The Blue Book

Overview

About eighty pages of notes dictated to a small group of students at Cambridge in 1933 and 1934, circulated in blue covers and published after Wittgenstein’s death. They open with the question what is the meaning of a word, and refuse to answer it by pointing to a mental object.

Instead Wittgenstein introduces the ideas that would carry the later philosophy: language games, family resemblance rather than shared essence, the craving for generality as a philosophical disease, and the argument that talking about my pain and your pain does not describe two instances of one private thing. It is the shortest way into the late Wittgenstein.

What happens

The meaning of a word. Wittgenstein asks what the meaning of a word is, notes that the question makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it, and argues that a word’s meaning is not a mental image or object accompanying it, since an image would need interpreting too.

Language games. He introduces simple invented languages, a builder calling for slabs and blocks, in which the whole use of a word can be surveyed, and proposes them as objects of comparison for our own language rather than as its foundation.

Understanding and rules. Understanding a word is not a mental process running alongside its use but the ability to use it, and following a rule cannot be explained by a further rule for interpreting it.

The craving for generality. The tendency to look for what all the things called by one name have in common, and to be contemptuous of the particular case, is diagnosed as a disease caught from the method of science, and family resemblance is offered in its place.

The self. Wittgenstein examines the use of the word I, distinguishes its use as subject from its use as object, and argues that the solipsist’s claim that only my experience is real is not a factual claim but a confusion about grammar.

Pain and privacy. The book ends by examining what it means to say my pain and your pain, and argues that the picture of two instances of one private thing, which no one else can have, rests on a misunderstanding of how the grammar of pain works.

How to read it

Read the opening refusal to answer what the meaning of a word is by pointing to a mental object as the direction of everything that follows, and notice how much of later philosophy turns on it.

Pay close attention to the language games, and use the builder’s language as a tool for looking at how words actually work rather than as a theory of what they must mean.

Notice the diagnosis of the craving for generality, and test it against Socrates’s demand in the Meno for what all virtues have in common.

Consider the closing treatment of I and of pain, and read it as the argument of the Investigations shown before it was compressed.

Read this book alongside the Philosophical Investigations to see the same ideas in plain dictated sentences and then in numbered remarks, and decide which form serves them better.

Questions it raises

• If the meaning of a word is not a mental object, what is it, and does saying that it lies in use answer the question or refuse it?
• Are language games a method or a theory, and can a philosophy that offers only objects of comparison say anything true about language as a whole?
• Is the craving for generality really a disease, and what happens to science, which lives by generality, if philosophy gives it up?
• What is wrong with the picture of my pain and your pain as two instances of one private thing, and does the argument show that there is no private experience or only that the picture misdescribes it?
• Why did Wittgenstein dictate rather than write, and what does the book’s origin as notes for a few students do to its authority?
• Is the Blue Book the clearest way into the later philosophy, or a stage Wittgenstein passed through, and does the Investigations correct it?