Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe

To steal a description from Existential Comics, Wittgenstein solved philosophy in 1921 with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and then unsolved it again in 1953 with Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical Investigations is primarily concerned with what we mean with our language. Many 20th century philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) have tried to translate our language into something more precise, as if to uncover what we really mean. Philosophical Investigations argues that meaning is much more complicated, deriving from practical use.

I have a book queue that consists mostly of queer mystery and romance novels, but Philosophical Investigations was an oddball among them. I’ve been interested in Wittgenstein largely as a result of my husband. He has a degree in philosophy, and his seminar on Wittgenstein was particularly impactful. If you want to know what our banter sounds like, it’s not altogether unlike the text of Philosophical Investigations. I had never actually read it though, so I thought to correct that.

Wittgenstein is one of those subjects covered extensively by experts, and I’m definitely not one of those. I’m reading this casually. I’m in the habit of writing a bit about each book in my queue, so I’ll describe my experience and takeaways.

The reading experience

The majority of Philosophical Investigations is structured as a numbered series of points, about 700 of them. In the introduction he explains that he wanted to make it flow better but couldn’t manage, and he needed to publish in its current form lest it never get published. That seems to sum up why philosophy writing is so bad, generally.

Wittgenstein is, as philosophers go, fairly engaging—much of it is a litany of silly thought experiments. Like what if we say “There is a chair”, but then the chair vanishes. Then it reappears again, then vanishes. It’s a decidedly mid as a thought experiment, but now I’m into the absurd drama of whether there is a chair or not. I read this out loud to my husband and we’re both into it. This is what reading Philosophical Investigations is like, over and over.

But the book also lacks organization, and it would be difficult to lay out his main points. He often doesn’t really make arguments, but rather asks a lot of questions. Some of the questions are implicitly arguments, but some seem to be genuinely asking questions, as if to say, “This be what we ask of philosophy!” Another barrier is that I’m not that familiar with the contemporary philosophies that Wittgenstein is largely responding to.

It helps a great deal that I do not need to understand him. If Wittgenstein says something that doesn’t make sense, I just move on with my life. The next item in my queue is a silly graphic novel and I’d like to get to that this lifetime.

Language Games

Wittgenstein describes how we use language as a “language game”. What is a language game? Wittgenstein deliberately refuses to define it. He compares it to “game”, which includes Chess to basketball to Ring Around the Rosy. It’s difficult to define, and there is no single property shared by every game, but it’s a category we nonetheless recognize. So too, language games are varied, playing by different sets of rules under different circumstances.

One example I think a lot about (though Wittgenstein doesn’t bring it up) is Theseus’ ship. Replace all the components of Theseus’ ship—is it still the same ship? There’s no clear answer, because it’s an outlandish scenario that it’s not covered in the rulebook, so to speak. On the other hand, humans cycle through most of their molecules over time, and we don’t worry that this makes them a different person. Our concept of object permanence obeys different rules depending on which language game we’re playing.

Wittgenstein discusses what it means for Moses to have existed. For example, if there was a man called Moses but he didn’t do all the things attributed to Moses, does that count? And what if he did all the things, but wasn’t called Moses? We could lay out a set of rules to determine whether someone does or does not count as Moses. But perhaps we prefer not to lay out any rules, and to lay out rules would be unfaithful to our deliberately ambiguous meaning.

One mustn’t think that “language game” means that anything goes. Perhaps there are some implicit rules about what it means for Moses to exist (in absence of explicit clarification), and it may be a fruitful philosophical project to try to describe them. My husband is fond of the “causal theory of reference” (from Saul Kripke, postdating Wittgenstein). This theory says that “Moses” refers to the entity that started a causal chain leading to our current reference to Moses. Isn’t that an interesting way to think about it? Wittgenstein would ask: does that describe how the language is used in practice?

Private sensations

Wittgenstein shows a particular interest in language games that concern our mental states. For example, how do we tell that someone is reading, as opposed to simply reciting the correct words from heart? We seem to have this sense that the text is guiding us, or is causally connected to what we say. But the sensation of reading is not itself what reading is, and one could imagine having the wrong sensation due to drugs or dreaming.

And what about declarations of capability, intent, expectation, thinking, understanding? If I intend to say something, what does that mean? Is it a description of the state of affairs? How do I know it? Is it possible to be wrong about it? How can intent refer to an action that doesn’t occur? Is intention an ongoing state of affairs, or could it be hidden even from oneself?

I suppose the conventional viewpoint is that we have private sensations of our own mental state, and are speaking about these sensations. However, Wittgenstein argues that there’s an important language layer. There are many different ways to experience intent, expectation, thinking, or remembering. And we have no real way of knowing that your private sensations and mine are the same. The commonality between your sensations and mine is the shared language we use to describe both. And the language isn’t really governed by the particulars of our private experience, it’s governed by practical use.

Philosophers have been interested in making our language more precise, to make our meaning unambiguous. But “meaning” also seems to rely on private sensations. For example, if I say, “This will stop soon”, I might mean that the music will stop soon, or that a pain in my arm will stop soon. How do I know which one I meant? How do others know what I mean? Meaning is often inferred from context and behavior.

Private Language

Famously, Wittgenstein argues against the possibility of a private language. This a hypothetical in which a person creates a language to describe their private sensations, but this language cannot be understood by anyone else, and bears no relation to our public language. This would be like playing a game of Chess in a world where no rules of Chess have been established. How, exactly, in this situation, could one ever play Chess right or wrong?

This is famously known as Wittgenstein’s private language argument. My husband says it was important because it conflicted with other contemporary philosophies at the time; however, I am not familiar with the other philosophies, so it’s not much use to me. He remarked that the weakness of the private language argument is that there isn’t much of an argument, and Wittgenstein mostly just asserts the conclusion.

Independent of whether I agree with the private language argument, I find it fascinating to compare to various real world scenarios. When people have aphantasia, perfect pitch, synaesthesia, these all concern variations in private sensations. And people don’t necessarily realize they have them, because the language we use to talk about our mental states is a shared language that creates an illusion of commonality across personal experiences. For people to identify variance in a private experience, we need to change our language.

Dear readers, do you have any thoughts on Wittgenstein?