Wittgenstein Flashcards
Language works by triggering pictures of how things are in the world.
Words enable us to make pictures of facts.
The Tractatus is a plea to speak more carefully and less impulsively.
The key to understanding the Tractates is the ‘picture theory of meaning’. The sentence is like a picture of possible fact.
Philosophical Investigations - language is a kind of tool which we use to play games.
Much of our self-understanding depends on the words of others.
Language is a public tool for the understanding of private life.
Reading many books gives us the tools to understand who we really are.
We are able to talk about reality because sentences picture.
We can learn about the structure of reality from sentences, independently of whether the sentence is true, because the mere meaningfulness of the sentence determines that it must correspond to a possible state of affairs in the world.
Melancholy - a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause
Nostalgia - a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past
Wittgenstein inherits from Frege the idea that the fundamental unit of meaning isn’t the word, but the sentence.
In the Tractates, he thought that the only language which strictly speaking makes any sense is ‘fact-stating’ language. Ethics, religions and aesthetics were all in the realm of the unsayable.
He insists that there isn’t any single essence that binds all uses of language together - no single feature e.g. GAME - there is no single essence of gamed, no single thing that all games have in common, but rather a series of overlapping similarities. We call this phenomenon ‘family resemblance’.
He is not saying that words are ambiguous. Rather, the word ‘game’ gets its strength from the family resemblance among the different cases. He thought it was crucial for philosophers to see the pervasiveness of the family resemblance phenomenon.
“Don’t ask for the meaning; ask for the USE.”
The meaning of a word can be entirely given by its use.
The subject matter of maths and logic became his central preoccupation.
What gives us the idea that something is logically right or wrong?
He is trying to find a way in which logic is in the world, and is the structure and boundary of our thinking.
Logic structures the limit of what we can think and the ways that reality could be.
If you have sentences which can describe possible states of the world, Wittgenstein thought that these could be pictorial representations of reality. A painting does not have to be of an actual scene: it could be a possible scene.
He wanted to see how philosophy could describe the limits of language as the limits of reality. The job of the philosopher is not to describe reality.
The limits of language were, for Wittgenstein, the limits of reality.
Even though he thinks he has solved the problems of philosophy in the Tractatus, stating what the limits of inteligible thought and language are, he realises that some philosophers still want explanation.
Try to see how language really works. The philosophy is in the fact that you don’t need explanations, just descriptions. He wants to see how language is actually used.
The second part of his life is devoted to the relationship between language and people (1st part was language and reality in Tractatus).
Positive comments:
- Conclusive refutation of the view that words get the meaning either by standing for objects in the world or being associated with some introspective process.
- Attacks against the Cartesian tradition: for a great deal of our behaviour, we don’t need an inner theory. We just do it. He urges us to remember that a great deal of what we do ought to be seen as biologically and culturally primitive. We just act in certain ways: they are ‘animal reactions’.
He also introduces the notion of a ‘language game’, where we should see speaking a language, using words, through an analogy with playing games.
A characteristic philosophical mistake is to think there must be some foundation, some transcendental justification, for each language game.
There cannot be any transcendental appraisal of the adequacy of language games because there is not any linguistic, transcendental point of view from which they can be appraised.
Thinking is operating with expressions: so language permeates all of thinking and human experience.
Philosophers should abandon the idea that philosophy has a special task of explaining or justifying which goes beyond describing. We should not crave some kind of theory where there is none.
Negative points about his work:
- Anti-theoretical character
- Tries to get away from idea that representation is the essence of language
- Failure to see importance of the brain
- Uncriticality
