Wittgenstein, Ludwig J. J.

(1889-1951)

Though he was born in Vienna and lived in Austria until 1912, Wittgenstein is often regarded as the most important English-language philosopher of the twentieth century. His extraordinary achievement was to have produced two profoundly influential but mutually incompatible philosophies in the course of his relatively short academic career.

Wittgenstein's early philosophical work was influenced by Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics, and its most complete expression was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 and then in English in 1922. At the core of this work was a view of language and meaning , according to which each sentence is a picture of some possible state of affairs. Sentences are combinations of names, which, in some ultimate analysis, must refer unambiguously to simple objects. For this relationship of picturing between reality, language, and thought to be possible, they must share a common logical form. But this logical form is, of course, not in the world and so cannot itself be pictured in language. Similarly, moral values and the relation of the self to the world are not states of affairs which can be pictured in language. These are metaphysical matters about which nothing meaningful can be said and about which one must be silent. Wittgenstein's early work was often misunderstood as sympathetic to the anti-metaphysical verificationism of the Vienna Circle . However, unlike the adherents of that school, Wittgenstein acknowledged the depth and seriousness of metaphysical questions, whilst denying their answerability.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy emerged piecemeal, in notebooks written during the 1930s and 1940s, and in his lecture-courses at Cambridge during the same period. It took the form of a devastating critique of the very view of language and meaning to which his earlier philosophy had been committed. The major source for this later philosophy is the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953).

This work begins with descriptions of a series of imaginary ‘language-games’ in the course of which Wittgenstein tries to dispel the powerful temptation to think that there must be some single underlying essence of all language, that this essence consists in some relation of representation of the world, and that words function primarily or exclusively through naming. As described by Wittgenstein, language-games are rule-governed human practices, in which the meaning of utterances is given by the part they play in the context of the practice. Generally, the meaning of a word or sentence is its use in such a practice, and so meanings can be as diverse as the practices and purposes to which humans may put them. Similarly, the rules governing language use are not somehow fixed for all time by a definition or logical formula, but are established by social practice itself. To give the meaning of a word is to describe the practices in which it is used, to consider how it is learned, and under what circumstances misuse of the word can be corrected.

This, in turn, forms the basis of one of Wittgenstein's most influential and controversial arguments. If meaning depends on use, and use is itself established only in the context of a human practice in which misuse can be detected and corrected, then there can be no such thing as a logically private language. The important consequence of this is that a whole range of pervasive ways of thinking about the language in which we talk about our inner, subjective life have to be rejected. Indeed, widely held images of language itself as an external expression of our inner thoughts are exposed as radically misleading. Wittgenstein insists that if the language in which we talk about our thoughts, dreams, imaginings, sensations, and so on is meaningful at all, then it can only be so in virtue of there being some publicly accessible way of learning how to use it correctly, correct misuses, and so on. As he puts it, an inner process stands in need of an outer ‘criterion’.

Wittgenstein has been widely misrepresented as a kind of behaviourist , but far from denying that we do have an inner life or even that we can meaningfully talk about it, he rather offers a powerful account of what makes it possible for us to do so. The possibility for practices of talking about subjective life to become established, and to be learned by children, is grounded in a repertoire of natural expressions of pain, pleasure, distaste, and so forth, which can reliably and consensually be recognized in the course of living a common ‘form of life’. Here, interpretations of Wittgenstein diverge. Is a shared form of life a common natural history, such as might define and distinguish species (Wittgenstein's writings contain often amusing references to the psychological capacities of dogs, or lions), or does it designate the culture of a people, as in anthropology? The latter interpretation takes some of its followers in the direction of culturally relative views on language, meaning, and rationality. The former interpretation would be consistent with a more naturalistic approach which linked the possibilities of human social and cultural life with certain facts of the natural history of the species.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy has been profoundly influential across the whole spectrum of humanities and social sciences. His account of meaning in terms of rule-governed social practice provided an important means for bringing philosophy and the social sciences back into communication with one another, and offered a powerful challenge to positivistic forms of social science methodology. It is also arguable that in his rejection of essentialism , his displacement of representation as the core image for thinking about linguistic meaning, and in his way of treating human subjectivity, Wittgenstein anticipated some key themes of post-modernism .

For a good short introduction to his work see, Wittgenstein (1988).