The New Wittgenstein

Alice Crary, Rupert Read, Alice Crary, Rupert Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134689958
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This text offers major re-evaluation of Wittgenstein's thinking. It is a collection of essays that presents a significantly different portrait of Wittgenstein. The essays clarify Wittgenstein's modes of philosophical criticism and shed light on the relation between his thought and different philosophical traditions and areas of human concern. With essays by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond, Peter Winch and Hilary Putnam, we see the emergence of a new way of understanding Wittgenstein's thought. This is a controversial collection, with essays by highly regarded Wittgenstein scholars that may change the way we look at Wittgenstein's body of work.

Part I

WITTGENSTEIN’S LATER WRITINGS
The illusory comfort of an external standpoint

1

EXCURSUS ON WITTGENSTEIN’S VISION OF LANGUAGE

Stanley Cavell

Now I want to say something more specific about what it is Wittgenstein has discovered, or detailed, about language (i.e., about the entire body and spirit of human conduct and feeling which goes into the capacity for speech) which raises the sorts of problems I have so crudely and vaguely characterized in terms of “normality” and “our world”.

What I wish to say at this point can be taken as glossing Wittgenstein’s remark that “we learn words in certain contexts” (e.g., Blue Book, p. 9). This means, I take it, both that we do not learn words in all the contexts in which they could be used (what, indeed, would that mean?) and that not every context in which a word is used is one in which the word can be learned (e.g., contexts in which the word is used metaphorically). And after a while we are expected to know when the words are appropriately used in further contexts. This is obvious enough, and philosophers have always asked for an explanation of it: “How do words acquire that generality upon which thought depends?” As Locke put it:

All things that exist being particulars, it may perhaps be thought reasonable that words, which ought to be conformed to things, should be so too, I mean in their signification: but yet we find quite the contrary. The far greatest part of words that make all languages are general terms; which has not been the effect of neglect or chance, but of reason and necessity…. The next thing to be considered is, how general words come to be made. For since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general terms, or where find we those general natures they are supposed to stand for?

[An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
Book III; Chapter III; Sections I and VI]

This is one of the questions to which philosophers have given the answer, “Because there are universals”; and the “problem of universals” has been one of assigning, or denying, an ontological status to such things and of explaining, or denying, our knowledge of them. What Wittgenstein wishes us to see, if I understand, is that no such answers could provide an explanation of the questions which lead to them.

“We learn words in certain contexts and after a while we are expected to know when they are appropriately used in (= can appropriately be projected into) further contexts” (and, of course, our ability to project appropriately is a criterion for our having learned a word). Now I want to ask: (1) What is (do we call) “learning a word”, and in particular (to keep to the simplest case) “learning the general name of something”?; and (2) what makes a projection an appropriate or correct one? (Again, traditionally, the answer to (1) is: “Grasping a universal”, and to (2): “The recognition of another instance of the same universal”, or “the fact that the new object is similar to the old”.)

Learning a word

Suppose we ask: “When a child learns the name of something (e.g., ‘cat’, ‘star’, ‘pumpkin’), obviously he doesn’t learn merely that this (particular) sound goes with that (particular) object; so what does he learn?” We might answer: “He learns that sounds like this name objects like that.” We can quickly become very dissatisfied with that answer. Suppose we reflected that that answer seems to describe more exactly a situation in which learning that “cat” is the name of that means learning that “rat” (a sound like “cat”) is the name of that (an object like a cat). That obviously is not what we meant to say (because that obviously is not what happens?). How is what we meant to say different? We might try: “He learns that sounds exactly similar to this name objects exactly similar to that.” But that is either false or obviously empty. For what does it mean to say that one cat is exactly similar to another cat? We do not want to mean that you can not tell them apart (for that obviously would not explain what we are trying to explain). What we want to say is that the child learns that a sound that is (counts as) this word names objects which are cats. But isn’t that just what we thought we needed, and were trying to give, an explanation for?

Suppose we change the point of view of the question and ask: What do we teach or tell a child when we point to a pumpkin and say, “Pumpkin”? Do we tell him what a pumpkin is or what the word “pumpkin” means? I was surprised to find that my first response to this question was, “You can say either”. (Cf. “Must We Mean What We Say?”, p. 21.) And that led me to appreciate, and to want to investigate, how much a matter knowing what something is is a matter of knowing what something is called; and to recognize how limited or special a truth is expressed in the motto, “We may change the names of things, but their nature and their operation on the understanding never change” (Hume, Treatise, Book II, Part III, Section I).

At the moment I will say just this: That response (“You can say either”) is true, at best, only for those who have already mastered a language. In the case of a child still coming to a mastery of its language it may be (fully) true neither that what we teach them is (the meaning of) a word nor that we tell them what a thing is. It looks very like one or the other, so of course it is very natural to say that it is one or the other; but so does malicious gossip often look like honesty, and so we very often call it honesty.

How might saying “Pumpkin” and pointing to a pumpkin not be “telling the child what a word means”? There are many sorts of answers to that. One might be: it takes two to tell someone something; you can’t give someone a piece of information unless he knows how to ask for that (or comparable) information. (Cf. Investigations, §31.) And this is no more true of learning language than it is true of learning any of the forms of life which grow language. You can’t tell a child what a word means when the child has yet to learn what “asking for a meaning” is (i.e., how to ask for a meaning), in the way you can’t lend a rattle to a child who has yet to learn what “being lent (or borrowing) something” means. Grownups like to think of children (especially their own) as small grownups, midgets. So they say to their child, “Let Sister use your shovel”, and then nudge the child over towards Sister, wrest the shovel from the child’s hand, and are later impatient and disappointed when the child beats Sister with a pail and Sister rages not to “return” the shovel. We learn from suffering.

Nor, in saying “Pumpkin” to the child, are we telling the child what a pumpkin is, i.e., the child does not then know what a pumpkin is. For to “know what a pumpkin is” is to know, e.g., that it is a kind of fruit; that it is used to make pies; that it has many forms and sizes and colors; that this one is misshapen and old; that inside every tame pumpkin there is a wild man named Jack, screaming to get out.

So what are we telling the child if we are telling him neither what a word means nor what a thing is? We might feel: “If you can’t tell a child a simple thing like what a pumpkin is or what the word ‘pumpkin’ means, then how does learning ever begin?” But why assume we are telling him anything at all? Why assume that we are teaching him anything? Well, because obviously he has learned something. But perhaps we are too quick to suppose we know what it is in such situations that makes us say the child is learning something. In particular, too quick to suppose we know what the child is learning. To say we are teaching them language obscures both how different what they learn may be from anything we think we are teaching, or mean to be teaching; and how vastly more they learn than the thing we should say we had “taught”. Different and more, not because we are bad or good teachers, but because “learning” is not as academic a matter as academics are apt to suppose.

First, reconsider the obvious fact that there is not the clear difference between learning and maturation that we sometimes suppose there is. Take this example: Suppose my daughter now knows two dozen words. (Books on child development must say things like: At age 15 months the average child will have a vocabulary of so many words.) One of the words she knows, as her Baby Book will testify, is “kitty”. What does it mean to say she “knows the word”? What does it mean to say she “learned it”? Take the day on which, after I said “Kitty” and pointed to a kitty, she repeated the word and pointed to the kitty. What does “repeating the word” mean here? and what did she point to? All I know is (and does she know more?) that she made the sound I made and pointed to what I pointed at. Or rather, I know less (or more) than that. For what is “her making the sound I made”? She produced a sound (imitated me?) which I accepted, responded to (with smiles, hugs, words of encouragement, etc.) as what I had said. The next time a cat came by, on the prowl or in a picture book, she did it again. A new entry for the Baby Book under “Vocabulary”.

Now take the day, some weeks later, when she smiled at a fur piece, stroked it, and said “kitty”. My first reaction was surprise, and, I suppose, disappointment: she doesn’t really know what “kitty” means. But my second reaction was happier: she means by “kitty” what I mean by “fur”. Or was it what I mean by “soft”, or perhaps “nice to stroke”? Or perhaps she didn’t mean at all what in my syntax would be recorded as “That is an X”. After all, when she sees real kittens she not only utters her allophonic version of “kitty”, she usually squeals the word over and over, squats down near it, stretches out her arm towards it and opens and closes her fingers (an allomorphic version of “petting the kitten”?), purses her lips, and squints with pleasure. All she did with the fur piece was, smiling, to say “kitty” once and stroke it. Perhaps the syntax of that performance should be transcribed as “This is like a kitty”, or “Look at the funny kitty”, or “Aren’t soft things nice?”, or “See, I remember how pleased you are when I say ‘kitty’”, or “I like to be petted”. Can we decide this? Is it a choice between these definite alternatives? In each case her word was produced about a soft, warm, furry object of a certain size, shape, and weight. What did she learn in order to do that? What did she learn from having done it? If she had never made such leaps she would never have walked into speech. Having made it, meadows of communication can grow for us. Where you can leap to depends on where you stand. When, later, she picks up a gas bill and says “Here’s a letter”, or when, hearing a piece of music we’ve listened to together many times, she asks “Who’s Beethoven?”, or when she points to the tele-vision coverage of the Democratic National Convention and asks “What are you watching?”, I may realize we are not ready to walk certain places together.

But although I didn’t tell her, and she didn’t learn, either what the word “kitty” means or what a kitty is, if she keeps leaping and I keep looking and smiling, she will learn both. I have wanted to say: Kittens—what we call “kittens”—do not exist in her world yet, she has not acquired the forms of life which contain them. They do not exist in something like the way cities and mayors will not exist in her world until long after pumpkins and kittens do; or like the way God or love or responsibility or beauty do not exist in our world; we have not mastered, or we have forgotten, or we have distorted, or learned through fragmented models, the forms of life which could make utterances like “God exists” or “God is dead” or “I love you” or “I cannot do otherwise” or “Beauty is but the beginning of terror” bear all the weight they could carry, express all they could take from us. We do not know the meaning of the words. We look away and leap around.

“Why be so difficult? Why perversely deny that the child has learned a word, and insist, with what must be calculated provocativeness, that your objects are ‘not in her world’? Anyone will grant that she can’t do everything we do with the word, nor know everything we do about kitties—I mean kittens; but when she says ‘Kitty’s nice’ and evinces the appropriate behavior, then she’s learned the name of an object, learned to name an object, and the same object we name. The differences between what she does and what you do are obvious, and any sensible person will take them for granted.”

What I am afraid of is that we take too much for granted about what the learning and the sharing of language implies. What’s wrong with thinking of learning language as being taught or told the names of things? Why did Wittgenstein call sharp attention to Augustine’s having said or implied that it is, and speak of a particular “picture” of language underlying it, as though Augustine was writing from a particular, arbitrary perspective, and that the judgment was snap?

There is more than one “picture” Wittgenstein wishes to develop: one of them concerns the idea that all words are names, a second concerns the idea that learning a name (or any word) is being told what it means, a third is the idea that learning a language is a matter of learning (new) words. The first of these ideas, and Wittgenstein’s criticism of it, has, I believe, received wider attention than the other two, which are the ones which concern us here. (The ideas are obviously related to one another, and I may say that I find the second two to give the best sense of what Wittgenstein finds “wrong” with the first. It isn’t as I think it is usually taken, merely that “language has many functions” besides naming things; it is also that the ways philosophers account for naming make it incomprehensible how language can so much as perform that function.)

Against the dominant idea of the dominant Empiricism, that what is basic to language (basic to the way it joins the world, basic to its supply of meaning, basic to the way it is taught and learned) are basic words, words which can (only) be learned and taught through “ostensive definitions”, Wittgenstein says, among other things, that to be told what a word means (e.g., to know that when someone forms a sound and moves his arm he is pointing to something and saying its name, and to know what he is pointing to) we have to be able to ask what it means (what it refers to); and he says further: “One has already to know (or be ab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Wittgenstein’s Later Writings: The Illusory Comfort of an External Standpoint
• Part II: The Tractatus As Forerunner of Wittgenstein’s Later Writings
• A Dissenting Voice
• Bibliography