Simply Wittgenstein by James C Klagge

Author:James C Klagge [Klagge, James C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO009000
ISBN: 9781943657049
Publisher: Simply Charly
Published: 2016-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

The gesture Sraffa used was akin to giving someone the finger. Sraffa’s point was that a gesture could convey meaning in the way language does, and yet it does not do so by representing a state of affairs. It does not get meaning by sharing a logical form. Language does not have to be representational. Another friend said Wittgenstein’s “discussions with Sraffa made him feel like a tree from which all branches had been cut” (MM, p. 15). And Wittgenstein himself testified to Sraffa’s impact on his thinking in the Preface to the Investigations.

Even if ethical judgments, say, do not describe reality, the language in which they are expressed may serve other functions. Wasn’t the account in the Tractatus of how language has sense correct? “Yes,” he says, “but only for [a] narrowly circumscribed area, not for the whole of what” we call language (PI §3).

When Wittgenstein set out to write about his new views he began by contrasting them with a picture of language he found in St. Augustine’s Confessions (PI §1). He told a friend that he chose to begin the Investigations with this passage from St. Augustine “not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it” (MM, pp. 59-60). In fact, the passage has important things in common with his own view in the Tractatus: “The words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names…. Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (PI §1).

During the war, Wittgenstein’s understanding of language had been shaped by the use of a model in a legal court to represent a traffic accident. But now he was prompted by a different comparison: “One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football [in the US: soccer] game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words” (MM, p. 55). This seems to be the origin of Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games.”

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