Ludwig Wittgenstein-Encyclopedia of Communication Theory & Philosophy entry

This is a pre-print version of an entry forthcoming in International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (2015); please refer to the final published version if quoting. Ludwig Wittgenstein Danièle Moyal-Sharrock University of Hertfordshire d.moyal-sharrock@herts.ac.uk ___________________________________________________________________________ Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentiethcentury. Born in Austria, he lived in England for several years, and taught philosophy at Cambridge University (1939-1947). He published only one book of philosophy during his lifetime: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), but left voluminous notes which were compiled and published posthumously in several volumes, the two most influential of which are: Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty. Wittgenstein's philosophy covers a great range of topics including logic, mathematics, religion, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, culture, perception; and in his treatment of these, he exposes and redefines our understanding of mind, language, meaning and action. 1. Language and Meaning In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein sought to demarcate sense from nonsense. He saw language as having a single function, that of depicting reality: the only sensical use of language is to depict facts or possible facts. Any other use of language is, on his view, nonsensical. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein rejects this reductionist view of language: rather, 'what is called "language" is something made up of heterogeneous elements and the way it meshes with life is infinitely various' (1974 66). He now sees language as, what he calls, a family resemblance concept. Contrary to the Socratic notion that in order to properly understand a concept, we must grasp the essence that characterizes all its instances, Wittgenstein notes that most of our concepts do not have an essential core, but merely subsume diverse uses of the same word whose similarities overlap and criss-cross (1958, 66). Just as that there is no single trait shared by all games which justifies our calling them 'games', there is nothing common to all our uses of language that makes them into language; rather, they are related to one another in many different ways, and it is because of this relationship that we call them all 'language' (1958, 65). In the Investigations, Wittgenstein compares the uses of words to the countless functions of tools in a toolbox. As well as underscoring the diversity in our uses of language, his tool-box analogy reminds us that words work much like tools in that their meaning resides in their use. Wittgenstein opposes the long-standing view that our words carry their meaning with them intrinsically, and claims that the 'meaning of a word is described by describing its use' – that is, how we operate with the word (1979, 48). Just as we learn how to play a game by learning what the permitted moves are, we learn the meaning of words by learning what is accepted as a meaningful use of the word. To use language meaningfully is analogous to making a correct move in a game. Wittgenstein introduces the term 'language-game' to highlight the idea that the mastery of language is an acquired skill or know-how, not a systematic (innate or acquired) application of rules: 'To understand a language means to be 2 master of a technique' (1958, 199). The notion of 'language-game' is also meant to flag the interplay, in the determination of meaning, between language and the actions into which it is woven, and to 'bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life' (1958, 23). For a language to emerge or be possible, there has to be something shared. What is shared is a distinct form of life: the particular biosocial conditions and activities that make particular languages possible. The human form of life could not have produced a feline language; nor a feline form of life, a human language. A human language can only have emerged from a human way of being and acting, which essentially involves both our biological make-up and our social practices. Both components are necessary. For Wittgenstein, language is a normative practice embedded in the shared activities of the language users in a given community: 'To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)' (1958, 199). Languages cannot be abstracted from the context in which they live: 'words have meaning only in the stream of life' (1982, 913). The necessity of social practices for the emergence of language is made clear by Wittgenstein in his account of the impossibility of a private language. Rules determining our use of words (what Wittgenstein calls 'grammar') are a necessary condition for the possibility of language: we cannot allow that both 'Black is darker than white' and 'Black is lighter than white' make sense, in the same way we cannot allow that both '2+2=4' and '2+2=5' make sense. In what is known as the private language argument (1958, 256-71), Wittgenstein asks us to imagine an individual, solitary from birth, who might try to generate a linguistic rule by keeping a diary, recording with the sign 'S' the recurrence of a particular sensation he experiences. Wittgenstein draws our attention to the impossibility for the individual to formulate a definition, or have any criterion of correctness, for the sign 'S' other than whether the sensation feels the same to her. But if whatever is going to feel the same to her is going to be the criterion for what is right; this 'only means that here we can't talk about "right"' (1958, 258). The individual is incapable, on her own, of establishing objective, consistent, criteria of use for her sign. For linguistic communication to be possible, there must be established and monitored criteria for the correct use of words, and that necessitates a social practice. 2. Mind and action Wittgenstein's fundamental contribution to philosophy and psychology may be summarized as debunking the view that the mind is reducible to the brain. On that view, everything we think, say or do – all that we hope, expect, intend, believe, learn, remember, etc. – is stored in our brain in the form of encoded propositions (content) or representations. Wittgenstein shows that this internalist view of the human mind is nonsensical; that it is due to false explanatory pictures that bewitch us, and that it needs correcting. He shows this through a demystification of 'the inner' and a correlated emphasis on action. The emphasis he places on action is immediately apparent in his signature phrase: 'meaning is use': meaning is the product of our operating with words (1979, 21). And so it goes for understanding: 'In most cases [the word 'understand'] is used to mean being able to do so-and-so' (1979, 80); and in his characterization of rule-following as making a move rather than a judgment. To follow a rule is not to grasp an abstract entity that will govern each 3 of our correct applications of the rule; following a rule is doing something: calculating, using mathematical rules, are mechanical activities; like making moves that one was trained to perform. Indeed, Wittgenstein often remarks on the dispensability of propositions in arithmetic, stressing the similarity of calculating to gestures, and the teaching of arithmetic to a training. The inflated role played by the proposition in our philosophical accounts of mind and action is a leitmotif of Wittgenstein's philosophy. He realizes that much of what we have always regarded as thinking is in fact acting or behaviour. This may sound like behaviourism, but isn't. Wittgenstein does not do away with the inner; he merely revises its importance and its nature. It is not the existence of an inner life, of sensations and emotions, that he denies, but that of allegedly explanatory ghostly mental processes that themselves remain unexplained. And so, he pares off anything superfluous from our philosophical descriptions or accounts. He does this for perception, belief, feelings, sensations, emotions and of course action, wherever we have, in our accounts, traditionally inserted an intellectual process or state – be it a thought, a description, an interpretation, an inference, a theory, a judgment, or a justified true belief – that turns out, upon scrutiny, to be superfluous. He shows that our desires, beliefs, emotions, perceptions and actions need not be prompted by implicit inferences, beliefs or propositions: I do not need to tacitly believe that I have a body in order to say: 'My back hurts'. My having a body is an animal (not a propositional or intellectual) certainty which manifests itself in what I say and do with my body: 'we can see from their actions that [people] believe certain things (1975, 284). Wittgenstein thereby rejects the standard view in epistemology that tacit beliefs or propositions are the implicit basis of all our acts and thoughts. He puts this error to rest in On Certainty where he shows that our basic certainties are logical and animal (that is: enacted). This animal or reflex-like immediacy in our basic interacting with the world also puts paid to the idea that our interactions with others are based on a so-called 'theory of mind'. 3. Child Development, Language-Acquisition, and Memory Wittgenstein's philosophy impacts many branches of psychology, particularly those concerned with child development, language acquisition and memory. It is commonplace for psychologists to assume that in order to relate to others normally, children must construct a theory about human talk and action, a 'theory of mind'; and that they – and generally all of us – need to infer the nature of other people’s minds from our experience of our own minds. In his writings on the philosophy of psychology, Wittgenstein argues that interpersonal understanding and social cognition are enculturated, rather than theoretical, inferential or analogical; and that our basic apprehension of feelings in the expressions of other people is immediate, and not by way of inference. On the subject of language acquisition, his work stands in stark opposition to the nativist view of language notably promulgated by Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky. For Wittgenstein, 'Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination' (1975, 475); rather, linguistic meaning is logically rooted in instinctive reactions and gestures and further developed through training and enculturation. Wittgenstein also addresses our preconception about memory being stored in the brain in the form of encoded traces. He does not deny that the brain is necessary to memory, and in 4 fact assumes that there exists a correlation between activities like talking, writing or remembering and what goes on in the brain (1980, 903); what he rejects is that this correlation is a representational or encrypted (codified) correlation. The brain is a mechanical enabler; it is not the storehouse and codifier of our memories. Wittgenstein replaces the picture of memory as information storage and retrieval with a conception of memory as nothing but an ability which is (as are all our abilities) physiologically supported by the brain. This discredits the picture of mental phenomena as essentially representations internal to the brain and sheds light on the mental as an ability whose manifestations can be as much in what we do as in what we think, but never in what our brain 'does' or 'thinks'. 4. The primacy of action Meaning, believing, thinking, understanding, reasoning, calculating, learning, following rules, remembering, intending, expecting, longing – there is hardly anything, traditionally thought to be emergent from, underwritten by, or reducible to, a mental process or state, that Wittgenstein has not shown to be basically embodied or enacted rather than originating in propositions, theories of mind, or ghostly processes. With its emphasis on action at the expense of superfluous inner thoughts or processes, Wittgenstein's philosophy can be credited with having prompted the contemporary philosophical movement called Enactivism, which considers the mind as embodied activity rather than rooted in detached forms of thought (Hutto 2013, 281). His groundbreaking work continues to impact many areas of philosophy (such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and epistemology), as well as psychology and the cognitive sciences, in the fight against cognitivism and reductionism. References Hutto, D. D. (2013) 'Enactivism, from a Wittgensteinian Point of View' American Philosophical Quarterly 50:3, 281-302. Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Blackwell; rpt 1997. (1974) Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, tr. A. Kenny. Oxford: Blackwell. (1975) On Certainty. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (eds). Trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Amended 1st Ed. Oxford: Blackwell, rpt 1997. (1979) Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932-1935, from the notes of A. Ambrose and M. MacDonald. A. Ambrose (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. (1980) Remarks On The Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. (1982) Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Volume I. ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman; trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell. Further Reading 5 Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. (1980) Wittgenstein: Understanding & Meaning: An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, vol. 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Canfield, John V. (1996) 'The Passage into Language: Wittgenstein and Quine' in Wittgenstein and Quine. ed. Arrington, R. L. & Glock, H.-J. London: Routledge, 1996, 118143. Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2007) Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stroll, A. (2002) Wittgenstein. London: OneWorld. Ulrich Mueller and Tim Racine (eds) (2009) New Ideas in Psychology Special Issue: Mind, Meaning and Language: Wittgenstein’s Relevance for Psychology 27 (2009).