The Example of Wittgenstein

We met Wittgenstein telling us that we cannot step outside our own skins, cannot survey our own practices on the one hand and the world on the other, and get a view of how they are related. So he is often taken to have been a quietist, who thinks that there is nothing in general to say about how language relates to the world. We just immerse ourselves in our different language games – pursuing ethics, mathematics, science, religion or whatever it is – and when we come up with various sayings, then they are true in just the same, minimal sense. ‘Reference to an objective reality’ is not a special distinction belonging to some class of sayings but not to others. There are no debates to be had.

Wittgenstein certainly held a minimalist or deflationist theory of truth. So he can pass without cost from any assertion p to ‘p is true’

and to ‘p corresponds to the facts’ or ‘p says how things are’. Nothing is added by these locutions, so Wittgenstein can say without hesita-tion all the things that define the Story part of realism. He can do this across the board. He can say that there really are values, numbers, possible worlds, rules, intentions, but he does not agree with our real realist, the meat eater who goes on to Meta Story, that these sayings are laden with theory. They go without saying, or rather, they go with saying, the things that get said in the respective areas of discourse. It is also plain that Wittgenstein had no sympathy with eliminativism or error theories. He was deeply suspicious of philosophical theory and its pretensions to cosy acquaintance with logos, and the idea that such theory could have the authority to dismiss any area of human activ-ity (even, as we saw in chapter 1, religious activactiv-ity) struck him as almost impious. Reflection must take off from where we stand.

This has led to Wittgenstein being celebrated for teaching the denial of differences, the celebration of the seamless web of language and the soothing away of distinctions. On this account, there is nothing inter-esting to be said about the contrast between empirical science and mathematics, or fact versus value, or any other significant kind. What is left is a smooth, undifferentiated view of language, in which all

sentences perform the same function: that of saying how things stand.

Wittgenstein is frequently presented as a patron saint of quietism. This bizarre misreading would not be worth taking seriously were it not practically universal in the philosophical community.

So is Wittgenstein bent on flattening out even these common-sense distinctions? Far from it. He works in the west, not the south-east. Even at a cursory glance, his later work is shot through with warnings against taking surface uniformity as a safe guide to linguis-tic function. He wrote that ‘We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the language games, because the clothing of our lan-guage makes everything alike.’⁶ He said that ‘The basic evil of Russell’s logic, as also of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a propo-sition is illustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then pre-supposed as understood in full generality.’⁷The idea that the words don’t determine the language game in which the proposition func-tions infuses his entire philosophy of mathematics, and might almost serve as a motto for it. He actually told his friend Drury that he had thought of using as a motto for the Philosophical Investigations a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences.’

And he does. In every area that Wittgenstein considers in detail his weapon of choice is to look carefully at what we are doing with lan-guage (another motto he liked was from Goethe: ‘Im Anfang war die Tat’ – in the beginning was the deed). And, he shows, in many cases there are much more illuminating ways of going about this descrip-tion than saying that we simply represent how things stand, how reality is configured. Indeed, he is consistently scornful of going about it this way. He thinks that precisely because minimalism about truth is correct, trying to understand a piece of language by insisting on the facts it purports to represent is either useless or positively misleading.

Here are some examples of this way of thinking.

In the 1929 ‘Lecture on Ethics’ Wittgenstein’s central and repeated claim is that no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgement of absolute value.⁸He considers the ‘book of the world’ as it might be written by an omniscient person, containing ‘all relative judge-ments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made’ (note especially the last clause). Even

if we make sure that our book describes all human feelings ‘there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics’. ‘Ethics, if it is any-thing, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and as if I were to pour out a gallon over it.’

Considering statements of absolute value he urges that ‘no state of affairs has the coercive power of an absolute judge’, and goes on to consider various states of mind lying in the region of the ethical (won-der, fear, or a feeling of safety or of the miracle of existence) en route to the idea that a certain misuse of language runs through all ethical and religious expressions. It is as if they are similes, but ‘as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts’. Finally, what it (ethics) says ‘does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a docu-ment of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply.’

Notice that he is not merely contrasting ethical facts with scientific ones. For he explicitly adds that the book of the world contains not only all scientific truths, but all truths, yet still no ethics. And the thrust of the lecture must surely be that it is from a different stand-point than that of description that ethics is found. It is found when it is felt, or perhaps even when we think not of description but of feel-ings and the will, and this explains the elusiveness, even the threat of vanishing, of the ethical proposition. Now Wittgenstein was still moving from his early to his later philosophy in 1929, and some might suppose that his minimalism or quietism was not at the time fully fledged. But Wittgenstein never gave any indication of changing this view. It is not as if later he said, as a quietist ought to say, ‘Of course my lecture was hopeless: ethics describes facts – ethical facts.’

What does happen later simply reaffirms the disengagement of ethics and facts. In a conversation of 1942, Rhees reports, Wittgenstein considers an ethical dilemma: ‘Someone might ask whether the treatment of such a question in Christian ethics is right or not. I want to say that this question does not make sense.’⁹If we imag-ine deciding which solution is right and which is wrong, he complains:

But we do not know what this decision would be like – how it would be determined, what sort of criteria would be used and so on. Compare saying that it must be possible to decide which of two standards of accuracy is the right one. We do not even know what a person who asks this question is after.

And in 1945 we find:

Someone may say, ‘There is still the difference between truth and falsity.

Any ethical judgement in whatever system may be true or false.’ Remember that ‘p is true’ means simply ‘p’. If I say ‘Although I believe that so and so is good, I may be wrong’: this says no more than that what I assert may be denied.

Or suppose someone says, ‘One of the ethical systems must be the right one – or nearer the right one.’ Well, suppose I say Christian ethics is the right one. Then I am making a judgement of value. It amounts to adopting Christian ethics. It is not like saying that one of these physical theories must be the right one. The way in which some reality corresponds – or conflicts – with a physical theory has no counterpart here.

Here Wittgenstein not only turns his back on the appeal to a moral reality, serving to make one opinion ‘the right one’. He explicitly con-trasts the case with that of physics where, he says, there is a different way in which reality does correspond or conflict with theory – the very antithesis of a ‘minimalist’ view.

One thing that is very obvious in this passage, and in others, is a dismissive attitude to the introduction of truth, reality or fact, as somehow containing the key to the use of the language game, ending the philosophical story. Here a minimalist or deflationary theory of truth is indeed exposed. His constant, characteristic stand is against using facts and the rest as a separate element in our description of the things we do with language – the ‘language game’ – something that we can use to ‘place’ or understand the activity of judgement, or that we can use as a constraint in any such attempt.

This is very important. An anti-realist about an area is likely to be met with sage rebuttals of the form ‘Well, I happen to think that it is a fact that . . . It is a fact that honesty is a virtue, or a fact that energy

is conserved in many physical processes’ as if this settled the matter against the expressivist, or against an instrumentalist or fictionalist view of this part of physical theory. Whereas all it illustrates is com-mitment to the claims in question, which, of course, the anti-realist shares (he is not an eliminativist). It doesn’t take us to a meta-level of special philosophical interpretation, and Wittgenstein is rightly impa-tient with views that pretend that it does.

A second area in which Wittgenstein certainly visits the south-west is that of mathematics and especially its necessity: the feeling we have that 7 + 5 not only is 12, but must be 12. What is it for necessities to obtain, so vast that they span not only this world but all possible worlds? Here are some of his sayings from Remarks on the Foun-dations of Mathematics:

Let us remember that in mathematics we are convinced of grammatical propositions; so the expression, the result, of our being convinced is that we accept a rule.

Nothing is more likely than that the verbal expression of the result of a mathematical proof is calculated to delude us with a myth.¹⁰

Why do you want always to consider mathematics under the aspect of discovering and not of doing? It must influence us a great deal that in cal-culating we use the words ‘correct’ and ‘true’ and ‘false’ and the form of statements. (Shaking and nodding one’s head) . . . There is no doubt at all that in certain language games mathematical propositions play the part of rules of description, as opposed to descriptive propositions . . . But that is not to say that this contrast does not shade off in all direc-tions. And that in turn is not to say that the contrast is not of the greatest importance.¹¹

To be practical, mathematics must tell us facts. – But do these facts have to be mathematical facts? Why should not mathematics instead of ‘teaching us the facts’ create the forms of what we call facts?¹²

In other words, according to Wittgenstein the language game of mathematics is better described in many ways than by just saying that it is the one in which we attempt to describe the mathematical facts.

On the necessity or inexorability of mathematical truth he also has this delicious remark:

We say: ‘if you really follow the rule in multiplying, it must come out the same’. Now when this is merely the slightly hysterical style of university talk, we have no need to be particularly interested. It is however the expres-sion of an attitude towards the technique of multiplying, which comes out everywhere in our lives. The emphasis of the ‘must’ corresponds only to the inexorability of this attitude, not merely towards the technique of calculat-ing, but also towards innumerable related practices.¹³

For Wittgenstein ‘it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our act-ing, which lies at the bottom of the language game’.¹⁴Seeing would imply a relationship to something else, but this is exactly what cannot usefully be invoked when we are trying to understand, for example, basic mathematical certainties.

Wittgenstein adopted the same approach in his discussion of the foundations of knowledge. In On Certainty, a text put together from his last writings, he ruminates on the nature of ‘hinge’ or ‘framework’

commitments that define our whole intellectual landscape – such things as the existence of the earth, or the fact that there were people around before I was born, that motor cars do not grow on trees, that the words coming out of my mouth are English words that I under-stand. Propositions of this kind, he suggests, are not ordinary empir-ical propositions, for there could be no activity of verifying or falsifying them. We could not bring anything more certain to bear; for they themselves determine the whole roster of what is certain and what is by contrast relatively doubtful. Such commitments do not have the same status as more ordinary ones: ‘one can lay down such a proposition and turn it from an empirical proposition into a norm of description.’ Wittgenstein holds that ‘there is something mislead-ing’ about applying truth or falsity to such matter-of-course back-grounds to all our living and thinking. ‘Really “the proposition is either true or false” only means that it must be possible to decide for or against it. But this does not say what the ground for such a deci-sion is like.’¹⁵The problem here is that someone seriously doubting such propositions is not so much making an assertion with which one

disagrees, but ruling themselves out of the game, putting themselves beyond the pale. We can know in advance that argument and evi-dence will be hopeless: what is required is something more like a drug or a bang on the head, a conversion. But that in turn is a question of attitude:

What does it mean to say: ‘But that’s no longer the same game!’ How do I use this sentence? As information? Well, perhaps to introduce some infor-mation in which differences are enumerated and their consequences explained. But also to express that just for that reason I don’t join in here, or at any rate take up a different attitude to the game.¹⁶

Wittgenstein applies the same set of thoughts, the same reinterpreta-tions, to the activity of philosophy itself. Like Kant, he was constant-ly preoccupied with the strange nature of philosophical reflection and its dubious claims to give us knowledge. As an activity, it is fine, but we are constantly in danger of misunderstanding the nature of the activity. For instance, we might suppose it to give us descriptions, but at a more ‘deep’ or ‘necessary’ level than those of more normal science or history. But, Wittgenstein holds, it is or should be nothing but an assemblage of ‘reminders’, a grammatical inquiry into the forms of thinking embedded in our language. Even reflection is not quite what it seems.

Another area where Wittgenstein invokes a south-westerly approach is that of our own descriptions of our own minds. We might think that when we say ‘I believe . . .’ or ‘I intend . . .’ we know our own minds through some specially privileged intimacy, an inner view which we have and nobody else has. Wittgenstein invites us to see the sayings instead not as descriptions, but as avowals: ‘“I intend” is never a description, although in certain circumstances a description can be derived from it.’¹⁷He presents this idea as helping to show us how intentions ‘fit’ actions, the implication being that if they just sat in our minds as ‘mental states’ (analogous to the state of our diges-tions) this fit would be mysterious. A food might fit the state of our digestions in one sense, but surely not in the same sense that an action fits my intention to do it. In fact, Wittgenstein thought that it was by misunderstanding these things that mind–body dualism gets such a

hold on us. He does, however, notice that the approach makes descriptions of the intentions and beliefs of other people, or indeed of our own past selves, problematic:

Don’t take it as a matter of course, but as a most remarkable thing, that the verbs ‘believe’, ‘wish’, ‘will’ display all the inflexions possessed by ‘cut’,

‘chew’, ‘run’.¹⁸

His idea is that ‘I intend to come to lunch’ is an avowal, rather like issuing a threat or a warning or a promise. This unfortunately leaves it obscure what we are doing when we come up with slightly more complex sayings, such as ‘I intended to come to lunch’ (past tense), or

‘He intends to come to lunch’ (third person). Although Wittgenstein notices the problem, he does little to suggest how he would solve it, and this remains the principal problem with this part of this thinking.

Wittgenstein does not take these reflections to impugn the notion of truth. As a minimalist he cannot do any such thing. What they do is to show us what the activities, which include saying things, rest upon. In ethics, for example, we cajole and insist, feel emotions such as shame or guilt, coerce, judge, condemn and prescribe. If we could not see these practical activities at the centre of ethical moral practice, just announcing that with ethical remarks we describe ethical facts would be useless.

Wittgenstein’s pluralism shows us that what goes for one area need not go for all. There is absolutely no reason for uniformity. One may be a perspectivist about some things, a realist about science, a sui generis realist about physics, but a reductionist about minds. One might be a quasi-realist about ethics and an eliminativist about theo-logy. Any such combination will simply need to defend its own con-trasts, and this is part of the interest. For this reason we should beware of framing the issues too generally, as issues about Language and the World. Even if that abstract issue ceases to enchant us, the

Wittgenstein’s pluralism shows us that what goes for one area need not go for all. There is absolutely no reason for uniformity. One may be a perspectivist about some things, a realist about science, a sui generis realist about physics, but a reductionist about minds. One might be a quasi-realist about ethics and an eliminativist about theo-logy. Any such combination will simply need to defend its own con-trasts, and this is part of the interest. For this reason we should beware of framing the issues too generally, as issues about Language and the World. Even if that abstract issue ceases to enchant us, the