Philosophical Investigations () is a work by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, published posthumously in 1953.
Philosophical Investigations is divided into two parts, consisting of what Wittgenstein calls, in the preface, Bemerkungen, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe as "remarks".Wittgenstein (1953), Preface. (All citations will be from Wittgenstein (1953), unless otherwise noted.)
A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy.
Relation to Wittgenstein's body of work
In its preface, Wittgenstein says that Philosophical Investigations can "be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my older way of thinking". Wittgenstein's biographer Ray Monk writes, "This is partly because of the great differences between his early and late work, but also because of the equally important continuities between the two".Monk, Ray (2005). How to Read Wittgenstein. London: Granta Books, pp. 63-64. The early work in which Wittgenstein expressed his "older way of thinking" is the only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
The Blue and Brown Books, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934, contain the seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language and are widely read as a turning point in his philosophy of language—"as an early prototype for subsequent presentations of Wittgenstein's later philosophy".Monk, Ray (1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York: The Free Press, p. 337.
The American philosopher Norman Malcolm credits Piero Sraffa with helping Wittgenstein's break away from the notion that a proposition must literally function as a picture of reality. According to Malcolm, this shift was prompted by a rude gesture from Sraffa, who then asked Wittgenstein, "What is the logical form of that?" In the first edition, the incident is described on page 69. See also, Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York: The Free Press, 1990, pp. 260-261. In the Introduction of Philosophical Investigations, written in 1945, Wittgenstein acknowledged Sraffa: "for many years unceasingly practiced on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas in this book".
Content The book begins with a quotation from Johann Nestroy's play Der Schützling: "The trouble about progress is that it always looks much greater than it really is" (translation from revised fourth edition).
Language games Wittgenstein first mentions games in section 3 of Philosophical Investigations and then develops this discussion of games into the key notion of a language game. Wittgenstein's use of the term language game "is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life-form". A central feature of language games is that language is used in a context and cannot be understood outside of that context. Wittgenstein lists the following as examples of language games: "Giving orders, and obeying them"; "describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements"; "constructing an object from a description (a drawing)"; "reporting an event"; "speculating about an event". The famous example is the meaning of the word "game". We speak of various kinds of games: board games, betting games, sports, and "war games". These are all different uses of the word "games". Wittgenstein also gives the example of "Water!",See § 27. which can be used as an exclamation, an order, a request, or an answer to a question. The meaning of the word depends on the language game in which it is used. Another way Wittgenstein makes the point is that the word "water" has no meaning apart from its use within a language game. One might use the word as an order to have someone else bring you a glass of water. But it can also be used to warn someone that the water has been poisoned.
Wittgenstein applies his concept of language games not only to word meaning but also to sentence meaning. For example, the sentence "Moses did not exist" (§ 79) can mean various things. Wittgenstein argues that, independent of use, the sentence does not yet "say" anything. It is "meaningless" in the sense of not being significant for a particular purpose. It acquires significance only if we use it within a context; the sentence by itself does not determine its meaning but becomes meaningful only when it is used to say something. For instance, it can be used to say that no person or historical figure fits the descriptions attributed to the person who goes by the name of "Moses". But it can also mean that the leader of the Israelites was not called Moses. Or that there cannot have been anyone who accomplished all that the Bible relates about Moses, etc. What the sentence means depends on its use in a context.
Meaning as use
The Investigations deal largely with the difficulties of language and meaning. Wittgenstein viewed the tools of language as being utterly simple, and he believed that philosophers had obscured this simplicity by misusing language and by asking meaningless questions. He attempted in the Investigations to make things clear: —to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.§ 309; the original English translation used the word shew for show.
Wittgenstein claims that the meaning of a word is based on how the word is understood within the language game. A common summary of his argument is that meaning is use.Hallett, Garth, S. J. Wittgenstein's Definition of Meaning as Use. New York: Fordham University Press, 1967. According to the use theory of meaning, the words are not defined by reference to the objects they designate or by the mental representations one might associate with them, but by how they are used. For example, this means there is no need to postulate that there is something called good that exists independently of any good deed.§ 77 Wittgenstein's theory of meaning contrasts with Platonic realism and with Gottlob Frege's notions of sense and reference.Jesús Padilla Gálvez Philosophical Anthropology: Wittgenstein's Perspective, p. 18 This argument has been labelled by some authors as "anthropological holism".Nicholas Bunnin, Jiyuan Yu (2008) The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, entry for anthropological holism p. 34
Section 43 in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations reads: "For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word 'meaning,' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."
Wittgenstein begins Philosophical Investigations with a quote from Augustine's Confessions, which represents the view that language serves to point out objects in the world; this is the view that he will be criticising.The individual words in a language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of language, we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. Wittgenstein rejects a variety of ways of thinking about what the meaning of a word is or how meanings can be identified. He shows how, in each case, the meaning of the word presupposes our ability to use it. He first asks the reader to perform a thought experiment: come up with a definition of the word game.See § 3. While this may at first seem like a simple task, he then leads us through the problems with each of the possible definitions of the word game. Any definition that focuses on amusement leaves us unsatisfied, since the feelings experienced by a world-class chess player are very different from those of a circle of children playing duck, duck, goose. Any definition that focuses on competition will fail to explain the game of catch, or the game of solitaire. And a definition of the word game that focuses on rules will face similar difficulties.
The essential point of this exercise is often missed. Wittgenstein's point is not that it is impossible to define game, but that "even if we don't have a definition, we can still use the word successfully".See § 66 (Wittgenstein. PI. Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Everybody understands what we mean when we talk about playing a game, and we can even clearly identify and correct inaccurate uses of the word, all without reference to any definition that consists of necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of a game. The German word for game, , has a different sense from the English; the meaning of also extends to the concept of play and playing. This German sense of the word may help readers better understand Wittgenstein's remarks regarding games.
Wittgenstein argues that definitions emerge from what he termed forms of life, roughly the culture and society in which they are used. Wittgenstein stresses the social aspects of cognition; to see how language works in most cases, we have to see how it functions in a specific social situation.See the first sentence of § 340: "One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that.". See § 497. It is this emphasis on becoming attentive to the social backdrop against which language is rendered intelligible that explains Wittgenstein's elliptical comment that "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." However, in proposing the thought experiment involving the fictional character Robinson Crusoe, a captain shipwrecked on a desolate island with no other inhabitant, Wittgenstein shows that language is not in all cases a social phenomenon (although it is in most cases); instead, the criterion for a language is grounded in a set of interrelated normative activities: teaching, explanations, techniques, and criteria of correctness. In short, it is essential that a language be shareable, but this does not imply that for a language to function, it must be shared.(II, xi), p. 190
Wittgenstein rejects the idea that ostensive definitions can provide us with the meaning of a word. For Wittgenstein, the thing that the word stands for does not give the meaning of the word. Wittgenstein argues for this by making a series of moves to show that understanding an ostensive definition presupposes an understanding of the way the word being defined is used.See § 26–34. So, for instance, there is no difference between pointing to a piece of paper, to its colour, or to its shape, but understanding the difference is crucial to using the paper in an ostensive definition of a shape or of a colour.
Family resemblances
Why is it that we are sure a particular activity (e.g. Olympic target shooting) is a game while a similar activity (e.g. military sharpshooting) is not? Wittgenstein's explanation is tied up with an important analogy. How do we recognise that two people we know are related to one another? We may see similar height, weight, eye colour, hair, nose, mouth, patterns of speech, social or political views, mannerisms, body structure, last names, etc. If we see enough similarities we say we've noticed a family resemblance.See § 66-§ 71. This is not always a conscious process—generally we don't catalogue various similarities until we reach a certain threshold; we just intuitively see the resemblances. Wittgenstein suggests that the same is true of language. We are all familiar with enough things that are games and enough things that are not games that we can categorise new activities as either games or not.See § 70 ("When I give the description 'The ground was quite covered with plants', do you want to say I don't know what I am talking about until I can give a definition of a plant?") and § 264 ("Once you know what the word signifies, you understand it, you know its whole application.")