- Length
- 320 pagesHacker and Schulte, Philosophical Investigations, Wiley-Blackwell, 4th ed. 2009
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Philosophical Investigations
A book of questions rather than doctrines, published after its author's death, arguing that philosophical problems arise when language is running idle and that the cure is to look at how words are actually used. It is the most influential philosophy of the last century and it advances almost no theses.
- Date
- 1953
- Author
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Region
- Cambridge
- Language
- German
- 1953 English, G. E. M. Anscombe Standard for half a century; in copyright Attested
- 2009 English, Hacker and Schulte Revised fourth edition; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Posthumous — Published after the author died
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 32 years
Published posthumously against its author's long hesitation, and by wide agreement the most influential philosophical book written in the twentieth century.
What the book says
Several hundred numbered remarks, most of them a paragraph long, many of them questions, working against the idea that words get their meaning by standing for things. It opens with a quotation from Augustine describing how he learned language - adults pointed at objects and said their names - and treats this as the picture the whole tradition has assumed. Wittgenstein then builds a series of imaginary languages to show what it leaves out: a builder calling for slabs, where the word is a move in an activity rather than a label; someone shown a pointing finger who does not know what is being pointed at. Meaning, on the alternative offered, is use - what a word does in the practices it belongs to - and those practices he calls language-games. From here come the arguments the book is known for. Words like game have no single defining feature, only overlapping family resemblances. Following a rule cannot be a matter of interpreting it, since any interpretation would itself need interpreting; rules are followed in practice, without further ground. And a language nobody but the speaker could check would give no difference between following a rule and thinking one is.
What it argues
That meaning is not a relation between a word and an object but a matter of what the word does in human activity, and that most philosophical confusion comes from ignoring this. The consequences are pursued through cases rather than stated as principles. Concepts need not have essences: what makes various activities games is a network of overlapping similarities, not a shared property. Understanding is not an inner state that accompanies use but a capacity displayed in going on correctly. Rule-following cannot rest on interpretation without regress, so at some point one simply acts. And there could be no private language whose terms referred to sensations knowable only to one speaker, because nothing would distinguish correct use from what merely seemed correct, and a criterion nobody could check is not a criterion. Philosophy on this account discovers nothing; it assembles reminders and dissolves the questions.
What it answered
Himself, and through himself the whole tradition that had assumed a proposition works by picturing. Wittgenstein had returned to Cambridge in 1929 after a decade away and spent twenty years working out where the earlier book had gone wrong; the Investigations is what he had to say about it. He is also answering the movements the Tractatus had produced - logical positivism and the search for a logically perfect language - by removing their starting point.
How it argues
By questions, examples and imagined interlocutors, with almost no assertions in propria persona. The reader is repeatedly shown a temptation, invited to follow it, and then made to notice where it leads - a method Wittgenstein compares to therapy and which makes the book resistant to summary. There are no chapters, no arguments in numbered steps, and no conclusions stated as results; there are voices, one of which raises the objections a philosopher would raise. This is why it can be read many times and why its interpreters disagree so profoundly.
The moment
Wittgenstein taught at Cambridge from 1930, worked as a hospital porter during the war, resigned his chair in 1947 to write, and died in 1951. He had tried to publish this material more than once and withdrawn it; the preface of 1945 records his dissatisfaction and his fear that his work would be misunderstood. The executors published it two years after his death, and the enormous body of remaining manuscripts has been appearing ever since.
How it travelled
Through a generation of pupils and then everywhere. The remarks had circulated in Cambridge for years before publication, so the influence began before the book existed; Anscombe, Rhees and von Wright as executors, and Ryle, Austin and the Oxford philosophers independently, made the approach dominant in British philosophy for two decades. Kripke's reading of the rule-following passages in 1982 opened a whole literature. The book is now read across philosophy of language, mind, mathematics, psychology, anthropology and religion, and the number of incompatible schools claiming it is itself a fact about it.
The strongest objection
That a method which advances no theses cannot be assessed, and may be concealing one. Wittgenstein says philosophy leaves everything as it is and that he is not putting forward opinions - yet the private language argument, if it works, is a substantial conclusion about the impossibility of a certain kind of language, and the account of meaning as use is a position with rivals. Either the book is doing philosophy of the ordinary kind while denying it, or its central passages establish less than everyone has taken from them. His defenders answer that the therapeutic aim is genuine and that readers who extract theses are doing precisely what the book warns against; the difficulty is that a text which cannot be wrong is also hard to learn from, and this argument has run since publication without resolution.
Why read it
Slowly, in small stretches, and more than once - it is not a book to be got through. The opening hundred remarks on Augustine and the builders, and the sequence on rule-following, are where most readers begin. It requires no technical background and defeats almost everyone anyway, which is part of why it is read so much.
- First printed
- 1953
- First in English
- 1953
- Digitised
- No
The text is assembled from manuscripts; Part II of the original editions is now printed separately as Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment, since it was not part of the book Wittgenstein had prepared. The Nachlass runs to some twenty thousand pages and continues to generate editions.
Anscombe's 1953 English was standard for half a century; the revised Hacker-Schulte version of 2009 is now usual. Both are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live and inexhaustible. Rule-following, the private language argument, family resemblance and meaning as use are all active topics, and the secondary literature is larger than for any other twentieth-century philosophical work.
On quoting this book
In copyright in German and in every English translation. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the private language argument is a single argument, and where it is, has been disputed for seventy years. Kripke's sceptical reading of rule-following is enormously influential and widely held to be a misreading, so that the literature distinguishes Kripke's Wittgenstein from Wittgenstein. Whether the later work continues or repudiates the Tractatus is argued in every generation. And the text's own status is unsettled: it is assembled from manuscripts, the executors made editorial choices, and the material once printed as Part II is now separated out because it is not the book its author had prepared.