Language, Form(s) of Life, and Logic

Investigations after Wittgenstein

Christian Martin

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783110710229
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110517392
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

This volume deals with the connection between thinking-and-speaking and our form(s) of life. All contributions engage with Wittgenstein's approach to this topic. As a whole, the volume takes a stance against both biological and ethnological interpretations of the notion "form of life" and seeks to promote a broadly logico-linguistic understanding instead.

The structure of this book is threefold. Part one focuses on lines of thinking that lead from Wittgenstein's earlier thought to the concept of form of life in his later work. Contributions to part two examine the concrete philosophical function of this notion as well as the ways in which it differs from cognate concepts. Contributions to part three put Wittgenstein's notion of form of life in perspective by relating it to phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and problems in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Paths to Form(s) of Life

Charles Travis

The Rule of the Game (The Moment of Truth)

Abstract: In 1929 Wittgenstein saw the Tractatus collapse before his eyes. By 1931 a framework for a new view was in place. In the interim, one of Wittgenstein’s main interests was mathematics, or philosophy thereof. In particular, he was interested in Hilbert, and, more generally, formalism. Which led him to Frege (Grundgesetze, Vol. 2). Here he came across the germ of the idea of a language game as this notion figures in the Investigations. In tracing this history we can also, I suggest, identify at least much of the work that notion is designed to do. The essay ends with a discussion of some of that work, as found in the first 22 paragraphs of the Investigations.

1 Introduction

In 1929 Wittgenstein agreed to appear in the Aristotelian Society lecture series for the coming academic year. As per custom he submitted his contribution in advance. When the time came, though, he spoke about something else entirely. What he wrote begins as follows:

If we try to analyse any given propositions, we shall find in general that they are logical sums, products, or other truth functions, of simpler propositions. But our analysis, if carried far enough, must come to the point where it reaches propositional forms which are not themselves composed of simpler propositional forms. We must eventually reach the ultimate connections of terms, the immediate connections which cannot be broken without destroying the propositional form as such. The propositions which represent this ultimate connection of terms I call, after B. Russell, atomic propositions. […] It is the task of the theory of knowledge to find them and to understand their construction out of the words or symbols. This task is very difficult, and Philosophy has hardly yet begun to tackle it at some points. (Wittgenstein 1929: 162)

In undertaking to carry out this task, Wittgenstein came to see that the idea itself was misconceived; and then in short order that, since this idea was essential to the Tractatus’s conception of truth, and of representing something as being something, that this, too, was simply a misconception. In 1929, then, Wittgenstein saw the Tractatus crumbling before his eyes. The search was on for what to say instead.

Here is how Wittgenstein later assessed the Tractatus:

Since I began, 16 years ago, to busy myself with philosophy again, I was forced to recognize grave errors in that which I had set down in that first book. (Wittgenstein 1953: x (written 1945))

One fault you can find with a dogmatic account is, first, that it is, as it were, arrogant. But that is not the worst thing about it. There is another mistake, which is much more dangerous and also pervades my whole book, and that is the conception that there are questions the answers to which will be found at a later date. It is held that, although a result is not known, there is a way of finding it. Thus I used to believe, for example, that it is the task of logical analysis to discover the elementary propositions. (Waismann 1984: 182 (9. 11. 1931)11)

Things had changed that much, and further, by September 1931. By which time the outlines of a new view were in place. What happened in those years? And under what influences? Of course, any answer to such questions must be somewhat speculative. But, thanks to Schlick and the Vienna Circle, we have material to go on. In particular, we have Waismann’s rather detailed notes on conversations he, and sometimes Schlick, held with Wittgenstein in those years. In which, I will suggest here, we can find the origins of Wittgenstein’s Investigations notion of a language game, and with that something as to what role it was to play.

In the years 1929 – 1931 there were two things much on Wittgenstein’s mind. One was the collapse of the Tractatus. The other was philosophy of mathematics, prominently then-current discussions of formalism, and in particular, Hilbert, and his reception. It is this second concern which led Wittgenstein, and with him Waismann, to read Frege, specifically Grundgesetze volume 2 (1903). And here, in Frege, we find the ur-idea of a language game. At the same time, recognising how the Tractatus had misconceived truth, or representing truly, inevitably brought Wittgenstein’s later view of such matters closer to Frege, since it was just what Russell, and relatedly Wittgenstein, could not see as to what representing truly must be that Frege got exactly right from start to end of his career. What was missed by Russell and early Wittgenstein is what is contained in Frege’s notion of that countable, der Gedanke.

We should thus expect to find in later Wittgenstein a modified Fregean view; modified at points where Frege got something not quite right, but also so as to forestall various misreadings of him and their resultant mythology; notably ones mis-locating features of the logical (of Wahrsein, the business of being true) in the psychological (Fürwahrhalten, the business of holding true). A thought (Gedanke) is designed for a role on the logical side of that distinction. Insofar as what we (intelligibly, coherently) hold true is what might be true, or at least false, in holding true we of course relate to thoughts. But just how, or where, such would occur does not follow simply from what a thought must be to fulfil its logical role. In which we find a rich source of confusions Wittgenstein is keen to scotch. Here, though, we are concerned with groundwork for such later projects in the years 1929 – 1931, as contained in that notion language game which then began to take form.

2 The Demise of the Tractatus

2.1 What Collapsed

The proximal cause of the Tractatus’s demise, what Wittgenstein first saw in 1929, is contained in two propositions:

1. There is exactly one complete analysis of a proposition [Satz]. (TLP: 3.25)

2. A sign of an elementary proposition is that no elementary proposition can contradict it. (TLP: 4.211)

We arrive at complete analysis, Wittgenstein tells us, where to go further would be to lose propositional form. There are three things it might be to lose propositional form. One might be to lose something which is liable to be true or false outright (rather than merely of something). A second (not quite the same, as we will see) would be to lose the content of something which might be true or false outright: a way for things to be, on that catholic reading which blocks questions ‘Which ones?’, on which it is not a plural, for use of one or another collection of things. (I will henceforth mark this reading as ‘things©’.) A third would be to move out of the realm of items whose business was to make truth beholden, even in part, to how things were. One way to view the core problem with the Tractatus is that in its picture these three things collapse into one. This, though, is to adumbrate.

Wittgenstein’s first reaction to this proximal cause of collapse was damage control. Thus, on 2. 1. 1930 he wrote,

Formerly I had two ideas about elementary propositions, of which one still appears right to me, whereas I was entirely mistaken as to the second. My first assumption was that by analysing propositions we must eventually come to ones which are an immediate combination of objects. I still hold that. Second I had the idea that elementary propositions must be independent of each other. […] I was mistaken about this, and what follows from it is certainly false. (Waismann 1984: 73)

But this idea of damage control was soon given up. It is, e. g., the whole Tractarian picture of being true that he is giving up when he presents it as an important discovery that there may be “a picture which, though correct, has no similarity with its object” (Wittgenstein 1958: 37).

The proximal cause of Wittgenstein’s realisation that there were ‘grave difficulties’ with the Tractatus really does point to a total collapse. This is because the idea that a proposition, or (as Frege put it) that by which truth comes into question, has a unique and complete analysis is mandated inexorably by the Tractatus’s idea of what being true is. So the (relatively) local collapse of Tractatus 3.25 is, au fond, the collapse of that same picture. But to see this we must first set out what this picture is. Here, then, the top of the garden path (in logical, not bibliographical, order):

There must be something identical in the picture and what it depicts by which the one can so much as be a picture of the other at all. (TLP: 2.161)

What every picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality in order to be able to depict it at all – correctly or falsely – is [its] logical form, that is, the form of reality. (TLP: 2.18)

So there is a form, or structure, of a sort to which both a picture (a Bild or Abbildung) and what it pictures in some way or other are both susceptible, and which they must share for the picture to picture the depicted as anything at all. It is thus a form for a picture, or picturing, to take, and also for reality (the way things are) to take. The way things are has a logical form. Our feet are now firmly on the path which is soon to give out under them.

This hypothesised common element is needed in order to allow for this:

That the elements of the picture relate to each other in a given way represents things as so relating. This connection of the elements of the picture is called its structure […]. (TLP: 2.15)

The form of a representation is the possibility that the things relate to each other as do the elements of the picture. (TLP: 2.151)

So a picture represents by a sort of correspondence between its elements and the elements of what it represents as being as it does, namely, things (Sachen). Things here are thus things©: the question ‘Which ones?’ is blocked. And the common form – what is shared by picture and things – consists in elements in each which can stand in the same relations to one another, so that it is at least intelligible for the picture’s elements to present the elements in what is pictured (things) so to relate, so that:

The picture agrees with reality or not; it is correct or incorrect, true or false. (TLP: 2.21)

So that being true can consist in such agreement. It can consist in reality resembling the picture in the way just described.

It is by now clear why 3.25, the idea that every proposition has a unique and complete analysis, is mandatory on the Tractatus’s account of what being true is. As Aristotle pointed out, representing truly is representing things as they are, representing falsely representing things as they are not. So for something to be in the business of being true or false at all is for it to represent things (Sachen, Wirklichkeit) as being some given way where this is (or is at least liable to be) a way things are, or, at worst, a way things are not. But now, if something is in the business of being true (or false), there must then be an answer to the question when things would be as it represents them, when not. So if truth consists in an agreement in structure between representer (or representation) and that which is thus represented as being something, then wherever there is something in the business of being true (or false) there must be an answer to the question just what structure (of the relevant sort) must be in things (the Abgebildete) if that something is to be true. And on the Tractatus’s account, as above, that answer can only be provided by identifying that structure in the representer which must be matched in reality if there is to be truth. To identify such a structure would be to provide a unique and complete analysis. So providing that much is mandatory if there is to be a truth-bearer at all.

It is in a way surprising that Wittgenstein should have thought such a thing by, say, 1918 or 1920. Certainly the handwriting was already on the wall. Perhaps, though, Russell’s influence is at play here (even though the picture just sketched was not Russell’s). In 1902 – 1904 Russell corresponded with Frege on a variety of topics, among which Frege’s ideas Sinn and Bedeutung, Gedanke. Two things (among others) stand out in that correspondence. The first is that Russell genuinely had no understanding of those ideas. And this is because he could not distinguish what Frege identifies as the logical from the psychological. And the second is that he agrees with the Tractatus’s picture just sketched to this extent: that he cannot see anything like a categorial distinction between the sorts of things liable to be constituents of a picture (Abbildung or Bild) which pictures, and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Form of Our Life with Language
• Paths to Form(s) of Life
• Form(s) of Life: the Very Idea
• Form(s) of Life after Wittgenstein
• Biographical Notes
• Index