For those of you who did not get the PDF because the file size was too large for your email, below are parts of Wittgenstein’s Lectures and his Blue Book, work that gets at private language in a different, though similar enough (for our purposes) way as the Philosophical Investigations PDF does. Ths work is available free online in totality at:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/wittgens.htm
http://www.geocities.jp/mickindex/wittgenstein/witt_blue_en.html
FROM THE BLUE BOOK:
PREFACE
DEAR RUSSELL
Two years ago, or so, I promised to send you a manuscript of mine. Now the one I am sending you to-day isn’t that manuscript. I’m still pottering about with it, and God knows whether I will ever publish it, or any of it. But two years ago I held some lectures in Cambridge and dictated some notes to my pupils so that they might have something to carry home with them, in their hands if not in their brains. And I had these notes duplicated. I have just been correcting misprints and other mistakes in some of the copies and the idea came into my mind whether you might not like to have a copy. So I’m sending you one. I don’t wish to suggest that you should read the lectures; but if you should have nothing better to do and if you should get some mild enjoyment out of them I should be very pleased indeed. (I think it’s very difficult to understand them, as so many points are just hinted at. They are meant only for the people who heard the lectures.) As I say, if you don’t read them it doesn’t matter at all.
yours ever,
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
The Blue Book
WHAT is the meaning of a word?
Let us attack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; what does the explanation of a word look like?
The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question “how do we measure a length” helps us to understand the problem “what is length?”
The question “What is length?”, “What is meaning?”, “What is the number one?” etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can’t point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something.(We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.)
Asking first “What is an explanation of meaning?” has two advantages. You in a sense bring the question “what is meaning” down to earth. For, surely, to understand the meaning of “meaning” you ought also to understand the meaning of “explanation of meaning”. Roughly:”let’s ask what the explanation of meaning is , for whatever that explains will be the meaning.” Studying the grammar of the expression “expression of meaning” will teach you something about the grammar of the word “meaning” and will cure you of the temptation to look about you for some object which you might call “the meaning”.
What one generally calls “expressions of the meaning of a word” can, very roughly, be divided into verbal and ostensive definitions. It will be seen later in what sense this division is only rough and provisional(and that it is, is an important point). The verbal definition, as it takes us from one verbal expression to another, in a sense gets us no further. In the ostensive definition however we seem to make a much more real step towards learning the meaning.
One difficulty which strikes us is that for many words in our language there do not seem to be ostensive definitions; e.g. for such words as “one”, “number”, “not”, etc.
Question: Need the ostensive definition itself be understood? — Can’t the ostensive definition be misunderstood?
If the definition explains the meaning of a word, surely it can’t be essential that you should have heard the word before. It is the ostensive definition’s business to give it a meaning. Let us explain the word “tove” by pointing to a pencil and saying “this is tove”. (Instead of “this is tove” I could here have said “this is called ‘tove’”. I point this out to remove, once and for all, the idea that the words of the ostensive definition predicate something of the defined; the confusion between the sentence “this is red”, attributing the colour red to something, and the ostensive definition “this is called ‘red’”.) Now the ostensive definition “this is tove” can be interpreted in all sorts of ways. I will give a few such interpretations and use English words with well established usage. The definition then can be interpreted to mean:
“This is a pencil”,
“This is round”,
“This is wood”,
“This is one”,
“This is hard”, etc. etc.
one might object to this argument that all these interpretations presuppose another word-language. And this objection is significant if by “interpretation” we only mean “translation into a word-language”. — Let me give some hints which might make this clearer. Let us ask ourselves what is our criterion when we say that someone has interpreted the ostensive definition in a particular way. Suppose I give to an Englishman the ostensive definition “this is what the Germans call ‘Buch’”. Then, in the great majority of cases at any rate, the English word “book” will come into the Englishman’s mind. We may say he has interpreted “Buch” to mean “book”. The case will be different if e.g. we point to a thing which he has never seen before and say: “This is a banjo”. Possibly the word “guitar” will then come into his mind, possibly no word at all but the image of a similar instrument, possibly nothing at all. Supposing then I give him the order “now pick a banjo from amongst these things.” If he picks what we call a “banjo” we might say “he has given the word ‘banjo’ the correct interpretation”; if he picks some other instrument — “he has interpreted ‘banjo’ to mean ’string instrument’”.
We say “he has given the word ‘banjo’ this or that interpretation”, and are inclined to assume a definite act of interpretation besides the act of choosing.
Our problem is analogous to the following:
If I give someone the order “fetch me a red flower from that meadow”, how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word?
Now the answer one might suggest first is that he went to look for a red flower carrying a red image in his mind, and comparing it with the flowers to see which of the had the colour of the image. Now there is such a way of searching, and it is not at all essential that the image we use should be a mental one. In fact the process may be this: I carry a chart-co-ordinating names and coloured squares. When I hear the order “fetch me etc.” I draw my finger across the chart from the word “red” to a certain square, and I go and look for a flower which has the same colour as the square. But this is not the only way of searching and it isn’t the usual way. We go, look about us, walk up to a flower and pick it, without comparing it to anything. To see that the process of obeying the order can be of this kind, consider the order “imagine a red patch”. You are not tempted in this case to think that before obeying you must have imagined a red patch to serve you as a pattern for the red patch which you were ordered to imagine.
Now you might ask: do we interpret the words before we obey the order? And in some cases you will find that you do something which might be called interpreting before obeying, in some cases not.
it seems that there are certain definite mental processes bound up with the working of language, processes through which alone language can function. I mean the processes of understanding and meaning. The signs of our language seem dead without these mental processes; and it might seem that only function of the signs is to induce such processes, and that these are the things we ought really to be interested in. Thus, if you are asked what is the relation between a name and the thing it names, you will be inclined to answer that the relation is a psychological one, and perhaps when you say this you think in particular of the mechanism of association. — We are tempted to think that the action of language consists of two parts; an inorganic part, the handling of signs, and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking. These latter activities seem to take place in a queer kind of medium, the mind; and the mechanism of the mind, the nature of which, it seems, we don’t quite understand, can bring about effects which no material mechanism could. Thus e.g. a thought (which is such a mental process) can agree or disagree with the reality;I am able to think of a man who isn’t present; I am able to imagine him, ‘mean him’ in a remark which I make about him, even if he is thousands of miles away or dead. “What a queer mechanism,” one might say, “the mechanism of wishing must be if I can wish that which will never happen”.
There is one way of avoiding at least partly the occult appearance of the processes of thinking, and it is, to replace in these processes any working of the imagination by acts of looking at real objects. Thus it may seem essential that, at least in certain cases, when I hear the word “red” with understanding, a red image should be before my mind’s eye. But why should I not substitute seeing a red bit of paper for imaging a red patch? The visual image will only be the more vivid. Imagine a man always carrying a sheet of paper in his pocket on which the names of colours are co-ordinated with coloured patches. You may say that it would be a nuisance to carry such a table of samples about with you, and that the mechanism of association is what we always use instead of it. But this is irrelevant; and in many cases it is not even true. If, for instance, you were ordered to paint a particular shade of blue called “Prussian Blue”, you might have to use a table to lead you from the word “Prussian Blue” to a sample of colour, which would serve you as a copy.
We could perfectly well, for our purpose, replace every process of imaging by a process of looking at an object or by painting, drawing or modelling; and every process of speaking to oneself by speaking aloud or by writing.
Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege’s ides could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.
But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? — In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)
The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a “thing corresponding to a substantive.”)
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.
As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.
It seems at first sight that that which gives to thinking its peculiar character is that it is a train of mental states, and it seems that what is queer and difficult to understand about thinking is the processes which happen in the medium of the mind, processes possible only in this medium. The comparison which forces itself upon us is that of the mental medium with the protoplasm of a cell, say, of an amoeba. We observe certain actions of the amoeba, its taking food by extending arms, its splitting up into similar cells, each of which grows and behaves like the original one. We say “of what a queer nature the protoplasm must be to act in such a way”, and perhaps we say that no physical mechanism could behave in this way, and that the mechanism of amoeba must be of a totally different kind. In the same way we are tempted to say “the mechanism of the mind must be of a most peculiar kind to be able to do what the mind does”. But here we are making two mistakes. For what struck us as being queer about thought and thinking was not at all that it had curious effects which we were not yet able to explain (causally). Our problem, in other words, was not a scientific one; but a muddle felt as a problem.
Supposing we tried to construct a mind-model as a result of psychological investigations, a model which, as we should say, would explain the action of the mind. This model would be a part of a psychological theory in the way in which a mechanical model of the ether can be part of a theory of electricity. (Such a model, by the way, is always part of the symbolism of a theory. Its advantage may be that it can be taken in at a glance and easily held in the mind. It has been said that a model, in a sense, dresses up the pure theory; that the naked theory is sentences or equations. This must be examined more closely later on.)
We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities; and on this ground we might call the mind a queer kind of medium. But this aspect of mind does not interest us. The problems which it may set are psychological problems, and the method of their solution is that of natural science.
Now if it is not the causal connections which we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open before us. And when we are worried about the nature of thinking, the puzzlement which we wrongly interpret to be one about the nature of a medium is a puzzlement caused by the mystifying use of our language. This kind of mistake recurs again and again in philosophy; e.g. when we are puzzled about the nature of time, when time seems to us a queer thing. We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can’t look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case. It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. But it is the use of the substantive “time” which mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction.
It is misleading then to talk of thinking as of a “mental activity”. We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs. This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by imaging signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks. If then you say that in such cases the mind thinks, I would only draw your attention to the fact that you are using metaphor, that here the mind is the agent in a different sense from that in which the hand can be said to be the agent in writing.
If again we talk about the locality where thinking takes place we have a right to say that this locality is the paper on which we write or the mouth which speaks. And if we talk of the head or the brain as the locality of thought, this is using the expression “locality of thinking” in a different sense. Let us examine what are the reasons for calling the head the place of thinking. It is not our intention to criticize this form of expression, or to show that it is not appropriate. What we must do is: understand its working, its grammar, e.g. see what relation this grammar has to that of the expression “we think with our mouth”, or “we think with a pencil on a piece of paper”.
Perhaps the main reason why we are so strongly inclined to talk of the head as the locality of our thoughts is this: the existence of the words “thinking” and “thought” alongside of the words denoting (bodily) activities, such as writing, speaking, etc., makes us look for an activity, different from these but analogous to them, corresponding to the word “thinking”. When words in our ordinary language have prima facie analogous grammars we are inclined to try to interpret them analogously; i.e. we try to make the analogy hold throughout. — We say, “The thought is not the same as the sentence; for an English and a French sentence, which are utterly different, can express the same thought”. And now, as the sentences are somewhere, we look for a place for the thought. (It is as though we looked for the place of the king of which the rules of chess treat, as opposed to the places of the various bits of wood, the kings of the various sets.) — We say, “surely the thought is something; it is not nothing”; and all one can answer to this is, that the word “thought” has its use, which is of a totally different kind from the use of the word “sentence”.
Now does this mean that it is nonsensical to talk of a locality where thought takes place? Certainly not. This phrase has sense if we give it sense. Now if we say “thought takes place in our heads”, what is the sense of this phrase soberly understood? I suppose it is that certain physiological processes correspond to our thoughts in such a way that if we know the correspondence we can, by observing these processes, find the thoughts. But in what sense can the physiological processes be said to correspond to thoughts, and in what sense can we be said to get the thoughts from the observation of the brain?
I suppose we imagine the correspondence to have been verified experimentally. Let us imagine such an experiment crudely. It consists in looking at the brain while the subject thinks. And now you may think that the reason why explanation is going to go wrong is that of course the experimenter gets the thoughts of the subject only indirectly by being told them, the subject expressing them in some way or other. But I will remove this difficulty by assuming that the subject is at the same time the experimenter, who is looking at his own brain, say by means of mirror. (The crudity of this description in no way reduces the force of the argument.)
Then I ask you, is the subject-experimenter observing one thing or two things? (Don’t say that he is observing one thing both from inside and from the outside; for this does not remove the difficulty. We will talk of inside and outside later.) The subject-experimenter is observing a correlation of two phenomena. One of them he, perhaps, calls the thought. This may consist of a train of images, organic sensations, or on the other hand of a train of the various visual, tactual and muscular experiences which he has in writing or speaking a sentence. — The other experience is one of seeing his brain work. Both these phenomena could correctly be called “expressions of thought”; and the question “where is the thought itself?” had better, in order to prevent confusion, be rejected as nonsensical. If however we do use the expression “the thought takes place in the head”, we have given this expression its meaning by describing the experience which would justify the hypothesis that the thought takes places in our heads, by describing the experience which we wish to call “observing thought in our brain”.
We easily forget that the word “locality” is used in many different senses and that there are many different kinds of statements about a thing which in a particular case, in accordance with general usage, we may call specifications of the locality of the thing. Thus it has been said of visual space that its place is in our head; and I think one has been tempted to say this, partly, by a grammatical misunderstanding.
I can say: “in my visual field I see the image of the tree to the right of the image of tower” or “I see the image of the tree in the middle of the visual field”. And now we are inclined to ask “and where do you see the visual field?” Now if the “where” is meant to ask for a locality in the sense in which we have specified the locality of the image of the tree, then I would draw your attention to the fact that you have not yet given this question sense; that you have been proceeding by a grammatical analogy without having worked out the analogy in detail.
In saying that the idea of our visual field being located in our brain arose from a grammatical misunderstanding, I did not mean to say that we could not give sense to such a specification of locality. We could e.g., easily imagine an experience which we should describe by such a statement. Imagine that we looked at a group of things in this room, and, while we looked, a probe was stuck into our brain and it was found that if the point of the probe reached a particular point in our brain, then a particular small part of our visual field was thereby obliterated. In this way we might co-ordinate points of our brain to points of the visual image, and this might make us say that the visual field was seated in such and such a place in our brain. And if now we asked the question “Where do you see the image of this book?” the answer could be (as above) “To the right of that pencil”, or “In the left hand part of my visual field”, or again: “Three inches behind my left eye”.
But what if someone said “I can assure you I feel the visual image to be two inches behind the bridge of my nose”; — what are we to answer him? Should we say that he is not speaking the truth, or that there cannot be such a feeling? What if he asks us “do you know all the feelings there are? How do you know there isn’t such a feeling?”
What if the diviner tells us that when he holds the rod he feels that the water is five feet under the ground? or that he feels that a mixture of copper and gold is five feet under the ground? Suppose that to our doubts he answered: “You can estimate a length when you see it. Why shouldn’t I have a different way of estimating it?”
If we understand the idea of such an estimation, we shall get clear about the nature of our doubts about the statements of the diviner, and of the man who said he felt the visual image behind the bridge of his nose.
There is the statement: “this pencil is five inches long”, and the statement, “I feel that this pencil is five inches long”, and we must get clear about the relation of the grammar of the first statement to the grammar of the second. To the statement “I feel in my hand that the water is three feet under the ground” we should like to answer: “I don’t know what this means.” But diviner would say: “Surely you know what it means. You know what ‘three feet under the ground’ means, and you know what ‘I feel’ means!” But I should answer him: I know what a word means in certain contexts. Thus I understand the phrase “three feet under the ground”, say in the connections “The measurement has shown that the water runs three feet under the ground”, “If we dig three feet deep we are going to strike water”, “The depth of the water is three feet by the eye”. But the use of the expression “a feeling in my hands of water being three feet under the ground” has yet to be explained to me.
We could ask the diviner “how did you learn the meaning of the word ‘three feet’”? We suppose by being shown such lengths, by having measured them and such like. Were you also taught to talk of a feeling of water being three feet under the ground, a feeling, say, in your hands? For if not, what made you connect the word ‘three feet’ with a feeling in your hand?” Supposing we had been estimating lengths by the eye, but had never spanned a length. How could we estimate a length in inches by spanning it? I.e., how could we interpret the experience of spanning in inches? The question is: what connection is there between, say, a tactual sensation and the experience of measuring a thing by means of a yard rod? This connection will show us what it means to ‘feel that a thing is six inches long’. Supposing the diviner said “I have never learnt to correlate depth of water under the ground with feelings in my hand, but when I have a certain feeling of tension in my hands, the words ‘three feet’ spring up in my mind.” We should answer “This is a perfectly good explanation of what you mean by ‘feeling the depth to be three feet’, and the statement that you feel this will have neither more, nor less, meaning than your explanation has given it.” And if experience shows that the actual depth of the water always agrees with the words ‘n feet’ which come into your mind, your experience will be very useful for determining the depth of water”. — But you see that the meaning of the words “I feel the depth of the water to be n feet” had to be explained; it was not known when the meaning of the words “n feet” in the ordinary sense(i.e. in the ordinary contexts) was known. — We don’t say that the man who tells us he feels the visual image two inches behind the bridge of his nose is telling a lie or talking nonsense. But we say that we don’t understand the meaning of such a phrase. It combines well-known words, but combines them in a way we don’t yet understand. The grammar of this phrase has yet to be explained to us.
The importance of investigating the diviner’s answer lies in the fact that we often think we have given a meaning to a statement P if only we assert “I
feel (or I believe) that P is the case.” (We shall talk at a later occasion
1 of Prof. Hardy saying that Goldbach’s theorem is a proposition because he can believe that it is true.) We have already said that by merely explaining the meaning of the words “three feet” in the usual way we have not yet explained the sense of the phrase “feeling that the water is three feet etc.” Now we should not felt these difficulties had the diviner said that he had
learnt to estimate the depth of the water, say, by digging for water whenever he had a particular feeling and in this way correlating such feelings with
measurements of depth. Now we must examine the relation of the process of learning to
estimate with the act of estimating. The importance of this examination lies in this, that it applies to the relation between learning the meaning of the word and making use of the word. Or, more generally, that it shows the different possible relations between a rule given and its application.
Let us consider the process of estimating a length by the eye: It is extremely important that you should realise that there are a great many different processes which we call “estimating by the eye”.
Consider these cases: –
- Someone asks “How did you estimate the height of this building?” I answer: “It has four storeys; I suppose each storey is about fifteen feet height; so it must be about sixty feet.”
- In another case: “I roughly know what a yard at that distance looks like; so it must be about four yards long.”
- Or again: “I can imagine a tall man reaching to about this point; so it must be about six feet above the ground.”
- Or: “I don’t know; it just looks like a yard.”
The last case is likely to puzzle us. If you ask “what happened in this case when the man estimated the length? the correct answer may be: “he looked at the thing and said ‘it looks one yard long’.” This may be all that has happened.
We said before that we should not have been puzzled about the diviner’s answer if he had told us that he had learnt how to estimate depth. Now learning to estimate may, broadly speaking, be seen in two different relations to the act of estimating; either as a cause of the phenomenon of estimating, or as supplying us with a rule (a table, a chart, or some such thing) which we make use of when we estimate.
Supposing I teach someone the use of the word “yellow” by repeatedly pointing to a yellow patch and pronouncing the word. On another occasion I make him apply what he has learnt by giving him the order, “choose a yellow ball out of this bag”. What was it that happened when he obeyed my order? I say “possibly just this: he heard my words and took a yellow ball from the bag”. Now you may be inclined to think that this couldn’t possibly have been all; and the kind of the thing that you would suggest is that he imagined something yellow when he understood the order, and then chose a ball according to his image. To see that this is not necessary remember that I could have given him the order, “Imagine a yellow patch”. Would you still be inclined to assume that he first imagines a yellow patch, just understanding my order, and then imagines a yellow patch to match the first? (Now I don’t say this is not possible. Only, putting it in this way immediately shows you that it need not happen. This, by the way, illustrates the method of philosophy.)
If we are taught the meaning of the word “yellow” by being given some sort of ostensive definition (a rule of the usage of the word) this teaching can be looked at in two different ways.
A. The teaching is a drill. This drill causes us to associate a yellow image, yellow things, with the word “yellow”. Thus when I gave the order “Choose a yellow ball from this bag” the word “yellow” might have brought up a yellow image, or a feeling of recognition when the person’s eye fell on the yellow ball. The drill of teaching could in this case be said to have up a psychical mechanism. This, however, would only be a hypothesis or else a metaphor. We could
compare teaching with installing an electric connection going wrong or breaking down would then be what we call forgetting the explanation, or the meaning, of the word. (We ought to talk further on about the meaning of “forgetting the meaning of a word”
2).
In so far as the teaching brings about the association, feeling of recognition, etc. etc., it is the cause of the phenomena of understanding, obeying, etc.; and it is a hypothesis that the process of conceivable, in this sense, that all the processes of understanding, been taught the language. (This, just now, seems extremely paradoxical.)
B. The teaching may have supplied us with a rule which is itself involved in the processes of understanding, obeying, etc.; “involved”, however, meaning that the expression of this rule forms part of these processes.
We must distinguish between what one might call “a process being in accordance with a rule”, and, “a process involving a rule” (in the above sense).
But what tempts us to think of the meaning of what we say as a process essentially of the kind which we have described is the analogy between the forms of expression:
“to say something”
“to mean something”,
which seem to refer to two parallel processes. br>
A process accompanying our words which one might call the “process of meaning them” is the modulation of the voice in which we speak the words; or one of the processes similar to this, like the play of facial expression. These accompany the spoken words not in the way a German sentence might accompany an English sentence, or writing a sentence accompany speaking a sentence; but in the sense in which the tune of a song accompanies its words. This tune corresponds to the ‘feeling’ with which we say the sentence. And I wish to point out that this feeling is the expression with which the sentence is said, or something similar to this expression.
Another source of the idea of a shadow being the object of our thought is this: We imagine the shadow to be a picture the intention of which cannot be questioned, that is, a picture which we don’t interpret in order to understand it, but which we understand without interpreting Jt, Now there are pictures of which we should say that we interpret them, that is, translate them into a different kind of picture, in order to understand them; and pictures of which we should say that we under stand them immediately, without any further interpretation. If you see a telegram written in cipher, and you know the key to this cipher, you will, in general, not say that you understand the telegram before you have translated it into ordinary language. Of course you have only replaced one kind of symbols by another; and yet if now you read the telegram in your language no further process of interpretation will take place.– Or rather, you may now, in certain cases, again translate this telegram, say into a picture; but then too you have only replaced One set of symbols by another.
The shadow, as we think of it, is some sort of a picture; in fact, something very much like an image which comes before our mind’s eye; and this again is something not unlike a painted representation in the ordinary sense. A source of the idea of the shadow certainly is the fact that in some cases saying, hearing, or reading a sentence brings images before our mind’s eye, images which more or less strictly correspond to the sentence, and which are therefore, in a sense, translations of this sentence into a pictorial language.– But it is absolutely essential for the picture which we imagine the ? shadow to be that it is what I shall call a “picture by similarity”. I don’t mean by this that it is a picture similar to what it is intended to represent, but that it is a picture which is correct only when it is similar to what it represents. One might use for this kind of picture the word “copy”. Roughly speaking, copies are good pictures when they can easily be mistaken for what they represent,
A plane projection of one hemisphere of our terrestrial globe is not a picture by similarity or a copy in this sense. It would be conceivable that I portrayed some one’s face by projecting it in some queer way, though correctly according to the adopted rule of projection, on a piece of paper, in such a way that no one would normally call the projection “a good portrait of so-and-so” because it would not look a bit like him.
If we keep in mind the possibility of a picture which, though correct, has no similarity with its object, the interpolation of a shadow between the sentence and reality loses all point. For now the sentence itself can serve as such a shadow. The sentence is just such a picture, which hasn’t the slightest similarity with what it represents. If we were doubtful about how the sentence “King’s College is on fire” can be a picture of King’s College on fire, we need only ask ourselves: “How should we explain what the sentence means?” Such an explanation might consist of ostensive definitions. We should say, e.g., “this is King’s College” (pointing to the building), “this is a fire” (pointing to a fire). This shews you the way in which words and things may be connected.
NOW, FROM LECTURES (1932-3):
16 We begin with the question whether the toothache someone else has is the same as the toothache I have. Is his toothache merely outward behaviour? Or is it that he has the same as I am having now but that I don’t know it since I can only say of another person that he is manifesting certain behaviour? A series of questions arises about personal experience. Isn’t it thinkable that I have a toothache in someone else’s tooth? It might be argued that my having toothache requires my mouth. But the experience of my having toothache is the same wherever the tooth is that is aching, and whoever’s mouth it is in. The locality of pain is not given by naming a possessor. Further, isn’t it imaginable that I live all my life looking in a mirror, where I saw faces and did not know which was my face, nor how my mouth was distinguished from anyone else’s? If this were in fact the case, would I say I had toothache in my mouth? In a mirror I could speak with someone else’s mouth, in which case what would we call me? Isn’t it thinkable that I change my body and that I would have a feeling correlated with someone’s else’s raising his arm?
The grammar of “having toothache” is very different from that of “having a piece of chalk”, as is also the grammar of “I have toothache” from “Moore has toothache”. The sense of “Moore has toothache” is given by the criterion for its truth. For a statement gets its sense from its verification. The use of the word “toothache” when I have toothache and when someone else has it belongs to different games. (To find out with what meaning a word is used, make several investigations. For example, the words “before” and “after” mean something different according as one depends on memory or on documents to establish the time of an event.) Since the criteria for “He has toothache” and “I have toothache” are so different, that is, since their verifications are of different sorts, I might seem to be denying that he has toothache. But I am not saying he really hasn’t got it. Of course he has it: it isn’t that he behaves as if he had it but really doesn’t. For we have criteria for his really having it as against his simulating it. Nevertheless, it is felt that I should say that I do not know he has it.
Suppose I say that when he has toothache he has what I have, except that I know it indirectly in his case and directly in mine. This is wrong. Judging that he has toothache is not like judging that he has money but I just can’t see his billfold. Suppose it is held that I must judge indirectly since I can’t feel his ache. Now what sense is there to this? And what sense is there to “I can feel my ache”? It makes sense to say “His ache is worse than mine”, but not to say “I feel my toothache” and “Two people can’t have the same pain”. Consider the statement that no two people can ever see the same sense datum. If being in the same position as another person were taken as the criterion for someone’s seeing the same sense datum as he does, then one could imagine a person seeing the same datum, say, by seeing through someone’s head. But if there is no criterion for seeing the same datum, then “I can’t know that he sees what I see” does not make sense. We are likely to muddle statements of fact which are undisputed with grammatical statements. Statements of fact and grammatical statements are not to be confused.
The question whether someone else has what I have when I have toothache may be meaningless, though in an ordinary situation it might be a question of fact, and the answer, “He has not”, a statement of fact. But the philosopher who says of someone else, “He has not got what I have”, is not stating a fact. He is not saying that in fact someone else has not got toothache. It might be the case that someone else has it. And the statement that he has it has the meaning given it, that is, whatever sense is given by the criterion. The difficulty lies in the grammar of “having toothache”. Nonsense is produced by trying to express in a proposition something which belongs to the grammar of our language. By “I can’t feel his toothache” is meant that I can’t try. It is the character of the logical cannot that one can’t try. Of course this doesn’t get you far, as you can ask whether you can try to try. In the arguments of idealists and realists somewhere there always occur the words “can”, “cannot”, “must”. No attempt is made to prove their doctrines by experience. The words “possibility” and “necessity” express part of grammar, although patterned after their analogy to “physical possibility” and “physical necessity”.
Another way in which the grammars of “I have toothache” and “He has toothache” differ is that it does not make sense to say “I seem to have toothache”, whereas it is sensible to say “He seems to have toothache”. The statements “I have toothache” and “He has toothache” have different verifications; but “verification” does not have the same meaning in the two cases. The verification of my having toothache is having it. It makes no sense for me to answer the question, “How do you know you have toothache?”, by “I know it because I feel it”. In fact there is something wrong with the question; and the answer is absurd. Likewise the answer, “I know it by inspection”. The process of inspection is looking, not seeing. The statement, “I know it by looking”, could be sensible, e.g., concentrating attention on one finger among several for a pain. But as we use the word “ache” it makes no sense to say that I look for it: I do not say I will find out whether I have toothache by tapping my teeth. Of “He has toothache” it is sensible to ask “How do you know?”, and criteria can be given which cannot be given in one’s own case. In one’s own case it makes no sense to ask “How do I know?” It might be thought that since my saying “He seems to have toothache” is sensible but not my saying a similar thing of myself, I could then go on to say “This is so for him but not for me”. Is there then a private language I am referring to, which he cannot understand, and thus that he cannot understand my statement that I have toothache? If this is so, it is not a matter of experience that he cannot. He is prevented from understanding, not because of a mental shortcoming but by a fact of grammar. If a thing is a priori impossible, it is excluded from language.
Sometimes we introduce a sentence into our language without realising that we have to show rules for its use. (By introducing a third king into a chess game we have done nothing until we have given rules for it.) How am I to persuade someone that “I feel my pain” does not make sense? If he insists that it does he would probably say “I make it a rule that it makes sense”. This is like introducing a third king, and I then would raise many questions, for example, “Does it make sense to say I have toothache but don’t feel it?” Suppose the reply was that it did. Then I could ask how one knows that one has it but does not feel it. Could one find this out by looking into a mirror and on finding a bad tooth know that one has a toothache? To show what sense a statement makes requires saying how it can be verified and what can be done with it. Just because a sentence is constructed after a model does not make it part of a game. We must provide a system of applications.
The question, “What is its verification?”, is a good translation of “How can one know it?”. Some people say that the question, “How can one know such a thing?”, is irrelevant to the question, “What is the meaning?” But an answer gives the meaning by showing the relation of the proposition to other propositions. That is, it shows what it follows from and what follows from it. It gives the grammar of the proposition, which is what the question, “What would it be like for it to be true?”, asks for. In physics, for example, we ask for the meaning of a statement in terms of its verification.
I have remarked that it makes no sense to say “I seem to have toothache”, which presupposes that it makes sense to say I can or cannot, doubt it. The use of the word “cannot” here is not at all like its use in “I cannot lift the scuttle”. This brings us to the question: What is the criterion for a sentence making sense? Consider the answer, “It makes sense if it is constructed according to the rules of grammar”. Then does this question mean anything: What must the rules be like to give it sense? If the rules of grammar are arbitrary, why not let the sentence make sense by altering the rules of grammar? Why not simply say “I make it a rule that this sentence makes sense”?
18 To return to the differing grammars of “I have toothache” and “He has toothache”, which show up in the fact that the statements have different verifications and also in the fact that it is sensible to ask, in the latter case, “How do I know this?”, but not in the former. The solipsist is right in implying that these two are on different levels. I have said that we confuse “I have a piece of chalk” and “He has a piece of chalk” with “I have an ache” and “He has an ache”. In the case of the first pair the verifications are analogous, although not in the case of the second pair. The function “x has toothache” has various values, Smith, Jones, etc. But not I. I is in a class by itself. The word “I” does not refer to a possessor in sentences about having an experience, unlike its use in “I have a cigar”. We could have a language from which “I” is omitted from sentences describing a personal experience. {Instead of saying “I think” or “I have an ache” one might say “It thinks” (like “It rains”), and in place of “I have an ache”, “There is an ache here”. Under certain circumstances one might be strongly tempted to do away with the simple use of “I”. We constantly judge a language from the standpoint of the language we are accustomed to, and hence we think we describe phenomena incompletely if we leave out personal pronouns. It is as though we had omitted pointing to something, since the word “I” seems to point to a person.
But we can leave out the word “I” and still describe the phenomenon formerly described. It is not the case that certain changes in our symbolism are really omissions. One symbolism is in fact as good as the next; no one symbolism is necessary.
19 The solipsist who says “Only my experiences are real” is saying that it is inconceivable that experiences other than his own are real. This is absurd if taken to be a statement of fact. Now if it is logically impossible for another person to have toothache, it is equally so for me to have toothache. To the person who says “Only I have real toothache” the reply should be: “If only you can have real toothache, there is no sense in saying ‘Only I have real toothache’. Either you don’t need ‘I’ or you don’t need ‘real’ . . . ‘I’ is no longer opposed to anything. You had much better say ‘There is toothache’.” The statement, “Only I have real toothache,” either has a commonsense meaning, or, if it is a grammatical proposition, it is meant to be a statement of a rule. The solipsist wishes to say, “I should like to put, instead of the notation ‘I have real toothache’ ‘There is toothache’ “. What the solipsist wants is not a notation in which the ego has a monopoly, but one in which the ego vanishes.
Were the solipsist to embody in his notation the restriction of the epithet “real” to what we should call his experiences and exclude “A has real toothache” (where A is not he), this would come to using “There is real toothache” instead of “Smith (the solipsist) has toothache”. Getting into the solipsistic mood means not using the word “I ” in describing a personal experience. Acceptance of such a change is tempting] because the description of a sensation does not contain a reference to either a person or a sense organ. Ask yourself, How do I, the person, come in? How, for example, does a person enter into the description of a visual sensation? If we describe the visual field, no person necessarily comes into it. We can say the visual field has certain internal properties, but its being mine is not essential to its description. That is, it is not an intrinsic property of a visual sensation, or a pain, to belong to someone. There will be no such thing as my image or someone else’s. The locality of a pain has nothing to do with the person who has it: it is not given by naming a possessor. Nor is a body or an organ of sight necessary to the description of the visual field. The same applies to the description of an auditory sensation. The truth of the proposition, “The noise is approaching my right ear”, does not require the existence of a physical ear; it is a description of an auditory experience, the experience being logically independent of the existence of my ears. The audible phenomenon is in an auditory space, and the subject who hears has nothing to do with the human body. Similarly, we can talk of a toothache without there being any teeth, or of thinking without there being a head involved. Pains have a space to move in, as do auditory experiences and visual data. The idea that a visual field belongs essentially to an organ of sight or to a human body having this organ is not based on what is seen. It is based on such facts of experience as that closing one’s lids is accompanied by an event in one’s visual field, or the experience of raising one’s arm towards one’s eye. It is an experiential proposition that an eye sees. We can establish connections between a human body and a visual field which are very different from those we are accustomed to. It is imaginable that I should see with my body rather than with my eyes, or that I could see with someone else’s eyes and have toothache in his tooth. If we had a tube to our eyes and looked into a mirror, the idea of a perceiving organ could be dispensed with. Were all human bodies seen in a mirror, with a loudspeaker making the sounds when mouths moved, the idea of an ego speaking and seeing would become very different.
20 The solipsist does not go through with a notation from which either “I” or “real” is deleted. He says “Only my experiences are real”, or “Only I have real toothache”, or “The only pain that is real is what I feel”. This provokes someone to object that surely his pain is real. And this would not really refute the solipsist, any more than the realist refutes the idealist. The realist who kicks the stone is correct in saying it is real if he is using the word “real” as opposed to “not real”. His rejoinder answers the question, “Is it real or hallucinatory?”, but he does not refute the idealist who is not deterred by his objection. They still seem to disagree. Although the solipsist is right in treating “I have toothache” as being on a different level from “He has toothache”, his statement that he has something that no one else has, and that of the person who denies it, are equally absurd. “Only my experiences are real” and “Everyone’s experiences are real” are equally nonsensical.
21 Let us turn to a different task. What is the criterion for “This is my body”? There is a criterion for “This is my nose”: the nose would be possessed by the body to which it is attached. There is a temptation to say there is a soul to which the body belongs and that my body is the body that belongs to me. Suppose that all bodies were seen in a mirror, so that all were on the same level. I could talk of A’s nose and Any nose in the same way. But if I singled out a body as mine, the grammar changes. Pointing to a mirror body and saying “This is my body” does not assert the same relation of possession between me and my body as is asserted by “This is A’s nose” between A’s body and A’s nose. What is the criterion for one of the bodies being mine? It might be said that the body which moved when I had a certain feeling will be mine. (Recall that the “I” in “I have a feeling” does not denote a possessor.) Compare “Which of these is my body?” with “Which of these is A’s body?”, in which “my” is replaced by “A’s”. What is the criterion for the truth of the answer to the latter? There is a criterion for this, which in the case of the answer to “Which is mine?” there is not. If all bodies are seen in a mirror and the bodies themselves become transparent but the mirror images remain, my body will be where the mirror image is. And the criterion for something being my nose will be very different from its belonging to the body to which it is attached. In the mirror world, will deciding which body is mine be like deciding which body is A’s? If the latter is decided by referring to a voice called “A” which is correlated to the body, then if I answer “Which is my body?” by referring to a voice called Wittgenstein, it will make no sense to ask which is my voice.
There are two kinds of use of the word “I” when it occurs in answer to the question “Who has toothache?”. For the most part the answer “I” is a sign coming from a certain body. If when people spoke, the sounds always came from a loudspeaker and the voices were alike, the word “I” would have no use at all: it would be absurd to say “I have toothache”. The speakers could not be recognised by it.) Although there is a sense in which answering “I” to the question, “Who has toothache?”, makes a reference to a body, even to this body of mine, my answer to the question whether I have toothache is not made by reference to any body. I have no need of a criterion. My body and the toothache are independent. Thus one answer to the question “Who?” is made by reference to a body, and another seems not to be, and to be of a different kind.
22 Let us turn to the view, which is connected with “All that is real is my experience”, namely, solipsism of the present moment: “All that is real is the experience of the present moment”. (Cf. Wm. James’ remark “The present thought is the only thinker”, which makes the subject of thinking equivalent to the experience.) We may be inclined to make our language such that we will call only the present experience “experience”. This will be a solipsistic language, but of course we must not make a solipsistic language without saying exactly what we mean by the word which in our old language meant “present”. Russell said that remembering cannot prove that what is remembered actually occurred, because the world might have sprung into existence five minutes ago, with acts of remembering intact. We could go on to say that it might have been created one minute ago, and finally, that it might have been created in the present moment. Were this latter the situation we should have the equivalent of “All that is real is the present moment”. Now if it is possible to say the world was created five minutes ago, could it be said that the world perished five minutes ago? This would amount to saying that the only reality was five minutes ago.
Why does one feel tempted to say “The only reality is the present”? The temptation to say this is as strong as that of saying that only my experience is real. The person who says only the present is real because past and future are not here has before his mind the image of something moving. past < present < future .This image is mispast present future leading, just as the blurred image we would draw of our visual field is misleading inasmuch as the field has no boundary. That the statement “Only the present experience is real” seems to mean something is due to familiar images we associate with it, images of things passing us in space. When in philosophy we talk of the present, we seem to be referring to a sort of Euclidean point. Yet when we talk of present experience it is impossible to identify the present with such a point. The difficulty is with the word “present”. There is a grammatical confusion here. A person who says the present experience alone is real is not stating an empirical fact, comparable to the fact that Mr. S. always wears a brown suit. And the person who objects to the assertion that the present alone is real with “Surely the past and future are just as real” somehow does not meet the point. Both statements mean nothing.
I’m sending this to you due to your status as a literary journal editor, managing editor, or possibly even former editor. I’m doing so in hopes that you will find it of value, and please forward it along to the mailing list of authors and subscribers that your journal has put together. Or possibly post something about it on your journal’s website or blog? I’d really appreciate it. The following went out to members of the EWN (and so a few of you may have received it already) a little over a week ago.