Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk

Author:Ray Monk [Monk, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448112678
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2012-03-31T03:00:00+00:00

16

LANGUAGE-GAMES:

The Blue and Brown Books

AFTER WITTGENSTEIN’S RETURN to Cambridge for the academic year of 1933–4, Wittgenstein and Skinner were rarely to be seen apart: they both had rooms in college; they walked together, talked together, and whatever social life they had (chiefly going to the cinema to watch Westerns and musicals) was shared. Above all, perhaps, they worked together.

Wittgenstein began the term, as he had the previous year, by giving two sets of lectures, one entitled ‘Philosophy’, and the other ‘Philosophy for Mathematicians’. The second set, much to his dismay, proved particularly popular, between thirty and forty people turning up – far too many for the kind of informal lectures he wanted to deliver. After three or four weeks he amazed his audience by telling them that he could no longer continue to lecture in this way, and that he proposed instead to dictate his lectures to a small group of students, so that they could be copied and handed out to the others. The idea, as he later put it to Russell, was that the students would then ‘have something to take home with them, in their hands if not in their brains’. The select group included his five favourite students – Skinner, Louis Goodstein, H. M. S. Coxeter, Margaret Masterman and Alice Ambrose. The duplicated set of notes was bound in blue paper covers and has been known ever since as ‘The Blue Book’.

This was the first publication in any form of Wittgenstein’s new method of philosophy, and as such it created great interest. Further copies were made and distributed, and the book reached a far wider audience than Wittgenstein had expected – much wider, indeed, than he would have wished. By the late 1930s, for example, it had been distributed among many members of the philosophy faculty of Oxford. The Blue Book was thus responsible for introducing into philosophic discourse the notion of a ‘language-game’ and the technique, based upon it, for dissolving philosophical confusion.

In many ways the Blue Book can be regarded as an early prototype for subsequent presentations of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Like all future attempts to arrange his work in coherent form (including the Brown Book and Philosophical Investigations), it begins with ‘one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment’ – i.e. the tendency to be misled by substantives to look for something that corresponds to them. Thus, we ask: ‘What is time?’, ‘What is meaning?’, ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is a thought?’, ‘What are numbers?’ etc., and expect to be able to answer these questions by naming some thing. The technique of language-games was designed to break the hold of this tendency:

I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games.1 These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages.

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