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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Part I, §§258 and 293

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

• Part I, §§109 and 133

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

• Second part, section on seeing aspects

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