Philosophical Papers

George Edward Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317832249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This is Volume XVII of twenty-two in a series on 20th Century Philosophy. Originally published in 1959, it is a contribution to the History of Modern Philosophy under the heads: first of different Schools of Thought-Sensationalist, Realist, Idealist, Intuitivist; secondly of different Subjects-Psychology, Ethics, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy, Theology. This is a collection of papers by George Edward Moore, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity College in the University of Cambridge.

XI Wittgenstein's Lectures in 1930–33

DOI: 10.4324/9781315823560-11

I

In January 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge after an absence of more than fifteen years. He came with the intention of residing in Cambridge and pursuing there his researches into philosophical problems. Why he chose Cambridge for this latter purpose I do not know: perhaps it was for the sake of having the opportunity of frequent discussion with F. P. Ramsey. At all events he did in fact reside in Cambridge during all three Full Terms of 1929, and was working hard all the time at his researches.¹ He must, however, at some time during that year, have made up his mind that, besides researching, he would like to do a certain amount of lecturing, since on October 16th, in accordance with his wishes, the Faculty Board of Moral Science resolved that he should be invited to give a course of lectures to be included in their Lecture List for the Lent Term of 1930.

1 The statement in the Obituary notice in The Times for May 2, 1951, that he arrived in Cambridge in 1929 ‘for a short visit’ is very far from the truth. Fortunately I kept a brief diary during the period in question and can therefore vouch for the truth of what I have stated above about his residence in 1929, though there is in fact other evidence.

During this year, 1929, when he was researching and had not begun to lecture, he took the Ph.D. degree at Cambridge. Having been entered as an ‘Advanced Student’ during his previous period of residence in 1912 and 1913, he now found that he was entitled to submit a dissertation for the Ph.D. He submitted the Tractatus and Russell and I were appointed to examine him. We gave him an oral examination on June 6th, an occasion which I found both pleasant and amusing. We had, of course, no doubt whatever that his work deserved the degree: we so reported, and when our report had been approved by the necessary authorities, he received the degree in due course.

In the same month of June in which we examined him, the Council of Trinity College made him a grant to enable him to continue his researches. (They followed this up in December 1930, by electing him to a Research Fellowship, tenable for five years, which they afterwards prolonged for a time.)

In the following July of 1929 he attended the Joint Session of the Mind Association and Aristotelian Society at Nottingham, presenting a short paper entitled ‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’. This paper was the only piece of philosophical writing by him, other than the Tractatus, published during his life-time. Of this paper he spoke in a letter to Mind (July 1933) as ‘weak’; and since 1945 he has spoken of it to me in a still more disparaging manner, saying something to the effect that, when he wrote it, he was getting new ideas about which he was still confused, and that he did not think it deserved any attention.

But what is most important about this year, 1929, is that in it he had frequent discussions with F. P. Ramsey—discussions which were, alas! brought to an end by Ramsey's premature death in January 1930.² Ramsey had written for Mind (October 1923, page 465) a long Critical Notice of the Tractatus; and subsequently, during the period when Wittgenstein was employed as a village schoolmaster in Austria, Ramsey had gone out to see him, in order to question him as to the meaning of certain statements in the Tractatus. He stayed in the village for a fortnight or more, having daily discussions with Wittgenstein. Of these discussions in Austria I only know that Ramsey told me that, in reply to his questions as to the meaning of certain statements, Wittgenstein answered more than once that he had forgotten what he had meant by the statement in question. But after the first half of the discussions at Cambridge in 1929, Ramsey wrote at my request the following letter in support of the proposal that Trinity should make Wittgenstein a grant in order to enable him to continue his researches.

2 In the Preface to his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations,where Wittgenstein acknowledges his obligations to Ramsey (p. x), Wittgenstein himself says that he had ‘innumerable’ discussions with Ramsey ‘during the last two years of his life’, which should mean both in 1928 and in 1929. But I think this must be a mistake. I imagine that Wittgenstein, trusting to memory alone, had magnified into a series of discussions continuing for two years, a series which in fact only continued for a single year. It will be noticed that in the letter from Ramsey himself which I am about to quote, and which is dated June 14, 1929, Ramsey states that he had been in close touch with Wittgenstein's work ‘during the last two terms’, i.e. during the Lent and May Terms of 1929, implying that he had not been in close touch with it in 1928. And though I do not know where Wittgenstein was in 1928, he certainly was not resident in Cambridge where Ramsey was resident, so that it is hardly possible that they can have had in that year such frequent discussions as they certainly had in 1929.

‘In my opinion Mr Wittgenstein is a philosophic genius of a different order from anyone else I know. This is partly owing to his great gift for seeing what is essential in a problem and partly to his overwhelming intellectual vigour, to the intensity of thought with which he pursues a question to the bottom and never rests content with a mere possible hypothesis. From his work more than that of any other man I hope for a solution of the difficulties that perplex me both in philosophy generally and in the foundations of Mathematics in particular.

‘It seems to me, therefore, peculiarly fortunate that he should have returned to research. During the last two terms I have been in close touch with his work and he seems to me to have made remarkable progress. He began with certain questions in the analysis of propositions which have now led him to problems about infinity which lie at the root of current controversies on the foundations of Mathematics. At first I was afraid that lack of mathematical knowledge and facility would prove a serious handicap to his working in this field. But the progress he has made has already convinced me that this is not so, and that here too he will probably do work of the first importance.

‘He is now working very hard and, so far as I can judge, he is getting on well. For him to be interrupted by lack of money would, I think, be a great misfortune for philosophy.’

The only other thing I know about these discussions with Ramsey at Cambridge in 1929 is that Wittgenstein once told me that Ramsey had said to him ‘I don't like your method of arguing’.

Wittgenstein began to lecture in January 1930, and from the first he adopted a plan to which he adhered, I believe, throughout his lectures at Cambridge.³ His plan was only to lecture once a week in every week of Full Term, but on a later day in each week to hold a discussion class at which what he had said in that week's lecture could be discussed. At first both lecture and discussion class were held in an ordinary lecture-room in the University Arts School; but very early in the first term Mr R. E. Priestley (now Sir Raymond Priestley), who was then Secretary General of the Faculties and who occupied a set of Fellows' rooms in the new building of Clare, invited Wittgenstein to hold his discussion classes in these rooms. Later on, I think, both lectures and discussion classes were held in Priestley's rooms, and this continued until, in October 1931, Wittgenstein, being then a Fellow of Trinity, was able to obtain a set of rooms of his own in Trinity which he really liked. These rooms were those which Wittgenstein had occupied in the academic year 1912–13, and which I had occupied the year before, and occupied again from October 1913, when Wittgenstein left Cambridge and went to Norway. Of the only two sets which are on the top floor of the gate-way from Whewell's Courts into Sidney Street, they were the set which looks westward over the larger Whewell's Court, and, being so high up, they had a large view of sky and also of Cambridge roofs, including the pinnacles of King's Chapel. Since the rooms were not a Fellow's set, their sitting-room was not large, and for the purpose of his lectures and classes Wittgenstein used to fill it with some twenty plain cane-bottomed chairs, which at other times were stacked on the large landing outside. Nearly from the beginning the discussion classes were liable to last at least two hours, and from the time when the lectures ceased to be given in the Arts School they also commonly lasted at least as long. Wittgenstein always had a blackboard at both lectures and classes and made plenty of use of it.

3 Professor von Wright has subsequently informed me that I was mistaken in believing this: that in 1939, Wittgenstein lectured twice a week and held no discussion class; and that in the Easter Term of 1947, he both gave two lectures a week and also held a discussion class. I have also remembered that at one time (I do not know for how long) he gave, besides his ordinary lectures, a special set of lectures for mathematicians.

I attended both lectures and discussion classes in all three terms of 1930 and in the first two terms of 1931. In the Michaelmas Term of 1931 and the Lent Term of 1932 I ceased, for some reason which I cannot now remember, to attend the lectures though I still went to the discussion classes; but in May 1932, I resumed the practice of attending the lectures as well, and throughout the academic year 1932–33 I attended both. At the lectures, though not at the discussion classes, I took what I think were very full notes, scribbled in notebooks of which I have six volumes nearly full. I remember Wittgenstein once saying to me that he was glad I was taking notes, since, if anything were to happen to him, they would contain some record of the results of his thinking.

My lecture-notes may be naturally divided into three groups, to which I will refer as (1), (II) and (III). (1) contains the notes of his lectures in the Lent and May Terms of 1930; (II) those of his lectures in the academic year 1930–31; and (III) those of lectures which he gave in the May Term of 1932, after I had resumed attending, as well as those of all the lectures he gave in the academic year 1932–33. The distinction between the three groups is of some importance, since, as will be seen, he sometimes in later lectures corrected what he had said in earlier ones.

The chief topics with which he dealt fall, I think, under the following heads. First of all, in all three periods he dealt (A) with some very general questions about language, (B) with some special questions in the philosophy of Logic, and (C) with some special questions in the philosophy of Mathematics. Next, in (III) and in (III) alone, he dealt at great length, (D) with the difference between the proposition which is expressed by the words ‘I have got toothache’, and those which are expressed by the words ‘You have got toothache’ or ‘He has got toothache’, in which connection he said something about Behaviourism, Solipsism, Idealism and Realism, and (E) with what he called ‘the grammar of the word “God” and of ethical and aesthetic statements’. And he also dealt, more shortly, in (I) with (F) our use of the term ‘primary colour’; in (III) with (G) some questions about Time; and in both (II) and (III) with (H) the kind of investigation in which he was himself engaged, and its difference from and relation to what has traditionally been called ‘philosophy’.

I will try to give some account of the chief things he said under all these heads; but I cannot possibly mention nearly everything, and it is possible that some of the things I omit were really more important than those I mention. Also, though I tried to get down in my notes the actual words he used, it is possible that I may sometimes have substituted words of my own which misrepresent his meaning: I certainly did not understand a good many of the things he said. Moreover, I cannot possibly do justice to the extreme richness of illustration and comparison which he used: he was really succeeding in giving what he called a ‘synoptic’ view of things which we all know. Nor can I do justice to the intensity of conviction with which he said everything which he did say, nor to the extreme interest which he excited in his hearers. He, of course, never read his lectures: he had not, in fact, written them out, although he always spent a great deal of time in thinking out what he proposed to say.

(A) He did discuss at very great length, especially in (II), certain very general questions about language; but he said, more than once, that he did not discuss these questions because he thought that language was the subject-matter of philosophy. He did not think that it was. He discussed it only because he thought that particular philosophical errors or ‘troubles in our thought’ were due to false analogies suggested by our actual use of expressions; and he emphasized that it was only necessary for him to discuss those points about language which, as he thought, led to these particular errors or ‘troubles’.

The general things that he had to say about language fall naturally, I think, under two heads, namely (a) what he had to say about the meaning of single words, and (b) what he had to say about ‘propositions’.

(a) About the meaning of single words, the positive points on which he seemed most anxious to insist were, I think, two, namely (α) something which he expressed by saying that the meaning of any single word in a language is ‘defined’, ‘constituted’, ‘determined’ or ‘fixed’ (he used all four expressions in different places) by the ‘grammatical rules’ with which it is used in that language, and (β) something which he expressed by saying that every significant word or symbol must essentially belong to a ‘system’, and (metaphorically) by saying that the meaning of a word is its ‘place’ in a ‘grammatical system’.

But he said in (III) that the sense of ‘meaning’ of which he held these things to be true, and which was the only sense in which he intended to use the word, was only one of those in which we commonly use it: that there was another which he described as that in which it is used ‘as a name for a process accompanying our use of a word and our hearing of a word’. By the latter he apparently meant that sense of ‘meaning’ in which ‘to know the meaning’ of a word means the same as to ‘understand’ the word; and I think he was not quite clear as to the relation between this sense of ‘meaning’ and that in which he intended to use it, since he seemed in two different places to suggest two different and incompatible views of this relation, saying in (II) that ‘the rules applying to negation actually describe my experience in using “not”, i.e. describe my understanding of the word’, and in one place in (III), on the other hand, saying, ‘perhaps there is a causal connection between the rules and the feeling we have when we hear “not” ’. On the former occasion he added that ‘a logical investigation doesn't teach us anything about the meaning of negation: we can't get any clearer about its meaning. What's difficult is to make the rules explicit’.

Still later in (III) he made the rather queer statement that ‘the idea of meaning is in a way obsolete, except in such phrases as “this means the same as that” or “this has no meaning”’, having previously said in (III) that ‘the mere fact that we have the expression “the meaning” of a word is bound to lead us wrong: we are led to think that the rules are responsible to something not a rule, whereas they are only responsible to rules’.

As to (α) although he had said, at least once, that the meaning of a word was ‘constituted’ by the grammatical rules which applied to it, he explained later that he did not mean that the meaning of a word was a list of rules; and he said that though a word ‘carried its meaning with it’, it did not carry with it the grammatical rules which applied to it. He said that the student who had asked him whether he meant that the meaning of a word was a list of rules would not have been tempted to ask that question but for the false idea (which he held to be a common one) that in the case of a substantive like ‘the meaning’ you have to look for something at which you can point and say ‘This is the meaning’. He seemed to think that Frege and Russell had been misled by the same idea, when they thought they were bound to give an answer to the question ‘What is the number 2?’ As for what he meant by saying that the meaning of a word is ‘determined by’ (this was the phrase which he seemed to prefer) the ‘grammatical rules’ in accordance with which it is used, I do not think he explained further what he meant by this phrase.

(β) As to what he meant by saying that, in order that a word or other sign should have meaning, it must belong to a ‘system’, I have not been able to arrive at any clear idea. One point on which he insisted several times in (II) was that if a word which I use is to have meaning, I must ‘commit myself’ by its use. And he explained what he meant by this by saying ‘If I commit myself, that means that if I use, e.g., “green” in this case, I have to use it in others’, adding ‘If you commit yourself, there are consequences’. Similarly he said a little later, ‘If a word is to have significance, we must commit ourselves’, adding ‘There is no use in correlating noises to facts, unless we commit ourselves to using the noise in a particular way again—unless the correlation has consequences’, and going on to say that it must be possible to be ‘led by a language’. And when he expressly raised, a little later, the question ‘What is there in this talk of a “system” to which a symbol must belong?’ he answered that we are concerned with the phenomenon of ‘being guided by’. It looked, therefore, as if one use which he was making of the word ‘system’ was such that in order to say that a word or other sign ‘belonged to a system’, it was not only necessary but sufficient that it should be used in the same way on several different occasions. And certainly it would be natural to say that a man who habitually used a word in the same way was using it ‘systematically’.

But he certainly also frequently used ‘system’ in such a sense that different words or other expressions could be said to belong to the same ‘system’; and where, later on, he gave, as an illustration of what he meant by ‘Every symbol must essentially belong to a system’, the proposition ‘A crotchet can only give information on what note to play in a system of crotchets’, he seemed to imply that for a sign to have significance it is not sufficient that we should ‘commit ourselves’ by its use, but that it is also necessary that the sign in question should belong to the same ‘system’ with other signs. Perhaps, however, he only meant, not that for a sign to have some meaning, but that for some signs to have the significance which they actually have in a given language, it is necessary that they should belong to the same ‘system’ with other signs. This word ‘system’ was one which he used very ver...