By Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language, meaning, and philosophical method
Subject
Themes
A passage from Augustine describes a child learning language by watching adults point at objects and name them: each word stands for a thing, and sentences are combinations of such names. This picture, though capturing something real, is dangerously incomplete. A shopper with a slip marked "five red apples" uses these words in entirely different ways: consulting drawers, matching colour samples, counting. The meaning of "five" is not some object; meaning lies in use.
A passage from Augustine describes a child learning language by watching adults point at objects and name them: each word stands for a thing, and sentences are combinations of such names. This picture, though capturing something real, is dangerously incomplete. A shopper with a slip marked "five red…
Published posthumously in 1953, two years after Ludwig Wittgenstein's death, the Philosophical Investigations arrived as a radical challenge to the analytical tradition Wittgenstein himself had helped to create. His earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) had argued that language mirrors…
The single most transformative claim is that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. This overturns centuries of philosophical tradition in which meaning was understood as a relationship between a word and an object, a mental image, or an abstract entity. Augustine's picture of language,…
The demand for strict definitions, for necessary and sufficient conditions that capture the essence of a concept, has dominated Western philosophy since Socrates. When Socrates asked "What is justice?" or "What is courage?", the expected answer was a definition that would apply to every instance and…
The private language argument is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophical arguments of the twentieth century. It attacks a deeply intuitive assumption: that each person has privileged access to a private inner world of sensations, and that language about sensations works by…
The notion of a "form of life" is among the most suggestive and least precisely defined concepts in the work. It appears at crucial junctures: "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life"; "the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life"; and agreement in language…
The discussion of aspect perception in Part II represents one of the most original and far-reaching contributions to the philosophy of perception and mind. Through the famous duck-rabbit figure, drawn from the psychologist Jastrow, a series of puzzles about the nature of seeing are opened up that…
A passage from Augustine's Confessions provides the starting point: a child learns language by observing adults naming objects, grasping that each sound corresponds to a particular thing. This Augustinian picture, where every word functions as a name for an object, captures something real but…
Knowing the alphabet is called a state of mind, yet this phrase conceals a grammatical confusion. A disposition (such as knowing how to read) is not the same kind of thing as a conscious experience, and the words "conscious" and "unconscious" paper over this difference rather than illuminating it.…
Certainty that fire will burn rests on induction, but what does this really mean? Not that one consciously argues from past experience to future expectation. The previous experience may be the cause of certainty rather than its logical ground, and the distinction between cause and ground matters…
Logical possibility is compared to chemical possibility. A chemical formula with the right valencies represents a possible combination, whether or not that combination actually exists. Similarly, what counts as logically possible is determined not by reality but by the grammar of our expressions. A…
An animal can be imagined angry, frightened, or happy, but not hopeful. Hope belongs only to beings who have mastered a language, because the phenomena of hope are modes of a complicated form of life. If a concept refers to a character of human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do…
Kinaesthetic sensations are said to advise us of our limbs' positions, yet moving a finger in a small pendulum arc produces barely any sensation at all, while the movement can be described exactly. "Knowing" how the finger moves means simply being able to describe it, not feeling a particular inner…
By Ludwig Wittgenstein
Subject
Themes
A passage from Augustine describes a child learning language by watching adults point at objects and name them: each word stands for a thing, and sentences are combinations of such names. This picture, though capturing something real, is dangerously incomplete. A shopper with a slip marked "five red apples" uses these words in entirely different ways: consulting drawers, matching colour samples, counting. The meaning of "five" is not some object; meaning lies in use.