Biographical Sketch of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy

 Biographical Sketch of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy 

‘The philosopher,’ wrote Wittgenstein, ‘is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher’. Throughout his life Wittgenstein stood outside philosophical schools and despised contem porary fashions of thought; by his own work, whether he wished to or not, he created a new community of ideas. He published very little and avoided any kind of publicity; but the problems he discussed with a small group of pupils are now aired in universities throughout the world. ‘Philosophers who never met him,’ Gilbert Ryle wrote at the time of his death in 1951, ‘can be heard talking philosophy in his tone of voice; and students who can barely spell his name now wrinkle up their noses at things which had a bad smell for him.’1 In the two decades since 1951 nine posthumous volumes of writings have been published, and the bibliography of studies of them contains well over a thousand titles. 

Though he taught in England and died a British citizen, Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 of an Austrian family of Jewish descent. The family was rich and artistic, the father holding a prominent position in the Austrian iron and steel industry, and the nine children sharing a variety of talents. Typical of the family was Ludwig’s brother Paul, a concert pianist who resumed a distinguished international career after losing an arm in the First World War. Among the friends of the family was Johannes Brahms. 

Until he was fourteen, Wittgenstein was educated at home. Then, after three years of school at Linz, he studied engineering in Berlin. In 1908 he registered as a research student at the University of Manchester, where he designed a jet-reaction engine for aircraft. While he was designing the 

1. G. Ryle, Collected Papers (Hutchinson, 1971), vol. I, p. 249.

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propellor his interest shifted from engineering to mathematics, and later to the philosophical foundations of mathematics. As a youth he had read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, and had been impressed by the idealist philosophy of that work. Now he read Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and through it became acquainted with Gottlob Frege’s realist philosophy of mathematics. Under this influence he grad ually abandoned his early belief in philosophical idealism. 

In 1911 Wittgenstein visited Frege at Jena and was advised by him to study under Russell at Cambridge. He followed this advice and spent five terms at Trinity College in 1912–13. When he arrived there Russell and A. N. Whitehead had recently published Principia Mathematica, a classic of the new discipline of symbolic logic. Russell has frequently described his early encounters with Wittgenstein. 

At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said ‘Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?’ I replied ‘My dear fellow, I don’t know. Why are you asking me?’ He said, ‘Because if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher.’ I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was a complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term he brought me the fulfilment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence, I said to him ‘No, you must not become an aeronaut.’1 

While in Cambridge, Wittgenstein made friends with the philosopher G. E. Moore and the economist J. M. Keynes. Besides his studies in mathematical logic, he made some experiments in the psychology labora tory concerning rhythm in music. 

After five terms in Cambridge he went to live in Norway where he built himself a hut and lived in isolation until the outbreak of war in 1914. Notes and letters from this period survive and have been published posthumously: they show the germination of the philosophy which was to make him famous. In the preliminary remarks to some ‘Notes on Logic’ of 1913, he sketched an account of the nature of philosophy. It is not, he wrote, a deductive discipline; it cannot be placed side by side with the natural sciences. ‘Philosophy gives no pictures of reality and can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigations.’ Philosophy teaches us the logical form of propositions: that is its fundamental task (nb 93). This conception of philosophy he was to deepen and modify, but never to abandon. 

1. B. Russell, Portraits from Memory (Allen & Unwin, 1957), pp. 26–7. 

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When war broke out Wittgenstein enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian artillery. He served on the Eastern Front, where he was repeatedly decor ated for bravery, and in the southern Tyrol, where he was taken prisoner by the Italian army in November 1918. Some of his postcards and letters from the front survive and have been published by his friend Paul Engel mann. ‘I am working reasonably hard (on philosophy)’, he wrote in 1917, ‘and wish I were a better man and had a better mind. These things are really one and the same.’ And later: ‘Our life is like a dream. But in our better hours we wake up just enough to realize that we are dreaming. Most of the time, though, we are fast asleep’ (llw 5, 7). 

During his military service Wittgenstein wrote his philosophical thoughts into notebooks which he carried in his rucksack. Most of these were destroyed by his orders in 1950, but three survived and have been published posthumously. Out of these notes grew the only philosophical book he published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He composed it by selecting the best thoughts out of his notebooks and reordering and numbering them until he was satisfied with their sequence. One of his preliminary orderings has been recently rediscovered and published under the title Prototractatus. 

The Tractatus was finished in August 1918 and carried by its author into captivity. From a prison camp at Monte Cassino a copy was sent to Russell through the good offices of Keynes. The two philosophers discussed the manuscript line by line in Holland in 1919. It was published in German in 1921, and shortly afterwards in German and English with an introduction by Russell. 

The twenty thousand words of the Tractatus can be read in an afternoon, but few would claim to understand them thoroughly even after years of study. The book is not divided into chapters in the normal way, but consists of a series of numbered paragraphs, often containing no more than a single sentence. The two most famous are the first (‘The world is all that is the case’) and the last (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’). Some of them have proved easier to set to music, or to illustrate in sculpture, than to paraphrase. The style of the paragraphs is concise and economical, devoid of decoration, sparing in examples. By comparing the text with the Notebooks and the Prototractatus we can see how Wittgenstein refined and refined his thought to the essential elements. The result is austerely beau tiful, but uncommonly difficult to comprehend. 

The greater part of the book is concerned with the nature of language and its relation to the world, Wittgenstein’s major philosophical concern throughout his life. The central doctrine it conveys is the famous picture theory of meaning. According to this theory, language consists of 

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propositions which picture the world. Propositions are the perceptible expressions of thoughts, and thoughts are logical pictures of facts (tlp 3.5, 4, 4.001). 

Propositions and thoughts, for Wittgenstein, are pictures in a literal, not just a metaphorical sense. An English sentence, such as ‘Elephants never forget’ or ‘John is taller than he used to be’, does not look much like a picture. But this, according to the Tractatus, is because language disguises thought beyond all recognition (tlp 4.002, 4.011). 

However, even in ordinary language there is a perceptibly pictorial element. Take the sentence ‘My fork is to the left of my knife.’ This sentence says something quite different from another sentence containing exactly the same words, namely, ‘My knife is to the left of my fork.’ What makes the first sentence, but not the second, mean that the fork is to the left of the knife? It is the fact that the words ‘my fork’ occur to the left of the words ‘my knife’ in the context of the first sentence but not in that of the second. So here we have a spatial relationship between words symbol izing a spatial relationship between things. Such spatial representation of spatial relationships is pictorial in a quite straightforward way (tlp 4.012). 

Few cases, however, are as simple as this. If the sentence ‘My fork is to the left of my knife’ were spoken instead of written, it would be the temporal relationship between the spoken words, instead of the spatial relationship between the written words, which would represent the spatial relation ship between the physical objects. But this in turn is possible only because the temporal sequence of spoken words and the spatial array of written words have a certain abstract structure in common. It is in a similar manner that the score of a song, the notes sung by a singer, and the grooves of a record of the song have a structure in common (tlp 4.011). 

According to the Tractatus there must be something which any picture, of whatever kind, must have in common with what it depicts, if it is to be able to depict it even incorrectly. This irreducible shared minimum is called by Wittgenstein ‘logical form’. Propositions in general, unlike the untypical one chosen above, do not have spatial form in common with the situation they depict; but any proposition must have logical form in common with what it depicts. It is because of this shared form that propositions can truly be called pictures (tlp 2.18–2.182). 

In ordinary language, as has been said, the logical form of thoughts is concealed. There are many reasons for this, Wittgenstein believed, one of which is that many of our words signify complex objects. For instance, my knife consists of a blade and a handle related in a certain way: so that if the sentence ‘My fork is to the left of my knife’ is to be true, the blade and the handle must be in a certain relationship. This relationship is not pictorially 

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represented in the expression ‘my knife’ in the way that the relationship between knife and fork is pictorially represented by the whole sentence. It would be possible, no doubt, to bring out this relationship by rewriting the sentence into a fuller account of the situation, thus: ‘My fork is to the left of my knife-blade, and my fork is to the left of my knife-handle, and my knife blade is attached to my knife handle.’ But clearly, the fork, the knife-handle and the knife-blade are themselves complex objects consisting of parts in spatial relations. There appears to be no end to this further rewriting, or analysis, of the proposition, until we come to symbols which denote entirely non-complex objects. So, for Wittgenstein, a fully analysed proposition will consist of an enormously long combination of atomic propositions, each of which will contain names of simple objects, names related to each other in ways which will picture, truly or falsely, the relations between the objects they represent. Such full analysis of a proposition is no doubt humanly impossible to give; but the thought expressed by the proposition already has the complexity of the fully analysed proposition. The thought is related to its expression in ordinary language by extremely complicated rules. We operate these rules from moment to moment without knowing what they are, just as we speak without knowing the mechanisms by which we produce the particular sounds (tlp 3.2–3.24, 4.002). 

Such, in crude outline, is the picture theory of meaning. The outline will be filled in later in the book. Meanwhile we may notice that according to the theory one very important connection between language and the world is made by the correlation between the ultimate elements of thoughts, and the simples or atoms which constitute the substance of the world. How the correlation between the thought-elements and the world-atoms is to be set up, we are not told. Indeed Wittgenstein con fessed to Russell that he had no idea what the thought-elements were: it would, it seems, be a matter for psychology to discover (nb 129). One thing, however, seems likely: the correlation between names and what they name is something which each of us must make for himself; so that each of us is master of a language which is, in a sense, private to himself. 

Much of the Tractatus is devoted to showing how, with the aid of various logical techniques, propositions of many different kinds are to be analysed into atomic pictures and their combinations. Would-be pro positions which are incapable of such analysis reveal themselves as pseudo-propositions which yield no pictures of the world. Among these, it turns out, are the propositions of philosophy. Metaphysicians attempt to describe the logical form of the world; but this is an impossible task. A picture, Wittgenstein believed, must be independent of what it pictures: it must be capable of being a false picture, or it is no picture at all. It 

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follows that there can be no pictures of the logical form of the world, for any proposition must itself share that logical form and cannot be inde pendent of it. We cannot, so to speak, get far enough away from the logical form to take a picture of it (tlp 4.12–4.121). 

What the metaphysician attempts to say cannot be said, but can only be shown. Philosophy, rightly understood, is not a set of theories, but an activity, the clarification of propositions. The propositions which philoso phy clarifies are not themselves propositions of philosophy but non philosophical propositions about the world. When these propositions have been clarified the logical form of the world will mirror itself in them: and thus philosophy will exhibit, in non-philosophical proposi tions, that which cannot be said by philosophical propositions (tlp 4.112, 4.121). 

Above all, philosophy will not provide us with any answer to the problems of life. Propositions show how things are; but how things are in the world is of no importance in relation to anything sublime. ‘God does not reveal himself in the world,’ Wittgenstein wrote. ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’ (tlp 6.432, 6.44). The real problems of life, indeed, cannot even be put into questions. 

When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it. Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously non sensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only when an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (tlp 6.5–6.51) 

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (tlp 6.52–6.521) 

Wittgenstein’s condemnation of philosophical propositions as senseless applied, as he realized, to the propositions of the Tractatus itself. At the end of the book he compared it to a ladder which must be climbed and then kicked away if one was to enjoy a correct picture of the world. The Tractatus, like all metaphysics, was an attempt to say the unsayable. None the less, he believed, it contained all that was essential for the solution of the problems of philosophy (tlp, Preface). 

With perfect consistency, once he had completed the book he gave up philosophy. On returning home from the war he gave away the large fortune he had inherited from his father in 1912. In 1919 he went to a 

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teachers’ training college in Vienna and from 1920 to 1926 worked as a teacher in remote Austrian villages. He was desperately unhappy during this period, and his letters to Engelmann reveal that he several times contemplated suicide. ‘I know,’ he wrote, ‘that to kill oneself is always a dirty thing to do. Surely one cannot will one’s own destruction, and anybody who has visualized what is in practice involved in the act of suicide knows that suicide is always a rushing of one’s own defences.’ Life as a schoolmaster was a torment to him, and he could not respect the people he worked with. ‘I had a task,’ he wrote, ‘did not do it, and now the failure is wrecking my life. I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky. Instead of which I remained stuck on earth, and now I am gradually fading out.’ ‘The one good thing in my life just now,’ he wrote in 1920, ‘is that I sometimes read fairy-tales to the children at school’ (llw 29, 41). 

At last, in 1926, he gave up schoolteaching to work for a while as a monastery gardener. For two years he assisted in designing a house for his sister in the Kundmanngasse in Vienna. During this period he was intro duced to Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University and future founder of the Vienna Circle. With him, and with Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann and Herbert Feigl, he began once again to discuss philosophy. They read together the poems of Rabindranath Tagore and studied the Foundations of Mathematics of the Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey. 

Wittgenstein had by now grown dissatisfied with some of the doctrines of the Tractatus, and in 1929 he returned to Cambridge to continue his philosophical work as a research student. He submitted the Tractatus – already internationally recognized as a classic – as a Ph.D. dissertation; and after a unique viva voce examination conducted by Russeil and Moore he was awarded the degree. He became a research fellow of Trinity College and worked on a manuscript published posthumously as the Philoso phische Bemerkungen. 

During the vacations he returned to Vienna, where he found that the Vienna Circle had developed into a self-conscious philosophical move ment with a manifesto and a programme. Its best-known slogan, the rallying-cry of logical positivism, was the verification principle: ‘The meaning of a proposition is its method of verification.’ The logical posi tivists admired the Tractatus, and at this time of his life Wittgenstein stood quite close to their doctrines. But then as always he fought shy of party philosophy, though he continued his friendship with Schlick and Wais mann. The latter took notes of their conversations during the vacations of 

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1930–2, which were published posthumously in 1968 under the title Ludwig Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis. 

The early thirties were the most prolific period of Wittgenstein’s life. He wrote, but did not publish, two full-length books, Philosophische Bemer kungen and Philosophische Grammatik. In these works he recanted several of the characteristic doctrines of the Tractatus: he ceased to believe in logical atoms or to look for a logically articulate language cloaked in ordinary language. The centre of his interest shifted from the philosophy of logic to the philosophy of mathematics, and he wrote at length on the nature of mathematical proof and mathematical induction, on generality and infinity in mathematics. 

Philosophers of mathematics sometimes debate whether new branches of mathematics are discovered or created by the mathematician. According to realist philosophers, the mathematician is a discover; according to constructivist philosophers, he is a creator. Wittgenstein now sided very definitely with the constructivists. ‘History can be made or written,’ he said to Waismann; ‘mathematics can only be made.’ The realist Frege, he thought, had presented a mistaken alternative: either mathematics deals merely with marks on paper, or those marks stand for something. There is a third possibility, which Wittgenstein illustrated by considering the game of chess. The game is not about the wooden pieces, and yet the pieces stand for nothing; the significance of each piece is given by the rules for its movement. 

‘If you ask me,’ said Wittgenstein, ‘where lies the difference between chess and the syntax of a language, I reply: solely in their application. If there were men on Mars who made war like the chess pieces, then the generals would use the rules of chess for prediction’ (wwk 104). The comparison between mathematics and a game was worked out in detail in the Philosophische Grammatik. 

At the same time Wittgenstein grew more interested in the philosophy of mind. When he wrote the Tractatus he had thought that the study of such things as understanding, intention, desire and expectation was no special concern of philosophy (tlp 4.1121). Now he came to see that the study of such concepts was essential for the understanding of the nature of language and symbolism, and so belonged to philosophy and not just to empirical psychology. Consequently the Bemerkungen and the Grammatik contain detailed studies of mental concepts and the language used to express and report states of mind. 

From 1930 onwards Wittgenstein gave lectures almost every year in Cambridge. Many of his pupils have given descriptions of them. They were held in his sparsely furnished rooms, where for a while the most 

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conspicuous item of furniture was a fan installed to drown the noise of an undergraduate piano below. Wittgenstein sat in his deck-chair, in flannels, a leather jacket and an open-necked shirt. He used no manuscript or notes, but wrestled aloud with philosophical problems, interrupting his exposition with long silences and passionate questioning of his audience. 

He was exhausted by these classes, and after them would relax in the cinema, munching a pork-pie in the front row of the stalls, utterly absorbed. His favourite films were Westerns, just as some of his favourite reading consisted in detective stories without intellectual pretensions. He once said that he wondered how anyone who could read detective maga zines could face reading the philosophical journal Mind ‘with all its impotence and bankruptcy’. 

From the small classes in Cambridge the word went round that he was developing a radically new philosophy, different from that of the Tractatus and logical positivists. The class of 1933–4 had notes dictated to them about thought and meaning, about sensation and imagination, about realism, idealism and solipsism. These notes circulated in stencilled copies and became known as The Blue Book. Another more carefully prepared manu script dictated the following year was known as The Brown Book: it deve loped the comparison between language and games and investigated such psychological concepts as recognition and voluntariness. Unlike Wittgen stein’s other works, these notes were composed in English. They were pub lished posthumously and are the easiest to read and follow of all his writings. 

In 1935 Wittgenstein visited the Soviet Union: had it not been for the growing tyranny of Stalin, it seems, he might have settled there. Instead he went once more to Norway, and lived for nearly a year in his hut. There he worked on the book to which, until his death, he devoted the best of his philosophical labour: the Philosophical Investigations. 

He returned to Cambridge in 1937, and when Austria was annexed by Germany he became a British citizen. Notes of his classes in 1938 have been preserved by several of the students who attended them, and were pub lished in 1966 as Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. 

In 1939 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in succession to G. E. Moore, but before he could take up his chair war broke out. He served as a medical orderly during the war, first at Guy’s Hospital in London, and later in the Clinical Research Laboratory at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne. 

After the war he returned to his duties as professor, but as always he was unhappy in a formal academic routine. He thought university life led to hysterical artificiality. Writing to a pupil to congratulate him on his 

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doctorate of philosophy, he said ‘May you make good use of it! By that I mean: may you not cheat either yourself or your students. Because, unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s what will be expected from you.’ He described the life of a professor of philosophy as ‘a living death’ and after acting as a professor for only two years he resigned in 1947. 

He left Cambridge and settled for a while in Ireland, first on an inland farm and later in a seaside hut in Galway, where the fishermen remarked on his ability to tame birds. In Dublin in 1948 he completed the Philo sophical Investigations. 

In 1949 he spent some time in America as the guest of his friend Norman Malcolm at Cornell. Malcolm has written a Memoir of Wittgen stein which gives a vivid picture of the philosopher’s relationship to his friends and from which many details in this chapter are drawn. Wittgen stein once said ‘Although I cannot give affection, I have a great need for it.’ He made many friends, who were devoted to him in his lifetime and to his memory after his death. From Malcolm’s narrative it is clear that he was a demanding friend with exacting standards: Malcolm recalls the sharp rebukes he received for expressing distaste of powdered eggs, for allowing a potted plant to die, for a rash generalization about ‘the British national character’. ‘What is the use of studying philosophy,’ Wittgenstein wrote to Malcolm, ‘if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?’ 

Wittgenstein’s health had now begun to deteriorate, and after his return to England in the autumn of 1949 it was discovered that he had an incurable cancer. He spent the last two years of his life with friends in Oxford and Cambridge, working at philosophy so far as his disease permitted until his death. Some of the writings from the last year and a half of his life were published in 1969 under the title On Certainty, and another volume concerning colour-concepts is being prepared for publi cation. He died in Cambridge, at the home of his doctor, on 29 April 1951. 

The publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953 enabled the general philosophical public to acquaint itself at first hand with the philosophy that had developed out of the Cambridge classes and the privately circulated notes. Like the Tractatus the Investigations was composed by the repeated sifting and shuffling of paragraphs from note books, and since 1953 Wittgenstein’s literary executors have published two other volumes of selections from the same notebooks, under the titles Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) and Zettel (1967). Despite the similar method of composition, the Investigations contrasts 

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astonishingly with the Tractatus in style and content. The carefully numbered aphorisms are replaced by a sequence of paragraphs in conver sational tone. Where the earlier work was laconic and abstract, the later is diffuse and concrete, rich in vivid illustrations and colourful metaphor. But once again there are no chapters or chapter headings. 

Like the Tractatus, the Investigations is largely devoted to discussion of the nature of language, but following the developments of the thirties the Investigations treats in great detail the relation of language to thoughts and states of mind. Consequently the Investigations is a classic not only of philosophy of language, but also of philosophy of mind. 

As the Tractatus was dominated by the comparison between pro positions and pictures, so the Investigations returns over and over again to the idea that in language we play games with words. Like the picture theory of meaning, the concept of language-game was much more than a metaphor. Words, Wittgenstein now insisted, cannot be understood outside the context of the non-linguistic human activities into which the use of the language is interwoven: the words plus their behavioural surroundings make up the language-game. Words are like tools: their functions differ from one another as much as those of a saw and a screwdriver. But their dissimilarities of function are hidden by their uniform appearance in sound and in print. (Similarly, a clutch pedal is like a foot-brake to look at, but their mechanical functions are totally different.) The similarity between words of different kinds makes us assimilate them all to names, and tempts us to try to explain their meaning by pointing to objects for which they stand. But in fact the way to understand the meaning of a word is to study it in the language game to which it belongs, to see how it contributes to the communal activity of a group of language-users. In general, the meaning of a word is not an object for which it stands, but rather its use in a language (pi, i, 11–12, 24, 43). 

The study of language-games shows that not all words are names; but even naming is not as simple as it appears. To name something it is not sufficient to confront it and utter a sound: the asking and giving of names is something which can be done only in the context of a language-game. This is so even in the relatively simple case of naming a material object: matters are much more complicated when we consider the names of mental events and states, such as sensations and thoughts (pi, 1, 28–32). 

Wittgenstein considers at length the way in which a word such as ‘pain’ functions as the name of a sensation. We are tempted to think that for each person ‘pain’ acquires its meaning by being correlated by him with his own private, incommunicable sensation. This temptation must be 

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resisted: Wittgenstein showed that no word could acquire meaning in this way. One of his arguments runs as follows. 

Suppose that I wish to baptize a private sensation of mine with the name ‘S’. I fix my attention on the sensation in order to correlate the name with it. What does this achieve? When next I want to use the name ‘S’, how will I know whether I am using it rightly? Since the sensation it is to name is supposed to be a private one, no one else can check up on my use of it. But neither can I do so for myself. Before I can check up on whether ‘This is S’ is true, I need to know what I mean by the sentence ‘This is S’, true or false. How then do I know that what I now mean by ‘S’ was what I meant when I christened the first sensation ‘S’? Can I appeal to memory? No, for to do so I must call up the right memory: in order to summon the memory of S I must already know what ‘S’ means.1 There is in the end no check on my use of ‘S’, no possibility of correcting any misuse. That means the talk of ‘correctness’ is out of place, and this shows that the private definition I have given myself is no real definition. 

This argument is one strand of Wittgenstein’s famous attack on private languages. The conclusion of the attack is that there cannot be a language whose words refer to what can only be known to the speaker of the language. The language-game with the English word ‘pain’ is not a private language, because whatever philosophers may say, other people can very often know when a person is in pain. It is not by any solitary definition that ‘pain’ becomes the name of a sensation: it is rather by forming part of a communal language-game. For instance, a baby’s cry is a spontaneous, pre-linguistic expression of pain; gradually the child is trained by his parents to replace this with the conventional, learned expression of pain by language. Thus pain-language is grafted on to the natural expression of pain (pi, i, 244). 

What is the target of the attack on private language? Who is Wittgen stein arguing against? It is not as if there was in existence, when he wrote, an influential school of thought committed to the defence of private languages. Why is it important to show that they are not possible? 

It seems likely that in this part of the Investigations, as in others, Wittgenstein is arguing against his own earlier views. In the Tractatus 

1. In philosophy it is important to be careful to employ quotation marks when using a word to refer to itself, instead of using it in the normal way. Obviously enough, Rome is a city, ‘Rome’ is a four-letter word. Less obviously, in the paragraph above ‘S’ is a dummy name, S is a would-be sensation. Carelessness about quotation – though great philosophers, including Wittgenstein, have been guilty of it – can lead to confusion of symbols with what they symbolize. 

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the connection between language and reality depended on the correlation between elements of thought and simple atoms of the world. In the Investigations Wittgenstein argues that the notion of atoms which are simple in some absolute sense is an incoherent notion, and that a private correlation between thought-elements and items of reality is impossible to make. The ultimate data in the Tractatus are the atoms which form the substance of the world; the ultimate data of the Investigations are the forms of life in which the language-games are embedded. 

But the interest of the private-language argument is not merely internal to Wittgenstein’s own philosophy. Philosophers as different from each other as Descartes and Hume have thought it possible for an individual mind to classify and recognize its own thoughts and experiences while holding in suspense the question of the existence of the external world and of other minds. Such a supposition seems to entail the possibility of a private language or of something very like one. If Wittgenstein is correct in thinking such a language impossible, then both the Cartesian and empiri cist traditions in philosophy need radical overhaul. 

Moreover, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind had implications for empirical psychology. Philosophy of mind has often been a battleground between dualists and behaviourists. Dualists regard the human mind as independent of the body and separable from it; for them, the connection between the two is a contingent and not a necessary one. Behaviourists regard reports of mental acts and states as disguised reports of pieces of bodily behaviour, or at best of tendencies to behave bodily in certain ways. Wittgenstein rejected both dualism and behaviourism. He agreed with dualists that particular mental events could occur without accompanying bodily behaviour; he agreed with behaviourists that the possibility of describing mental events at all depends on their having, in general, an expression in behaviour. In his view, to ascribe a mental event or state to someone is not to ascribe to him any kind of bodily behaviour; but such ascription can only sensibly be made to beings which have at least the capability of behaviour of the appropriate kind. The Philosophical Investi gations is full of painstaking investigations of psychological concepts such as sensation, thought, understanding, volition. Experimental psychology, Wittgenstein believed, was often vitiated by conceptual confusion on these and kindred matters (pi, 11, 232). 

Despite the differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations there is continuity in Wittgenstein’s conception of the nature of philoso phy. He continued to regard philosophy as an activity rather than a theory, as the activity of clarifying propositions and preventing us from being led astray by the misleading appearances of ordinary language. But now the 

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way to clarify propositions is not to analyse them to reveal their hidden structure, but to show how they are applied in language-games. Still, as in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believes that the metaphysician must be shown that he has given no meaning to certain signs in his utterances; but the way to do this, in the Investigations, is to show that the signs have no part to play in a language-game. Wittgenstein still denies the possibility of philo sophical theses; the aim of philosophy is a therapeutic one, to cure us from talking nonsense and being tormented by problems for which there is no solution. When philosophy achieves clarity, this is not by the solution of philosophical problems but by their disappearance. ‘Why is philosophy so complicated?’ Wittgenstein once asked himself. His answer sums up his conception of its nature. 

Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, which we have foolishly put there; but to do that it must make movements which are just as complicated as those knots. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its method cannot be if it is to arrive at that result. 

The complexity of philosophy is not in its subject matter, but in our knotted understanding.1 

1. pb 52; translated by Norman Malcolm, The Philosophical Review, vol. lxxvi, p. 229.