Philosophical Investigations
by Ludwig Wittgenstein · Philosophische Untersuchungen
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists
Published two years after Wittgenstein's death, and written against his own earlier Tractatus. In numbered remarks rather than chapters, he attacks the assumption that words work by naming things and that meaning is a mental accompaniment of speech. Meaning is use, learned in the practices he calls language games; rule-following cannot be secured by any further interpretation; a private language would have no criterion of correctness; and philosophical problems are confusions to be dissolved rather than theories to be built. Part two, on seeing aspects and the inner life, includes the duck-rabbit and the remark that the human body is the best picture of the soul.
We recommendPhilosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim SchulteWiley-Blackwell, 2009The revised fourth edition, with facing German and the corrections Hacker and Schulte made to Anscombe's text.
As an Amazon Associate, The Great Books earns from qualifying purchases. Bookshop.org links also support this site. How this works.
- Written
- 1953
- Form
- Treatise
- Language
- German
- Length
- Long · 300 pp300 to 700 pages
- Difficulty
- Formidable5 of 5 for a first-year reader
G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte translation
Buy on Amazon: Philosophical Investigations, opens in a new tabBookshop.org: Philosophical Investigations, opens in a new tab
Why it's on the list
Attacking the assumption that words work by naming things, and replacing it with meaning as use learned in language games, turned philosophy of language from a search for the relation between words and world into a description of what speakers do. Arguing that following a rule cannot be secured by any further interpretation, and that a rule is followed blindly within a practice, produced the problem that has occupied philosophers of mind and language ever since. Showing that a private language, whose words referred to sensations only its speaker could know, would have no criterion of correctness and so would not be a language, struck at the Cartesian picture of the mind as an inner theatre. Treating philosophical problems as confusions to be dissolved rather than theories to be built gave the century a new idea of what philosophy is and a book that has never stopped being argued about.
Key themes
- Language and rhetoric
- Attacking the assumption that words work by naming things, and replacing it with meaning as use learned in language games, turned philosophy of language into a description of what speakers do.
- Knowledge and truth
- Following a rule cannot be secured by any further interpretation, since every interpretation can itself be interpreted, and a rule is followed blindly within a practice.
- The self and identity
- A private language would have no criterion of correctness and so would not be a language, and the inner life is moved into the public forms of life that give it sense.
- Reason and passion
- Philosophical problems are confusions to be dissolved by assembling reminders of how words are used, and the philosopher's task is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
- Education
- The book begins with Augustine learning to speak and returns constantly to how a child is trained into a practice, since the way a word is taught shows what it means.
Which translation to read
Our pick
Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009
The revised fourth edition, with facing German and the corrections Hacker and Schulte made to Anscombe's text.
Amazon: the G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte translation, opens in a new tabBookshop.org: the G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte translation, opens in a new tab
Overview
About three hundred pages, published in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein’s death, and written against his own earlier Tractatus. In numbered remarks rather than chapters, he attacks the assumption that words work by naming things and that meaning is a mental accompaniment of speech. Meaning is use, learned in the practices he calls language games; rule-following cannot be secured by any further interpretation; a private language would have no criterion of correctness; and philosophical problems are confusions to be dissolved rather than theories to be built.
Part two, on seeing aspects and the inner life, includes the duck-rabbit and the remark that the human body is the best picture of the soul.
What happens
Augustine’s picture. The book opens with Augustine’s account of learning to speak by having objects pointed out and named, and shows through the builders’ language of slabs and blocks that naming is only one of countless things words do.
Language games and family resemblance. Wittgenstein multiplies the uses of language, giving orders, describing, reporting, joking, praying, and argues that they have no common essence but a family resemblance, and that the demand for a definition is a demand the practice does not need.
Understanding and rules. Understanding is not a mental process accompanying use, and following a rule, as in continuing a series, cannot be secured by any interpretation of the rule, since interpretations can themselves be interpreted; a rule is followed within a practice, blindly, as we have been trained.
The private language argument. A language whose words referred to private sensations, known only to its speaker, would have no criterion for using a word correctly and so no distinction between seeming right and being right; the beetle in the box illustrates that the private object drops out of the language game.
The inner and the outer. Wittgenstein examines thinking, imagining, intending, remembering and pain, and argues that the inner life is not hidden behind behaviour but expressed in it, within the forms of life we share.
Seeing aspects. The second part turns to the duck-rabbit and the experience of seeing something as something, to the way a face can suddenly look different, and to the relation between perception and interpretation, and remarks that the human body is the best picture of the human soul.
How to read it
Read the opening quotation from Augustine as the picture the whole book is written against, and notice how the builders’ language shows that naming is one use of words among many.
Pay close attention to the remark that meaning is use, and to the qualification, for a large class of cases though not all, that most quotations leave out.
Notice the rule-following sections and their conclusion that a rule is followed blindly within a practice, and decide whether this is a solution or the deepest problem in the book.
Consider the beetle in the box and the private language argument, and ask what remains of the inner life once its objects have dropped out of the language game.
Read this book alongside Descartes’s Meditations to see the picture of the mind as an inner theatre stated with full conviction, and then to watch the Investigations try to take it apart.
Questions it raises
- Is meaning use, and if so, what stops any use from counting, and who decides which uses are correct?
- Does the rule-following argument show that rules are grounded in practice, or that nothing grounds them at all, and what is the difference?
- Does the private language argument prove that there could be no private language, or only that we could not know one if there were, and does the distinction matter?
- Is philosophy really the dissolving of confusions rather than the building of theories, and is the Investigations itself a theory of what philosophy is?
- What does it mean that the human body is the best picture of the human soul, and does the second part of the book answer the questions about the inner life that the first part raises?
- Why is a book of numbered remarks, without a thesis stated anywhere, the most influential work of philosophy in the twentieth century, and what would be lost if it were written as a treatise?
Highlights
For a large class of cases in which we employ the word meaning, though not for all, it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
Close paraphrase of the book's most quoted remark.
No course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made to accord with the rule; and so there is a way of grasping a rule that is not an interpretation but is shown in what we call following it in actual cases.
Paraphrase of the rule-following considerations.
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it we call a beetle, and no one can look into anyone else's box; the thing in the box has no place in the language game at all, not even as a something, for the box might even be empty.
Close paraphrase of the beetle in the box, the private language argument's central image.
