Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) investigated logic, language, knowledge, and psychological concepts. The early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the later Philosophical Investigations differ substantially, but their relation is also a subject of interpretation. His later work examines language in use, rule-following, and the temptation to explain meaning through private mental objects. It does not offer one conventional explanatory theory of mind.

Major Works and Development

The Tractatus appeared in German in 1921 and in a bilingual book edition in 1922. The Blue and Brown Books contains dictations from the 1930s, published in 1958. Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. Zettel (1967) collects remarks; On Certainty (1969) investigates the background of knowledge and doubt. These works differ in composition and editorial history, rather than forming a series of completed treatises published by their author.

The Early Picture Account

In the Tractatus, propositions picture possible states of affairs by sharing a logical form with what they represent. Their elements are correlated with objects, and their arrangement represents a possible arrangement in the world. Truth and falsity concern whether the represented possibility obtains.

The work also distinguishes what can be said from what is shown by meaningful representation. Its remarks on logic, ethics, and the limits of language resist a straightforward summary as a theory that every meaningful sentence names an observable object. How literally to treat its apparent metaphysical commitments remains disputed among interpreters.

Meaning, Use, and Language-Games

The Investigations criticizes the assumption that words work uniformly as names and that understanding must consist in an inner accompaniment. Language includes asking, ordering, describing, joking, calculating, and many other activities. Wittgenstein calls these organized activities language-games, embedded in forms of life.

Section 43 qualifies the formulation “meaning is use”: it applies to a large class of cases, not to every case without exception. Describing use also means describing standards of correct application, circumstances, responses, and training. It is not merely counting word frequencies or substituting observable behavior for every question about meaning.

Family resemblance challenges the demand that every concept pick out one feature common to all its instances. Games, for example, can be related through overlapping similarities rather than a single essence. The proposal concerns how a concept operates; it does not entail that no concepts have precise definitions.

Following a Rule

The rule-following discussion asks how a rule guides a new application. An interpretation can itself be interpreted, so adding interpretations cannot indefinitely supply what makes an application correct. Wittgenstein points to training, established practice, and ways of going on that are not always mediated by an explicit further interpretation.

The significance of communal agreement is debated. Some readings emphasize public practices; others resist making community approval the ultimate truth-maker for correctness. Saul Kripke’s influential skeptical reconstruction is one interpretation, not an uncontested statement of Wittgenstein’s doctrine. Rule-following need not be reduced either to an inner formula or to a majority vote.

Private Language and Sensation

A private language in the targeted sense is not an ordinary diary, a secret code, or speech used while alone. Its signs would refer to sensations whose identification and correctness conditions were available only to their speaker.

In section 258, a person tries to fix the meaning of “S” by inwardly attending to a sensation and later consulting memory. The difficulty is that seeming to remember the association correctly supplies no independent distinction between correctness and the impression of correctness. This concerns standards for the proposed sign, not the conclusion that sensations do not exist.

The “beetle in a box” example in section 293 makes a related point. If everyone has an inaccessible box and calls its contents “a beetle,” what those inaccessible contents are cannot play the explanatory role assigned to them in the shared word’s use. Ordinary sensation language has learned roles tied to expression, circumstances, and response; it is not simply a collection of privately attached labels.

Psychological Concepts and Method

Wittgenstein rejects both the picture of a hidden object behind every mental expression and the behaviorist denial of inner life. Pain behavior, for example, can enter the grammar of pain language without pain being identical to a movement or utterance. First-person avowals and third-person judgments need not have the same role or evidential basis.

His therapeutic method seeks to clarify how language generates philosophical problems. Critics ask whether clarification can settle substantive disputes about mind, and whether public criteria adequately respect subjective experience. Defenders reply that exposing a misleading question can be philosophical progress without eliminating the phenomenon that prompted it.

Later externalists and philosophers of mind draw on these investigations, but Wittgenstein should not be credited with endorsing their subsequent causal, biological, or computational theories.

Further Reading

  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922. German publication, 1921.
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Basil Blackwell, 1953.
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books. Basil Blackwell, 1958.
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Basil Blackwell, 1969.
  • Semantic Externalism — later theories of meaning beyond the individual.
  • Inner Speech — public language and silent verbal activity.
  • Anti-Reification — the explanatory role of mental objects.
  • Sellars — a distinct account of inner-episode concepts.
  • Putnam — later externalism and natural realism.