Philosophical Investigations
Philosophical Investigations (German: Philosophische Untersuchungen) is a work by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, published posthumously in 1953.
This article is about the book by Wittgenstein. For other uses of Philosophical Investigation or Philosophical Investigations, see Philosophical Investigations (disambiguation).Author
Philosophische Untersuchungen
German
1953
Philosophical Investigations is divided into two parts, consisting of what Wittgenstein calls, in the preface, Bemerkungen, translated by Anscombe as "remarks".[1]
A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy.[2]
Relation to Wittgenstein's body of work[edit]
In its preface, Wittgenstein says that Philosophical Investigations can be understood "only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking". That "old way of thinking" is to be found in the only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Many of the ideas developed in the Tractatus are criticised in the Investigations, while other ideas are further developed.
The Blue and Brown Books, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934, contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language and is widely read as a turning point in his philosophy of language.
Themes[edit]
Language-games[edit]
Wittgenstein develops this discussion of games into the key notion of a language-game. For Wittgenstein, his 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."[3] A central feature of language-games is that language is used in 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".[3] 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!", 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. One might even use the word as a code by members of a secret society.
Wittgenstein does not limit the application of his concept of language games to word meaning. He also applies it 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 only acquires significance if we fix it within some context of use. Thus, it fails to say anything because the sentence as such does not yet determine some particular use. The sentence is only meaningful when it is used to say something. For instance, it can be used so as to say that no person or historical figure fits the set of descriptions attributed to the person that 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 thus depends on its context of use.
Meaning as use[edit]
The Investigations deal largely with the difficulties of language and meaning. Wittgenstein viewed the tools of language as being fundamentally simple [a], 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: "Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen"—to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.[4]
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. 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.[5] Wittgenstein's theory of meaning contrasts with Platonic realism[6] and with Gottlob Frege's notions of sense and reference.[7] This argument has been labeled by some authors as "anthropological holism".[8]
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 and the view that he will be criticizing.[9]
Philosophical Investigations was not ready for publication when Wittgenstein died in 1951. G. E. M. Anscombe translated Wittgenstein's manuscript into English, and it was first published in 1953. There are multiple editions of Philosophical Investigations with the popular third edition and 50th anniversary edition having been edited by Anscombe: