Wittgenstein private language games

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What Kripke means by this comparison with a Humean problem is that Wittgenstein is questioning the nexus between a past act of meaning and subsequent practice in a way analogous to that in which Hume questions the causal nexus between a single past event and a subsequent one. And what he means by a Humean solution is that there is a corresponding analogy between the ways in which Hume and Wittgenstein handle their respective problems.

For one of the themes of Philosophical Investigations is that there is no such idea, that the only route to the identification of facts is through the uses of the expressions in which those facts are stated, uses which give us the truth-conditions. These uses are often very different from what we would expect—hence the impression that truth-conditions are lacking—and it is a matter of some philosophical difficulty to see them clearly.

The other formulation of the problem is this Kripke p. This of course does not show that he has not hit upon a new and more interesting notion of private language than that expounded here.

Further, his reading of the argument gave new life to the debate over the community view. Similarly, he can claim that language is essentially social, but still allow the possibility of exceptions provided these are peripheral cases. For a detailed account, the reader is referred to Canfield [] to which this section is indebted, and which also contains a useful bibliography of the debate over the community view , and to Hacker [].

The secondary literature on this topic is enormous. The following list is highly selective, and entries are included by meeting at least one of the following criteria: good representative of a standard reading of the argument; influential source, primary or secondary; useful collection of items meeting one or other of the previous two criteria; useful survey; item making recent and significant progress in the understanding and assessment of the argument; source drawn on in the writing of this article; item mentioned in the main text of this article.

The Significance of the Issue 3. The Private Language Argument Expounded 3. Of this Wittgenstein says merely: … whatever is going to seem correct to me is correct.

That is, textual support can be found for two apparently conflicting exegetical claims: Language is essentially social. It is conceptually even if not psychologically possible that a lifelong Crusoe i.

And the contending parties share the assumption that the conflict is genuine. Bibliography The secondary literature on this topic is enormous. Baker, G. Boghossian, P. Candlish, S. Canfield, J. Child, W. Sullivan and M. Potter eds. Conant, J. Stocker ed. Cook, J. Winch, ed.

Crary, A. Diamond, C. Read eds. Fodor, J. Fogelin, R. Hacker, P. Venturhina ed. Hymers, M. Jones, O. Kenny, A. Pitcher ed. Kripke, S. Kusch, M. Malcolm, N. McDowell, J. McGinn, M. Mulhall, S.

Nielsen, K. Pears, D. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Ch. Rhees, R. Russell, B. Sluga, H. Sinnott-Armstrong ed. Stern, D. Kahane, E. Kuusela eds. Ahmed ed. Kuusela and M. McGinn eds. Stroud, B. Tang, H. Travis, C. Verheggen, C. Winch, P. Wittgenstein, L. Klagge and A. Nordmann eds. Anscombe, P. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Wrisley, G. Academic Tools How to cite this entry.

Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database. Other Internet Resources [Please contact the author with suggestions. Related Entries consciousness language of thought hypothesis other minds Russell, Bertrand self-knowledge Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Public words that refer to inner sensations do not get their meaning from the sensations themselves.

All these words tell us is that there is a sensation, not what the sensation is. But what Wittgenstein is trying to show is that what we actually feel — which no one else can really know — is irrelevant to the meaning of the word. The word merely indicates that a certain kind of sensation is present. Why does Wittgenstein put forward the concept of a private language and attempt to destroy it immediately?

One possibility is that he wished to either defend or attack behaviourism. A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain behaviour. To say that I have a pain in my hand is to say that I am inclined to clutch my hand and scream or cry.

What greater difference could there be? So the actual sensation that you feel does not affect the meaning ie public use of the word, but whether or not there is a sensation being felt does. It could not tell us anything we do not already know. But both of these implications seem to be side-effects rather than being the main inspiration for the argument. Yet another view is that Wittgenstein was attacking private language from the point of view of memory scepticism. It has been claimed that this position would be self-defeating, as reliance on memory rules out correctness and consistency in public language as well.

But this is based upon a misunderstanding. It attaches an importance to the inner mental connection between a word and its meaning which Wittgenstein does not grant. For Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is its agreed use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. This leads us on to the true function of the private language argument and the associated discussion of sensations. This is the view [also] favoured by Saul Kripke and Norman Malcolm, amongst others.

The community view states that a rule must form part of an agreed practice by a multiplicity of people forming a community. Colin McGinn objects to this conception, suggesting that Wittgenstein requires only that there be a multiplicity of instances of rule-following to constitute a practice. During his years in Cambridge, from to , Wittgenstein conducted several conversations on philosophy and the foundations of logic with Russell, with whom he had an emotional and intense relationship, as well as with Moore and Keynes.

He retreated to isolation in Norway, for months at a time, in order to ponder these philosophical problems and to work out their solutions. In he returned to Austria and in , at the start of World War I — , joined the Austrian army.

He was taken captive in and spent the remaining months of the war at a prison camp. It was during the war that he wrote the notes and drafts of his first important work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. After the war the book was published in German and translated into English. It was only in that he returned to Cambridge to resume his philosophical vocation, after having been exposed to discussions on the philosophy of mathematics and science with members of the Vienna Circle, whose conception of logical empiricism was indebted to his Tractatus account of logic as tautologous, and his philosophy as concerned with logical syntax.

During these first years in Cambridge his conception of philosophy and its problems underwent dramatic changes that are recorded in several volumes of conversations, lecture notes, and letters e. In the s and s Wittgenstein conducted seminars at Cambridge, developing most of the ideas that he intended to publish in his second book, Philosophical Investigations. In he prepared the final manuscript of the Philosophical Investigations , but, at the last minute, withdrew it from publication and only authorized its posthumous publication.

For a few more years he continued his philosophical work, but this is marked by a rich development of, rather than a turn away from, his second phase. He traveled during this period to the United States and Ireland, and returned to Cambridge, where he was diagnosed with cancer. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was first published in German in and then translated—by C. Ogden and F. Ramsey —and published in English in It was later re-translated by D.

Pears and B. It is constructed around seven basic propositions, numbered by the natural numbers 1—7, with all other paragraphs in the text numbered by decimal expansions so that, e.

The world is represented by thought, which is a proposition with sense, since they all—world, thought, and proposition—share the same logical form. Hence, the thought and the proposition can be pictures of the facts.

Starting with a seeming metaphysics, Wittgenstein sees the world as consisting of facts 1 , rather than the traditional, atomistic conception of a world made up of objects. Facts are existent states of affairs 2 and states of affairs, in turn, are combinations of objects. They may have various properties and may hold diverse relations to one another. Objects combine with one another according to their logical, internal properties.

Thus, states of affairs, being comprised of objects in combination, are inherently complex. The states of affairs which do exist could have been otherwise. This means that states of affairs are either actual existent or possible. It is the totality of states of affairs—actual and possible—that makes up the whole of reality.

The world is precisely those states of affairs which do exist. Pictures are made up of elements that together constitute the picture. Each element represents an object, and the combination of elements in the picture represents the combination of objects in a state of affairs. The logical structure of the picture, whether in thought or in language, is isomorphic with the logical structure of the state of affairs which it pictures.

This leads to an understanding of what the picture can picture; but also what it cannot—its own pictorial form. Logical analysis, in the spirit of Frege and Russell, guides the work, with Wittgenstein using logical calculus to carry out the construction of his system.

First, the structure of the proposition must conform to the constraints of logical form, and second, the elements of the proposition must have reference Bedeutung. These conditions have far-reaching implications. The analysis must culminate with a name being a primitive symbol for a simple object. Moreover, logic itself gives us the structure and limits of what can be said at all.

This bi-polarity of propositions enables the composition of more complex propositions from atomic ones by using truth-functional operators 5.

He delves even deeper by then providing the general form of a truth-function 6. Having developed this analysis of world-thought-language, and relying on the one general form of the proposition, Wittgenstein can now assert that all meaningful propositions are of equal value.

Subsequently, he ends the journey with the admonition concerning what can or cannot and what should or should not be said 7 , leaving outside the realm of the sayable propositions of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. It follows that only factual states of affairs which can be pictured can be represented by meaningful propositions.

This means that what can be said are only propositions of natural science and leaves out of the realm of sense a daunting number of statements which are made and used in language.

There are, first, the propositions of logic itself. These do not represent states of affairs, and the logical constants do not stand for objects. This is not a happenstance thought; it is fundamental precisely because the limits of sense rest on logic.

Tautologies and contradictions, the propositions of logic, are the limits of language and thought, and thereby the limits of the world. Obviously, then, they do not picture anything and do not, therefore, have sense. Propositions which do have sense are bipolar; they range within the truth-conditions drawn by the truth-tables. The characteristic of being senseless applies not only to the propositions of logic but also to mathematics or the pictorial form itself of the pictures that do represent.

These are, like tautologies and contradictions, literally sense-less, they have no sense. Beyond, or aside from, senseless propositions Wittgenstein identifies another group of statements which cannot carry sense: the nonsensical unsinnig propositions.

Nonsense, as opposed to senselessness, is encountered when a proposition is even more radically devoid of meaning, when it transcends the bounds of sense. Wittgenstein does not, however, relegate all that is not inside the bounds of sense to oblivion. He makes a distinction between saying and showing which is made to do additional crucial work. This applies, for example, to the logical form of the world, the pictorial form, etc.

They make themselves manifest. Is, then, philosophy doomed to be nonsense unsinnig , or, at best, senseless sinnlos when it does logic, but, in any case, meaningless? What is left for the philosopher to do, if traditional, or even revolutionary, propositions of metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics cannot be formulated in a sensical manner? It is an activity of clarification of thoughts , and more so, of critique of language. In other words, by showing them that some of their propositions are nonsense.

For it employs a measure of the value of propositions that is done by logic and the notion of limits. It is here, however, with the constraints on the value of propositions, that the tension in the Tractatus is most strongly felt. It becomes clear that the notions used by the Tractatus —the logical-philosophical notions—do not belong to the world and hence cannot be used to express anything meaningful. Since language, thought, and the world, are all isomorphic, any attempt to say in logic i.

That is to say, the Tractatus has gone over its own limits, and stands in danger of being nonsensical. The Tractatus is notorious for its interpretative difficulties. In the decades that have passed since its publication it has gone through several waves of general interpretations. These revolve around the realism of the Tractatus , the notion of nonsense and its role in reading the Tractatus itself, and the reading of the Tractatus as an ethical tract.

There are interpretations that see the Tractatus as espousing realism, i. Such realism is also taken to be manifested in the essential bi-polarity of propositions; likewise, a straightforward reading of the picturing relation posits objects there to be represented by signs.

As against these readings, more linguistically oriented interpretations give conceptual priority to the symbolism. In any case, the issue of realism vs. Subsequently, interpreters of the Tractatus have moved on to questioning the very presence of metaphysics within the book and the status of the propositions of the book themselves.

Beyond the bounds of language lies nonsense—propositions which cannot picture anything —and Wittgenstein bans traditional metaphysics to that area. More recent readings tend to take nonsense more seriously as exactly that—nonsense. The Tractatus , on this stance, does not point at ineffable truths of, e. An accompanying discussion must then also deal with how this can be recognized, what this can possibly mean, and how it should be used, if at all. This discussion is closely related to what has come to be called the ethical reading of the Tractatus.

And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. Obviously, such seemingly contradictory tensions within and about a text—written by its author—give rise to interpretative conundrums.

There is another issue often debated by interpreters of Wittgenstein, which arises out of the questions above. This has to do with the continuity between the thought of the early and later Wittgenstein. And again, the more recent interpretations challenge this standard, emphasizing that the fundamental therapeutic motivation clearly found in the later Wittgenstein should also be attributed to the early. The idea that philosophy is not a doctrine, and hence should not be approached dogmatically, is one of the most important insights of the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein used this term to designate any conception which allows for a gap between question and answer, such that the answer to the question could be found at a later date. The complex edifice of the Tractatus is built on the assumption that the task of logical analysis was to discover the elementary propositions, whose form was not yet known.

What marks the transition from early to later Wittgenstein can be summed up as the total rejection of dogmatism, i. It is in the Philosophical Investigations that the working out of the transitions comes to culmination.

Other writings of the same period, though, manifest the same anti-dogmatic stance, as it is applied, e. Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously in It was edited by G. Anscombe and Rush Rhees and translated by Anscombe. It comprised two parts. Part I, consisting of numbered paragraphs, was ready for printing in , but rescinded from the publisher by Wittgenstein. Part II was added on by the editors, trustees of his Nachlass. In a new edited translation, by P.

In the Preface to PI , Wittgenstein states that his new thoughts would be better understood by contrast with and against the background of his old thoughts, those in the Tractatus ; and indeed, most of Part I of PI is essentially questioning.

Its new insights can be understood as primarily exposing fallacies in the traditional way of thinking about language, truth, thought, intentionality, and, perhaps mainly, philosophy. In this sense, it is conceived of as a therapeutic work, viewing philosophy itself as therapy. This picture of language cannot be relied on as a basis for metaphysical, epistemic or linguistic speculation. Despite its plausibility, this reduction of language to representation cannot do justice to the whole of human language; and even if it is to be considered a picture of only the representative function of human language, it is, as such, a poor picture.

Furthermore, this picture of language is at the base of the whole of traditional philosophy, but, for Wittgenstein, it is to be shunned in favor of a new way of looking at both language and philosophy. The Philosophical Investigations proceeds to offer the new way of looking at language, which will yield the view of philosophy as therapy.

Traditional theories of meaning in the history of philosophy were intent on pointing to something exterior to the proposition which endows it with sense. Ascertainment of the use of a word, of a proposition , however, is not given to any sort of constructive theory building, as in the Tractatus. An analogy with tools sheds light on the nature of words. In giving the meaning of a word, any explanatory generalization should be replaced by a description of use. The traditional idea that a proposition houses a content and has a restricted number of Fregean forces such as assertion, question, and command , gives way to an emphasis on the diversity of uses.

Hence, indeed, the requirement to define harkens back to an old dogma, which misses the playful and active character of language. Throughout the Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein returns, again and again, to the concept of language-games to make clear his lines of thought concerning language. Primitive language-games are scrutinized for the insights they afford on this or that characteristic of language.