of cases, the word's use within a form of life.

Rhetorical device: thought experiment and imagined interlocutor. In §293 Wittgenstein imagines everyone owning a box with something called a beetle in it that no one else can see, and answers his interlocutor's insistence on private objects by showing the beetle drops out of the language-game.

Debate: Resolved: that the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain the private language argument using the diary example and the beetle in the box, and evaluate whether it shows that the inner life depends on public language.

Comparison with Confessions: Wittgenstein opens by quoting Augustine on learning to speak. Read Confessions I.6-8 and argue whether Wittgenstein's criticism fits Augustine's full account.

Medical Lens

The private language remarks use pain as their central example: how a child learns to replace crying with words, whether one can be certain of another's pain, and what grounds a first-person report of sensation. These questions bear on clinical practice, where symptoms are known through patients' reports and behaviour, and Wittgenstein's work has been drawn on in philosophy of psychiatry and in discussions of pain assessment; such applications are interpretive. He describes philosophical methods as like different therapies and philosophical problems as a kind of bewitchment by language, and some readers compare his method to psychoanalysis, which he discussed with interest and reservation elsewhere. The second part's remarks on seeing aspects, such as the duck-rabbit, engage with Gestalt psychology. Wittgenstein worked as a porter and dispensary assistant at Guy's Hospital in London and in a medical research laboratory in Newcastle during the Second World War, though the book does not draw on that work.

• Part I, §§243-246

  How words for sensations are learned, with the example of a child who has hurt himself, and the question whether pain is private.

  Pain Mind Body
• Part I, §§258 and 293

  The diary of a recurring sensation and the beetle in the box.

  Pain Mind Body
• Part I, §§109 and 133

  Philosophy as a struggle against the bewitchment of the intellect by language, and its methods compared to therapies.

  Philosophy AS Therapy
• Second part, section on seeing aspects

  The duck-rabbit and the experience of an aspect suddenly changing, discussed with reference to psychology.

  Psychology Unconscious Mind Body

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Invent a language-game with four words, as in the builders' example, play it in pairs, and then discuss what the words mean.

• Essay

  Try to define game, then test your definition against Wittgenstein's examples in §66. What does the exercise show about definitions?

• Dialogue

  Write a dialogue between Augustine and Wittgenstein on how a child learns the name of God.

Further Reading

• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk

• Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul A. Kripke

• Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy, David Pears