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<p class="noprint" style="text-align: center;">[[#part-i|Part I]] · [[#part-ii|Part II]]</p>
<span id="part-i">'''Part I'''</span>


{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,1}} Augustine, in describing his learning of language, says that he was taught to speak by learning the names of things. It is clear that whoever says this has in mind the way in which a child learns such words as “man”, “sugar”, “table”, etc. He does not primarily think of such words as “today”, “not”, “but”, “perhaps”.
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,1}} Augustine, in describing his learning of language, says that he was taught to speak by learning the names of things. It is clear that whoever says this has in mind the way in which a child learns such words as “man”, “sugar”, “table”, etc. He does not primarily think of such words as “today”, “not”, “but”, “perhaps”.
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Our method is purely descriptive; the descriptions we give are not hints of explanations.
Our method is purely descriptive; the descriptions we give are not hints of explanations.


{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,77
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,77}}
 
((Interval. Vacation after Michaelmas Term.))
 
Do we have a feeling of familiarity whenever we look at familiar objects? Or do we have it usually?
 
When do we actually have it?
 
It helps us to ask: What do we contrast the feeling of familiarity with?
 
One thing we contrast it with is surprise.
 
One could say: “Unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity”.
 
We say: A shows B a series of objects. B is to tell A whether the object is familiar to him or not. a) The question may be, “Does B know what the objects are?” or b) “Does he recognize the particular object?”
 
{{parBB|1}} Take the case that B is shown a series of apparatus, – – a balance, a thermometer, a spectroscope, etc.
 
{{parBB|2}} B is shown a pencil, a pen, an inkpot, and a pebble. Or:
 
{{parBB|3}} Besides familiar objects he is shown an object of which he says, “That looks as though it served some purpose, but I don't know what purpose”.
 
What happens when B recognizes a pencil || something as a pencil?
 
Suppose A had shown him an object looking like a stick. B handles this object, suddenly it comes apart, one of the parts being a cap, the other a pencil. B says, “Oh, this is a pencil”. He has recognized the object as a pencil.
 
{{parBB|4}} We could say, “B always knew what a pencil looked like; he could e.g., have drawn one on being asked to. He didn't know that the object he was given contained a pencil which he
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,78}} could have drawn any time”.
 
Compare with this case 5).
 
{{parBB|5}} B is shewn a word written on a piece of paper held upside down. He does not recognize the word. The paper is gradually turned round until B says, “Now I see what it is. It is ‘pencil’”.
 
We might say, “He always knew what the word ‘pencil’ looked like. He did not know that the word he was shewn would when turned round look like ‘pencil’”.
 
In both cases 4) and 5) you might say something was hidden. But note the different application of “hidden”.
 
{{parBB|6}} Compare with this: You read a letter and can't read one of its words. You guess what it must be from the context, and now can read it. You recognize this scratch as an e, the second as an a, the third as a t. This is different from the case where the word “eat” was covered by a blotch of ink, and you only guessed that the word “eat” must have been in this place.
 
{{parBB|7}} Compare: You see a word and can't read it. Someone alters it slightly by adding a dash, lengthening a stroke, or suchlike. Now you can read it. Compare this alteration with the turning in 5), and note that there is a sense in which while the word was turned round you saw that it was not altered. I.e., there is a case in which you say, “I looked at the word while it was turned, and I know that it is the same now as it was when I didn't recognize it”.
 
{{parBB|8}} Suppose the game between A and B just consisted in this,
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,79}} that B should say whether he knows the object or not but does not say what it is. Suppose he was shewn an ordinary pencil, after having been shewn a hygrometer which he had never seen before. On being shewn the hygrometer he said that he was not familiar with it, on being shewn the pencil, that he knew it. What happened when he recognized it? Must he have told himself, though he didn't tell A, that what he saw was a pencil? Why should we assume this?
 
Then, when he recognized the pencil, what did he recognize it as?
 
{{parBB|9}} Suppose even that he had said to himself, “Oh, this is a pencil”, could you compare this case with 4) or 5)? In these cases one might have said, “He recognized this as that” (pointing, e.g., for “this” to the covered up pencil and for “that” to an ordinary pencil, and similarly in 5)).
 
In 8) the pencil underwent no change and the words, “Oh, this is a pencil” did not refer to a paradigm, the similarity of which with the pencil shewn B had recognized.
 
Asked, “What is a pencil?”, B would not have pointed to another object as the paradigm or sample, but could straight away have pointed to the pencil shewn to him.
 
“But when he said, ‘Oh, this is a pencil’, how did he know that it was if he didn't recognize it as something?” ‒ ‒ This really comes to saying, “How did he recognize ‘pencil’ as the name of this sort of thing?” Well, how did he recognize it? He just reacted in this particular way by saying this word.
 
{{parBB|10}} Suppose someone shews you colours and asks you to name
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,80
 
them. Pointing to a certain object you say, “This is red”. What would you answer if you were asked, “How do you know that this is red?”?
 
Of course there is the case in which a general explanation was given to B, say, “We shall call ‘pencil’ anything that one can easily write with on a wax tablet”. Then A shews B amongst other objects a small pointed object, and B says, “Oh, this is a pencil”, after having thought, “One could write with this quite easily”. In this case, we may say, a derivation takes place. In 8), 9), 10) there is no derivation. In 4) we might say that B derived that the object shewn to him was a pencil by means of a paradigm, or else no such derivation might have taken place.
 
Now should we say that B on seeing the pencil after seeing instruments which he didn't know had a feeling of familiarity? Let us imagine what really might have happened. He saw a pencil, smiled, felt relieved, and the name of the object which he saw came into his mind or mouth.
 
Now isn't the feeling of relief just that which characterizes the experience of passing from unfamiliar to familiar things?
 
We say we experience tension and relaxation, relief, strain and rest in cases as different as these: a man holds a weight with outstretched arm; his arm, his whole body is in a state of tension. We let him put down the weight, the tension relaxes. A man runs, then rests. He thinks hard about the solution of a problem in Euclid, then finds it, and relaxes. He tries to remember a name, and relaxes on finding it.
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,81
 
What if we asked, “What do all these cases have in common that makes us say that they are cases of strain and relaxation?”
 
What makes us use the expression, “seeking in our memory”, when we try to remember a word?
 
Let us ask the question, “What is the similarity between looking for a word in your memory and looking for my friend in the park?” What would be the answer to such a question?
 
One kind of answer certainly would consist in describing a series of intermediate cases. One might say that the case which looking in your memory for something is most similar to is not that of looking for my friend in the park, but, say, that of looking up the spelling of a word in the dictionary. And one might go on interpolating cases. Another way of pointing out the similarity would be to say, e.g., “In both these cases at first we can't write down the word and then we can”. This is what we call pointing out a common feature.
 
Now it is important to note that we needn't be aware of such similarities thus pointed out when we are prompted to use the words “seeking”, “looking for”, etc. in the case of trying to remember.
 
One might be inclined to say, “Surely a similarity must strike us, or we shouldn't be { inclined || driven || moved to use the same word”. ‒ ‒ Compare this statement with that: “A similarity between these cases must strike us in order that we should be inclined to use the same picture to represent both”. This says that some act must precede the act of using this picture. But why shouldn't
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,82}} what we call “the similarity striking us” consist partially or wholly in our using the same picture? And why shouldn't it consist partially or wholly in our being prompted to use the same phrase?
 
We say: “This picture (or this phrase) suggests itself to us irresistibly”. Well, isn't this an experience?
 
We are treating here of cases in which, as one might roughly put it, the grammar of a word seems to suggest the “necessity” of a certain intermediary step || stage, although in fact the word is used in cases in which there is no such intermediary step. Thus we are inclined to say, “A man must understand an order before he obeys it”, “He must know where his pain is before he can point to it”, “He must know the tune before he can sing it”, & such like.)
 
Let us ask the question: Suppose I had explained to someone the word “red” (or the meaning of the word “red”) by having pointed to various red objects and given the ostensive explanation. ‒ ‒ What does it mean to say, “Now if he has understood the meaning, he will bring me a red object if I ask him to”? This seems to say: If he has really got hold of what is in common between || to all the objects I have shewn him, he will be in the position to follow my order. But what is it that is in common to these objects?
 
Could you tell me what is in common between a light red and a dark red? Compare with this the following case: I shew you two pictures of two different landscapes. In both pictures, amongst many other objects, there is the picture of a bush, and it is exactly alike in both. I ask you, “Point to what
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,83}} these two pictures have in common”, and as answer you point to this bush.
 
Now consider this explanation: I give someone two boxes containing various things, and say, “The object which both these boxes have in common is called a toasting fork”. The person I give this explanation to has to sort out the objects in the two boxes until he finds the one they have in common, and thereby we may say, he arrives at the ostensive explanation. Or, this explanation: “In these two pictures you see patches of many colours; the one colour which you find in both is called ‘mauve’”. ‒ ‒ In this case it makes a clear sense to say, “If he has seen (or found) what is in common between these two pictures, he can now bring me a mauve object.”
 
There is this case || game: I say to someone, “I shall explain to you the word ‘w’ by shewing you various objects. What's in common to them all is what ‘w’ means.” I first shew him two books, and he asks himself, “Does ‘w’ mean ‘book’?” I then point to a brick, and he says to himself, “Perhaps ‘w’ means ‘parallelepiped’”. Finally I point to glowing coal, and he says to himself, “Oh, it's ‘red’ he means, for all these objects had something red about them.” It would be interesting to consider another form of this game where the person has at each stage to draw or paint what he thinks I mean. The interest of this version lies in this, that in some cases it would be quite obvious what he has got to draw, say, when he sees that all the objects I have shewn him so far bear a certain trademark (; he'd draw the trademark). ‒ ‒ What, on the other hand, should he paint if he recognizes that there is something red on each object?
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,84}} A red patch? And of what shape and shade? Here a convention would have to be laid down, say, that painting a red patch with ragged edges does not mean that the objects have that red patch with ragged edges in common, but something red.
 
If, pointing to patches of various shades of red, you asked a man, “What have these in common that makes you call them red?”, he'd be inclined to answer, “Don't you see?” And this of course would not be pointing out a common element.
 
There are cases where experience teaches us that a person is not able to carry out an order, say, of the form, “Bring me x” if he did not see what was in common between the various objects to which I pointed as an explanation of “x”. And “seeing what they have in common” in some cases consisted in pointing to it, in letting one's glance rest on a coloured patch after a process of scrutiny and comparing, in saying to oneself, “Oh, it's red he means,” and perhaps at the same time glancing at all the red patches on the various objects, and so on. ‒ ‒ There are cases, on the other hand, in which no process takes place comparable with this intermediary “seeing what's in common”, and where we still use this phrase, though this time we ought to say, “If after shewing him these things he brings me another red object, then I shall say that he has seen the common feature of the objects I shewed him.” Carrying out the order is now the criterion for his having understood.
 
((Having now made a start, Wittgenstein resumes formal dictation.))
 
“Why do you call ‘strain’ all these different experiences?” ‒ ‒ “Because they have some element in common.” ‒ ‒ “What is it
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,85}} that bodily and mental strain have in common?” ‒ ‒ “I don't know, but obviously there is some similarity.”
 
Then why did you say the experiences had something in common? Didn't this expression just compare the present case with those cases in which we primarily say that two experiences have something in common? (Thus we might say that some experiences of joy and of fear have the feeling of heart beat in common.) But when you said that the two experiences of strain had something in common, these were only different words for saying that they were similar: It was then no explanation to say that the similarity consisted in the occurrence of a common element.
 
Also, shall we say that you had a feeling of similarity when you compared the two experiences, and that this made you use the same word for both? If you say you have a feeling of similarity, let us ask a few questions about it:
 
Could you say the feeling was located here or there?
 
When did you actually have this feeling? For, what we call comparing the two experiences is quite a complicated activity: perhaps you called the two experiences before your mind, and imagining a bodily strain, and imagining a mental strain, was each in itself imagining a process and not a state uniform through time. Then ask yourself at what time during all this you had the feeling of similarity.
 
“But surely I wouldn't say they are similar if I had no experience of their similarity.” ‒ ‒ But must this experience be anything you should call a feeling? Suppose for a moment
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,86}} it were the experience that the word “similar” suggested itself to you. Would you call this a feeling?
 
“But is there no feeling of similarity?” ‒ ‒ I think there are feelings which one might call feelings of similarity. But you don't always have any such feeling if you “notice similarity”. Consider some of the different experiences which you have if you do so.
 
a) There is a kind of experience which one might call being hardly able to distinguish. You see, e.g., two lengths, two colours, almost exactly alike. But if I ask myself, “Does this experience consist in having a peculiar feeling?”, I should have to say that it certainly isn't characterized by any such feeling alone, that a most important part of the experience is that of letting my glance oscillate between the two objects, fixing it intently, now on the one, now on the other, perhaps saying words expressive of doubt, shaking my head, etc. etc. There is, one might say, hardly any room left for a feeling of similarity between these manifold experiences.
 
b) Compare with this the case in which it is impossible to have any difficulty of distinguishing the two objects. Supposing I say, “I like to have the two kinds of flowers in this bed of similar colours to avoid a strong contrast.” The experience here might be one which one may describe as an easy sliding of the glance from one to the other.
 
c) I listen to a variation on a theme and say, “I don't see yet how this is a variation of the theme, but I see a certain similarity.” What happened was that at certain points of
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,87}} the variation, at certain turning points of the key, I had an experience of “knowing where I was in the theme”. And this experience might again have consisted in imagining certain figures of the theme, or in seeing them written before my mind or in actually pointing to them in the score, etc.
 
“But when two colours are similar, the experience of similarity should surely consist in noticing the similarity which there is between them.” ‒ ‒ But is a bluish green similar to a yellowish green or not? In certain cases we should say they are similar and in others that they are most dissimilar. Would it be correct to say that in the two cases we noticed different relations between them? Suppose I observed a process in which a bluish green gradually changed into a pure green, into a yellowish green, into yellow, and into orange. I say, “It only takes a short time from bluish green to yellowish green, because these colours are similar.” ‒ ‒ But mustn't you have had some experience of similarity to be able to say this? ‒ ‒ The experience may be this, of seeing the two colours and saying that they are both green. Or it may be this, of seeing a band whose colour changes from one end to the other in the way described, and having some one of the experiences which one may call noticing how close to each other bluish green and yellowish green are, compared to bluish green and orange.
 
We use the word “similar” in a huge family of cases.
 
There is something remarkable about saying that we use the word “strain” for both mental and physical strain because there is a similarity between them. Should you say we use the word “blue” both for light blue and dark blue because there is a similarity
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,88}} between them? If you were asked, “Why do you call this ‘blue’ also?”, you would say, “Because this is blue, too”.
 
One might suggest that the explanation is that in this case you call “blue” what is in common between the two colours, and that, if you called “strain” what was in common between the two experiences of strain, it would have been wrong to say, “I called them both ‘strain’ because they had a certain similarity”, but that you would have had to say, “I used the word ‘strain’ in both cases because there is a strain present in both.”
 
Now what should we answer to the question, “What do light blue and dark blue have in common?”? At first sight the answer seems obvious: “They are both shades of blue.” But this is really a tautology. So let us ask, “What do these colours I am pointing to have in common?” (Suppose one is light blue, the other dark blue.) The answer to this really ought to be, “I don't know what game you are playing.” And it depends upon this game whether I should say they had anything in common, and what I should say they had in common.
 
Imagine this game: A shews B different patches of colours and asks him what they have in common. B is to answer by pointing to a particular primary || pure colour. Thus if A points to pink and orange, B is to point to pure red. If A points to two shades of greenish blue, B is to point to pure green and pure blue, etc. If in this game A shewed B a light blue and a dark blue and asked what they had in common, there would be no doubt about the answer. If then he pointed to pure red and pure green, the answer would be that these have nothing in common. But I could easily imagine circumstances under which
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,89}} we should say that they had something in common and would not hesitate to say what it was: Imagine a use of language (a culture) in which there was a common name for green and red on the one hand, and yellow and blue on the other. Suppose, e.g., that there were two castes, one the patrician caste, wearing red and green garments, the other, the plebeian, wearing blue and yellow garments. Both yellow and blue would always be referred to as plebeian colours, green and red as patrician colours. Asked what a red patch and a green patch have in common, a man of our tribe would not hesitate to say they were both patrician.
 
We could also easily imagine a language (and that means again a culture) in which there existed no common expression for light blue and dark blue, in which the former, say, was called “Cambridge”, the latter “Oxford”. If you ask a man of this tribe what Cambridge and Oxford have in common, he'd be inclined to say, “Nothing”.
 
Compare this game with). B is shewn certain pictures, combinations of coloured patches. On being asked what these pictures have in common, he is to point to a sample of red, say, if there is a red patch in both, to green if there is a green patch in both, etc. This shews you in what different ways this same answer may be used.
 
Consider such a proposition || an explanation as, “I mean by ‘blue’ what these two colours have in common.” ‒ ‒ Now isn't it possible that someone should understand this explanation? He would, e.g., on being ordered to bring another blue object, carry out this order satisfactorily. But perhaps he will bring a red object and we shall be inclined to say: “He seems to notice some sort
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,90
 
of similarity between samples we shewed him and that red thing.
 
Note: Some people when asked to sing a note which we strike for them on the piano, regularly sing the fifth of that note. That makes it easy to imagine that a language might have one name only for a certain note and its fifth. On the other hand we should be embarrassed to answer the question: What do a note and its fifth have in common? For of course it is no answer to say: “They have a certain affinity.”
 
It is one of our tasks here to give a picture of the grammar (the use) of the word “a certain.”
 
To say that we use the word “blue” to mean “what all these shades of colour have in common” by itself says nothing more than that we use the word “blue” in all these cases.
 
And the phrase, “He sees what all these shades have in common,” may refer to all sorts of different phenomena, i.e., all sorts of phenomena are used as criteria for “his seeing that … ” Or all that happens may be that on being asked to bring another shade of blue he carries out our order satisfactorily. Or a patch of pure blue may appear before his mind's eye when we shew him the different samples of blue: or he may instinctively turn his head towards some other shade of blue which we haven't shewn him for sample, etc. etc.
 
Now should we say that a mental strain and a bodily strain were “strains” in the same sense of the word or in different (or “slightly different”) senses of the word? ‒ ‒ There are cases of this sort in which we should not be doubtful about the answer.
 
Consider this case: We have taught someone the use of the
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,91}} words “darker” and “lighter”. He could, e.g., carry out such an order as, “Paint me a patch of colour darker than the one I am shewing you.” Suppose now I said to him: “Listen to the five vowels a, e, i, o, u and arrange them in order of their darkness.” He may just look puzzled and do nothing, but he may (and some people will) now arrange the vowels in a certain order (mostly i, e, a, o, u). Now one might imagine that arranging the vowels in order of darkness presupposed that when a vowel was sounded a certain colour came before a man's mind, that he then arranged these colours in their order of darkness and told you the corresponding arrangement of the vowels. But this actually need not happen. A person will comply to the order: “Arrange the vowels in their order of darkness”, without seeing any colours before his mind's eye.
 
Now if such a person was asked whether u was “really” darker than e, he would almost certainly answer some such thing as, “It isn't really darker, but it somehow gives me a darker impression.”
 
But what if we asked him, “What made you use the word ‘darker’ in this case at all?”?
 
Again we might be inclined to say, “He must have seen something that was in common both to the relation between two colours and to the relation between two vowels.” But if he isn't capable of specifying what this common element was, this leaves us just with the fact that he was prompted to use the words “darker”, “lighter” in both these cases.
 
For, note the word “must” in “He must have seen something … ” When you said that, you didn't mean that from past
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,92}} experience you conclude that he probably did see something, and that's just why this sentence adds nothing to what we know and in fact only suggests a different form of words to describe it.
 
If someone said: “I do see a certain similarity, only I can't describe it”, I should say: “This itself || “Saying this also characterizes your experience.”
 
Suppose you look at two faces and say, “They are similar, but I don't know what it is that's similar about them.” And suppose that after a while you said: “Now I know; their eyes have the same shape”, I should say, “Now your experience of their similarity is different from what it was when you saw similarity and didn't know what it consisted in.” Now to the question “What made you use the word ‘darker’ … ?” the answer may be, “Nothing made me use the word ‘darker’, – – that is, if you ask me for a reason why I use it. I just used it, and what is more I used it with the same intonation of voice, and perhaps with the same facial expression and gesture which I should in certain cases be inclined to use when applying the word to colours.” ‒ ‒ It is easier to see this when we speak of a deep sorrow, a deep sound, a deep well. Some people are able to distinguish between fat and lean days of the week. And their experience when they conceive a day as a fat one consists in applying this word together perhaps with a gesture expressive of fatness and a certain comfort.
 
But you may be tempted to say: This use of the word and gesture is not their primary experience. First of all they
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,93}} have to conceive the day as fat and then they express this conception by word or gesture.
 
But why do you use the expression, “They have to”? Do you know of an experience in this case which you call “the conception, etc.”? For if you don't, isn't it just what one might call a linguistic prejudice that made you say, “He had to have a conception before, etc.”?
 
Rather, you can learn from this example and from others that there are cases in which we may call a particular experience “noticing, seeing, conceiving that so & so is the case”, before expressing it by word or gestures, and that there are other cases in which if we talk of an experience of conceiving at all, we have to apply this word to the experience of using certain words, gestures, etc.
 
When the man said, “u isn't really darker than e … ”, it was essential that he meant to say that the word “darker” was used in different senses when one talked of one colour being darker that another and, on the other hand, of one vowel being darker than another.
 
Consider this example: Suppose we had taught a man to use the words “green”, “red”, “blue” by pointing to patches of these colours. We had taught him to fetch us objects of a certain colour on being ordered, “Bring me something red!”, to sort out objects of various colours from a heap, and such like. Suppose we now shew him a heap of leaves, some of which are a slightly reddish brown, others a slightly greenish yellow, and give him the order, “Put the red leaves and the green leaves on separate heaps.” It is quite likely that he will upon this
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,94}} separate the greenish yellow leaves from the reddish brown ones. Now should we say that we had here used the words “red” and “green” in the same sense as in the previous cases, or did we use them in different but similar senses? What reasons would one give for adopting the latter view? One could point out that on being asked to paint a red patch, one should certainly not have painted a slightly reddish brown one, and therefore one might say “red” means something different in the two cases. But why shouldn't I say that it had one meaning only but was, of course, used according to the circumstances?
 
The question is: Do we supplement our statement that the word has two meanings by a statement saying that in one case it had this, in the other that meaning? As the criterion for a word's having two meanings, we may use the fact of there being two explanations given for a word. Thus we say the word “bank” has two meanings; for in one case it means this sort of thing, (pointing, say, to a river bank) in the other case that sort of thing, (pointing to the Bank of England). Now what I point to here are paradigms for the use of the words. One could not say: “The word ‘red’ has two meanings because in one case it means this (pointing to a light red), in the other that (pointing to a dark red)”, if, that is to say, there had been only one ostensive definition for the word “red” used in our game. One could, on the other hand, imagine a language-game in which two words, say “red” and “reddish”, were explained by two ostensive definitions, the first shewing a dark red object, the second a light red one. Whether two such explanations were given or only one might depend on the natural reactions of the people using the
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,95}} language. We might find that a person to whom we give the ostensive definition, “This is called ‘red’” (pointing to one red object) thereupon fetches any red object of whatever shade of red on being ordered: “Bring me something red!” Another person might not do so, but bring objects of a certain range of shades only in the neighborhood of the shade pointed out to him in the explanation. We might say that this person “does not see what is in common between all the different shades of red”. But remember please that our only criterion for that is the behaviour we have described.
 
Consider the following case: B has been taught a use of the words “lighter” and “darker”. He has been shewn objects of various colours and has been taught that one calls this a darker colour than that, trained to bring an object on being ordered, “Bring something darker than this”, and to describe the colour of an object by saying that it is darker or lighter than a certain sample, etc., etc. Now he is given the order to put down a series of objects, arranging them in the order of their darkness. He does this by laying out a row of books, writing down a series of names of animals, and by writing down the five vowels in the order u, o, a, e, i. We ask him why he put down that latter series, and he says, “Well o is lighter than u, and e lighter than o.” ‒ ‒ We shall be astonished at his attitude, and at the same time admit that there is something in what he says. Perhaps we shall say: “But look, surely e isn't lighter than o in the way this book is lighter than that.” ‒ ‒ But he may shrug his shoulders and say, “I don't know, but e is lighter than o, isn't it?”
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,96
 
We may be inclined to treat this case as some kind of abnormality, and to say, “B must have a different sense, with the help of which he arranges both coloured objects and vowels.” And if we tried to make this idea of ours (quite) explicit, it would come to this: The normal person registers lightness and darkness of visual objects on one instrument, and, what one might call the lightness and darkness of sounds (vowels) on another, in the sense in which one might say that we record rays of a certain wave length with the eyes, and rays of another range of wave length by || with our sense of temperature. B on the other hand, we wish to say, arranges both sounds and colours by the readings of one instrument (sense organ) only (in the sense in which a photographic plate might record rays of a range which we could only cover with two of our senses).
 
This roughly is the picture standing behind our idea that B must have “understood” the word “darker” differently from the normal person. On the other hand let us put side by side with this picture the fact that there is in our case no evidence for “another sense”. ‒ ‒ And in fact the use of the word “must” when we say, “B must have understood the word differently”, already shews us that this sentence (really) expresses our determination to look at the phenomena we have observed after the picture outlined in this sentence.
 
“But surely he used ‘lighter’ in a different sense when he said e was lighter than u”. ‒ ‒ What does this mean? Are you distinguishing between the sense in which he used the word and his usage of the word? That is, do you wish to say that if someone uses the word as he does, some other difference, say in
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,97}} his mind, must go along with the difference in usage? Or is all you want to say that surely the usage of “lighter” was a different one when he applied it to vowels?
 
Now is the fact that the usages differ anything over and above what you describe when you point out the particular differences?
 
What if somebody said, pointing to two patches which I had called red, “Surely you are using the word ‘red’ in two different ways.” ‒ ‒ I should say, “This is light red and the other dark red, – – but why should I have to talk of two different usages?”‒ ‒
 
It certainly is easy to point out differences between that part of the game in which we applied “lighter” and “darker” to coloured objects and that part in which we applied these words to vowels. In the first part there was comparison of two objects by laying them side by side and looking from one to the other, there was painting a darker or lighter shade than a certain sample given; in the second there was no comparison by the eye, no painting, etc. But when these differences are pointed out, we are still free to speak of two parts of the same game (as we have done just now) or of two different games.
 
“But don't I perceive that the relation between a lighter and a darker bit of material is a different one than that between the vowels e and u, – – as on the other hand I perceive that the relation between u and e is the same as that between e and i?” ‒ ‒ Under certain circumstances we shall in these cases be inclined to talk of different relations, under certain others to talk of the same relation. One might say, “It depends how
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,98}} one compares them.”
 
Let us ask the question, “Should we say that the arrows ⟶ and ⟵ point in the same direction or in different directions?” ‒ ‒ At first sight you might be inclined to say, “Of course, in different directions.” But look at it this way: If I look into a looking glass and see the reflection of my face, I can take this as a criterion for seeing my own head. If on the other hand, I saw in it the back of a head I might say, “It can't be my own head I am seeing, but a head looking in the opposite direction.” Now this could lead me on to say that an arrow and the reflection of an arrow in a glass have the same direction when they point at || towards each other, and opposite directions when the head of the one points to the tail end of the other. Imagine the case that a man had been taught the ordinary use of the word “the same” in the cases of “the same colour”, “the same shape”, “the same length.” He had also been taught the use of the word “to point to” in such contexts as, “The arrow points to the tree.” Now we shew him two arrows facing each other, and two arrows one following the other, and ask him in which of these two cases he'd apply the phrase, “The arrows point the same way.” Isn't it easy to imagine that if certain applications were uppermost in his mind, he would be inclined to say that the arrows ⟶ ⟵ point “the same way”?
 
When we hear the diatonic scale we are inclined to say that after every seven notes the same note recurs, and, asked why we call it the same note again one might answer, “Well it's a c again.” But this isn't the explanation I want, for I should ask, “What made one call it a c again?” And the answer to this
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,99}} would seem to be, “Well, don't you hear that it's the same tone only an octave higher?” ‒ ‒ Here too we could imagine that a man had been taught our use of the word “the same” when applied to colours, lengths, directions, etc., and that we now played the diatonic scale for him and asked him whether he'd say that he heard the same notes again and again at certain intervals, and we could easily imagine several answers, in particular for instance, this, that he heard the same note alternately after every four or three notes (he calls the tonic, the dominant, and the octave the same tone).
 
If we had made this experiment with two people A and B, and A had applied the expression “the same tone” to the octave only, B to the dominant and octave, should we have a right to say that the two hear different things when we play to them the diatonic scale? ‒ ‒ If we say they do, let us be clear whether we wish to assert that there must be some other difference between the two cases besides the one we have observed, or whether we wish to make no such statement.
 
All the questions considered here link up with this problem: Suppose you had taught someone to write down series of numbers according to rules of the form: Always write down a number n greater than the preceding. (This rule is abbreviated to “Add n”). The numerals in this game are to be groups of dashes -, --, ---, etc. What I call teaching this game of course consisted in giving general explanations and doing examples. ‒ ‒ These examples are taken from the range, say, between 1 and 85. We now give the pupil the order, “Add 1”. After some time we observe that after passing 100 he did what we should call
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,100
 
adding 2; after passing 300 he does what we should call adding 3. We have him up for this: “Didn't I tell you always to add 1? Look what you have done before you got to 100!” ‒ ‒ Suppose the pupil said, pointing to the numbers 102, 104, etc. “Well, didn't I do the same here? I thought this was what you wanted me to do”. ‒ ‒ You see that it would get us no further here again to say, “But don't you see … ?”, pointing out to him again the rules and examples we had given to him. We might in such a case, say that this person naturally understands (interprets) the rule (and examples) we have given as we should understand the rule (and examples) telling us: “Add 1 up to 100, then 2 up to 200, etc.”
 
(This would be similar to the case of a man who did not naturally follow an order given by a pointing gesture by moving in the direction shoulder to hand, but in the opposite direction. And understanding here means the same as reacting.)
 
“I suppose what you say comes to this, that in order to follow the rule “Add 1” correctly a new insight, intuition, is needed at every step.” ‒ ‒ But what does it mean to follow the rule correctly? How and when is it to be decided which at a particular point is the correct step to take? – “The correct step at every point is” that which is in accordance with the rule as it was meant, intended.” … with the meaning, intention, of the rule.” ‒ ‒ I suppose the idea is this: When you gave the rule, “Add 1”, and meant it, you meant him to write 101 after 100, 199 after 198, 1041 after 1040, and so on. But how did you do all these acts of meaning (I suppose an infinite number of them) when you gave him the rule? Or is this misrepresenting
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,101}} it? And would you say that there was only one act of meaning, from which, however, all these others, or any one of them, followed in turn? But isn't the point just: “what does follow from the general rule?” You might say, “Surely I knew when I gave him the rule that I meant him to follow up 100 by 101.” But here you are misled by the grammar of the word “to know”. Was knowing this some mental act by which you at the time made the transition from 100 to 101, e.g., some act like saying to yourself: “I want him to write 101 after 100”? In this case ask yourself how many such acts you performed when you gave him the rule. Or do you mean by knowing some kind of disposition, – – then only experience can teach us what it was a disposition for. ‒ ‒ “But surely if one had asked me which number he should write after 1568, I should have answered ‘1569’.” ‒ ‒ I dare say you would, but how can you be sure of it? Your idea really is that somehow in the mysterious act of meaning the rule you made the transitions without really making them. You crossed all the bridges before you were there. ‒ ‒ This queer idea is connected with a peculiar use of the word “to mean”. Suppose our man got the number 100 and followed it up by 102. We should then say, “I meant you to write 101.” Now the past tense in the word “to mean” suggests that a particular act of meaning had been performed when the rule was given, though as a matter of fact this expression alludes to no such act. The past tense could be explained by putting the sentence into the form, “Had you asked me before what I wanted you to do at this stage, I should have said … ” But it is a hypothesis that you would have said that.
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,102}} To get this clearer, think of this example: Someone says, “Napoleon was crowned in 1804.” I ask him, “Did you mean the man who won the battle of Austerlitz?” He says, “Yes, I meant him.” ‒ ‒ Does this mean that when he “meant him” he in some way thought of Napoleon's winning the battle of Austerlitz? ‒ ‒
 
The expression, “The rule meant him to follow up 100 by 101,” makes it appear that this rule, as it was meant, foreshadowed all the transitions which were to be made according to it. But the assumption of a shadow of a transition does not get us any further, because it does not bridge the gulf between it and the transition itself. || real transition. If the mere words of the rule could not anticipate a future transition, no more could any mental act accompanying these words.
 
We meet again and again with this curious superstition, as one might be inclined to call it, that the mental act is capable of crossing a bridge before we've got to it. This trouble crops up whenever we try to think about the ideas of thinking, wishing, expecting, believing, knowing, trying to solve a mathematical problem, mathematical induction, and so forth.
 
It is no act of insight, intuition, which makes us use the rule as we do at the particular stage || point of the series. It would be less confusing to call it an act of decision, though this too is misleading, for nothing like an act of decision must take place, but possibly just an act of writing or speaking. And the mistake which we here and in a thousand similar cases are inclined to make is labelled by the word “to make” as we have used it in the sentence, “It is no act of insight which makes us use the rule as we do,” because there is an idea that
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,103}} “something must make us” do what we do. And this again joins on to the confusion between cause and reason. We need have no reason to follow the rule as we do. The chain of reasons has an end.
 
Now compare these sentences: “Surely it is using the rule ‘Add 1’ in a different way if after 100 you go on to 102, 104, etc.” and “Surely it is using the word ‘darker’ in a new || different way if after applying it to coloured patches we apply it to the vowels.” ‒ ‒ I should say: “That depends on what you call a ‘different way’”. ‒ ‒
 
But I should certainly say that I would || should call the application of “lighter” and “darker” to vowels “another usage of the words”; and I also should carry on the series “Add 1” in the way 101, 102, etc., but not – – or not necessarily – – because of some other justifying mental act.
 
There is a kind of general disease of thinking which always looks for (and finds) a mental state || what would be called a mental state from which all our acts spring as from a reservoir. Thus one says, “The fashion changes because the taste of people changes.” The taste is the mental reservoir. But if a tailor today designs a cut of dress different from that which he designed a year ago, can't what is called his change of taste have consisted, partly or wholly, in doing just this?
 
And here we say, “But surely designing a new shape isn't in itself changing one's taste, – – and saying a word isn't meaning it, – – and saying that I believe isn't believing; there must be feelings, mental acts, going along with these lines and these words.” ‒ ‒ And the reason we give for saying this is
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,104}} that a man certainly could design a new shape without having changed his taste, say that he believes something without believing it, etc. And this obviously is true. But it doesn't follow that what distinguishes a case of having changed one's taste from a case of not having done so isn't under certain circumstances just designing what one hasn't designed before. Nor does it follow that in cases in which designing a new shape is not the criterion for a change of taste, the criterion must be a change in some particular region of our mind.
 
That is to say, we don't use the word “taste” as the name of a feeling. To think that we do is to imagine || represent the structure || practice of our language in undue simplification. This, of course, is the way in which philosophical puzzles generally arise; and our case is quite analogous to that of thinking that wherever we make a predicative statement we state that the subject has a certain ingredient (as we really do in the case, “Beer is alcoholic.”)
 
It is advantageous in treating our problem to consider parallel with the feeling or feelings characteristic for having a certain taste, changing one's taste, meaning what one says, etc. etc. the facial expression (gestures or tone of voice) characteristic for the same states or events. If someone should object, saying that feelings and facial expressions can't be compared, as the former are experiences and the latter aren't, let him consider the muscular, kinaesthetic and tactile experiences bound up with gestures and facial expressions.
 
Let us then consider the proposition, “Believing something can not merely consist in saying that you believe it, you must
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,105}} say it with a particular facial expression, gesture, and tone of voice.” Now it cannot be doubted that we regard certain facial expressions, gestures, etc. as characteristic for the expression of belief. We speak of a “tone of conviction”. And yet it is clear that this tone of conviction isn't always present whenever we rightly speak of conviction wherever we should say there was conviction. “Just so”, you might say, “this shews that there is something else, something behind these gestures, etc. which is the real belief as opposed to mere expressions of belief.” ‒ ‒ “Not at all”, I should say, “many different criteria distinguish, under different circumstances, cases of believing what you say from those of not believing what you say.” There may be cases where the presence of a sensation other than those bound up with gestures, tone of voice, etc. distinguishes meaning what you say from not meaning it. But sometimes what distinguishes these two is nothing that happens while we speak, but a variety of actions and experiences of different kinds before and after.
 
To understand this family of cases it will again be helpful to consider an analogous case drawn from facial expressions. There is a family of friendly facial expressions. Suppose we had asked, “What feature is it that characterizes a friendly face?” At first one might think that there are certain traits which one might call friendly traits, each of which makes the face look friendly to a certain degree, and which when present in a large number constitute the friendly expression. This idea would seem to be borne out by our common speech, talking
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,106}} of “friendly eyes”, “friendly mouth”, etc. But it is easy to see that the same eyes of which we say they make a face look friendly, do not look friendly, or even look unfriendly, with certain other wrinkles of the forehead, lines round the mouth, etc. Why then do we ever say that it is these eyes which look friendly? Isn't it wrong to say that they characterize the face as friendly, for if we say they do so “under certain circumstances” (these circumstances being the other features of the face) why did we single out the one feature from amongst the others? The answer is that in the wide family of friendly faces there is what one might call a main branch characterized by a certain kind of eyes, another by a certain kind of mouth, etc.; although in the large family of unfriendly faces we meet these same eyes when they don't mitigate the unfriendliness of the expression. ‒ ‒ There is further the fact that when we notice the friendly expression of a face, our attention, our gaze, is drawn to a particular feature in the face, the “friendly eyes” or the “friendly mouth”, etc., and that it does not rest on other features although these too are responsible for the friendly expression.
 
“But is there no difference between saying something and meaning it, and saying it without meaning it?” ‒ ‒ There needn't be a difference while he says it, and if there is, this difference may be of all sorts of different kinds according to the surrounding circumstances. It does not follow from the fact that there is what we call a friendly and an unfriendly expression of the eye that there must be a difference between the eye
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,107}} of a friendly and the eye of an unfriendly face.
 
One might be tempted to say, “This trait can't be said to make the face look friendly, as it may be belied by another trait.” And this is like saying, “Saying something with the tone of conviction can't be the characteristic of conviction, as it may be belied by experiences going along with it.” But neither of these sentences is correct. It is true that other traits in this face could take away the friendly character of this eye, and yet in this face it is the eye which is the outstanding friendly feature.
 
It is such phrases as, “He said it and meant it”, which are most liable to mislead us. ‒ ‒ Compare meaning “I shall be delighted to see you” with meaning “The train leaves at 3.30”. Suppose you had said the first sentence to someone and were asked afterwards, “Did you mean it?”, you would then probably think of the feelings, the experiences, which you had while you said it. And accordingly you would in this case be inclined to say, “Didn't you see that I meant it?” Suppose that on the other hand, after having given someone the information, “The train leaves at 3.30”, he asked you, “Did you mean it?”, you might be inclined to answer, “Certainly. Why shouldn't I have meant it?”
 
In the first case we shall be inclined to speak of a feeling characteristic of meaning what we said, but not in the second. Compare also lying in both these cases. In the first case we should be inclined to say that lying consisted in saying what we did but without the appropriate feelings or even with the opposite feelings. If we lied in giving the information
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,108}} about the train, we would be likely to have different experiences while we gave it than those which we have in giving truthful information, but the difference here would not consist in the absence of a characteristic feeling, but perhaps just in the presence of a feeling of discomfort.
 
It is even possible while lying to have quite a strong experience of what might be called the characteristic for meaning what one says, – – and yet under certain circumstances, and perhaps under the ordinary circumstances || ones, one refers to just this experience in saying, “I meant what I said”, because the cases in which something might give the lie to these experiences do not come into the question. In many cases therefore we are inclined to say, “Meaning what I say” means having such-and-such experiences while I say it.
 
If by “believing” we mean an activity, a process, taking place while we say that we believe, we may say that believing is something similar to or the same as expressing a belief.
 
It is interesting to consider an objection to this: What if I said, “I believe it will rain” (meaning what I say) and someone wanted to explain to a Frenchman who doesn't understand English what it was I believed. Then, you might say, if all that happened when I believed what I did was that I said the sentence, the Frenchman ought to know what I believe if you tell him the exact words I used, or say, “Il croit ‘It will rain’”. Now it is clear that this will not tell him what I believe and consequently, you might say, we failed to convey just that to him which was essential, my real mental act of believing. ‒ ‒ But the answer is that even if my words had been accompanied by
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,109}} all sorts of experiences, and if we could have transmitted these experiences to the Frenchman, he would still not have known what I believed. For “knowing what I believe” just doesn't mean: feel what I do just while I say it; just as knowing what I intend with this move in our game of chess doesn't mean knowing my exact state of mind while I'm making the move. Though, at the same time, in certain cases, knowing this state of mind might furnish you with very exact information about my intention.
 
We should say that we had told the Frenchman what I believed if we translated my words for him into French. And it might be that thereby we told him nothing – – even indirectly – – about what happened “in me” when I uttered my belief. Rather, we pointed out to him a sentence which in his language holds a similar position to my sentence in the English language. – Again one might say that, at least in certain cases, we could have told him much more exactly what I believed if he had been at home in the English language, because then, he would have known exactly what happened within me when I spoke.
 
We use the words “meaning”, “believing”, “intending” in such a way that they refer to certain acts, states of mind given certain circumstances; as by the expression “checkmating somebody” we refer to the act of taking his king. If on the other hand someone, say a child, playing about with chessmen, placed a few of them on a chess board and went through the motions of taking a king, we should not say the child had checkmated anyone. ‒ ‒ And here too one might think that what distinguished this
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,110
 
case from real checkmating was what happened in the child's mind.
 
Suppose I had made a move in chess and someone asked me, “Did you intend to mate him?”, I answer, “I did”, and he now asks me, “How could you know you did, as all you knew was what happened within you when you made the move?”, I might answer, “Under these circumstances this was intending to mate him.”
 
What holds for “meaning” holds for “thinking”. ‒ ‒ We very often find it impossible to think without speaking to ourselves half aloud, – – and nobody asked to describe what happened in this case would ever say that something – – the thinking – – accompanied the || his speaking, were they || he not led into doing so by the pair of verbs, “speaking”: :“thinking”, and by many of our common phrases in which their uses run parallel. Consider these examples: “Think before you speak!”, “He speaks without thinking”, “What I said didn't quite express my thought”, “He says one thing and thinks just the opposite”, “I didn't mean a word of what I said”, “The French language uses its words in that order in which we think them.”
 
If anything in such a case can be said to go with the speaking, it would be something like the modulation of voice, the changes in timbre, accentuation, and the like, all of which one might call means of expressiveness. Some of these like the tone of voice and the accent, nobody for obvious reasons would call the accompaniments of the speech; and such means of expressiveness as the play of facial expression or gestures which can be said to accompany speech nobody would dream of calling thinking.
 
Let us revert to our example of the use of “lighter” and
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,111}} “darker” for coloured objects and the vowels. A reason which we should like to give for saying that here we have two different uses and not one is this: “We don't think that the words ‘darker’, ‘lighter’ actually fit the relation between the vowels, we only feel a resemblance between the relation of the sounds and the darker and lighter colours.” Now if you wish to see what sort of feeling this is, try to imagine that without previous introduction you asked someone, “Say the vowels a, e, i, o, u, in the order of their darkness.” If I did this, I should certainly say it in a different tone from that in which I should say, “Arrange these books in the order of their darkness”, that is, I should say it haltingly in a tone similar to that of, “I wonder if you understand me”, perhaps smiling slyly as I say it. And this, if anything, describes my feeling.
 
And this brings me to the following point: When someone asks me, “What colour is the book over there?”, and I say, “Red”, and then he asks, “What made you call this colour ‘red’?”, I shall in most cases have to say: “Nothing makes me call it red; that is, no reason. I just looked at it and said, ‘It's red’”. One is then inclined to say: “Surely this isn't all that happened; for I could look at a colour and say a word and still not name the colour.” And then one is inclined to go on to say: “The word ‘red’ when we pronounce it, naming the colour we look at, comes in a particular way.” But, at the same time, asked, “Can you describe the way you mean?” – – one wouldn't feel prepared to give any description. Suppose now we asked: “Do you, at any rate, remember that the name of the colour
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,112}} came to you in that particular way whenever you named colours on former occasions?” – – he would have to admit that he didn't remember a particular way in which this always happened. In fact one could easily make him see that naming a colour could go along with all sorts of different experiences. Compare such cases as these: a) I put an iron in the fire to heat it to light red heat. I am asking you to watch the iron and want you to tell me from time to time what stage of heat it has reached. You look and say: “It is beginning to get light red.” b) We stand at a street crossing and I say: “Watch out for the red light. When it comes on, tell me and I'll run across.” Ask yourself this question: If in one such case you shout “Green!” and in another “Run!”, do these words come in the same way or different ways? Can you || one say anything about this in a general way? c) I ask you: “What's the colour of the bit of material you have in your hand?” (and I can't see). You think: “Now what does one call this? Is this ‘Prussian blue’ or ‘indigo’?”
 
Now it is very remarkable that when in a philosophical conversation we say: “The name of a colour comes in a particular way”, we don't trouble to think of the many different cases and ways in which such a name comes. ‒ ‒ And our chief argument is really that naming the colour is different from just pronouncing a word on some different occasion while looking at a colour. Thus one might say: “Suppose we counted some objects lying on our table, a blue one, a red one, a white one, and a black one, – – looking at each in turn we say: ‘One, two, three,
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,113}} four’. Isn't it easy to see that something different happens in this case when we pronounce the words than what would happen if we had to tell someone the colours of the objects? And couldn't we, with the same right as before, have said, ‘Nothing happens when we say the numerals than just saying them while looking at the object’?” ‒ ‒ Now two answers can be given to this: First, undoubtedly, at least in the great majority of cases, counting the objects will be accompanied by different experiences from naming their colours. And it is easy to describe roughly what the difference will be. In counting we know a certain gesture, as it were, beating the number out with one's finger or by nodding one's head. There is on the other hand an experience which one might call “concentrating one's attention on the colour”, getting the full impression of it. And these are the sort of things one recalls when one says, “It is easy to see that something different happens when we count the objects and when we name their colours.” But it is in no way necessary that certain peculiar experiences more or less characteristic for counting take place while we are counting, nor that the peculiar phenomenon of gazing at the colour takes place when we look at the object and name its colour. It is true that the processes of counting four objects and of naming their colours will, in most cases at any rate, be different taken as a whole, and this is what strikes us; but that doesn't mean at all that we know that something different happens every time in these two cases when we pronounce a numeral on the one hand and a name of a colour on the other.
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,114}} When we philosophize about this sort of thing we almost invariably do something of this sort: We repeat to ourselves a certain experience, say, by looking fixedly at a certain object and trying to “read off” as it were the name of its colour. And it is quite natural that doing so again and again we should be inclined to say, “Something particular happens while we say the word ‘blue’”. For we are aware of going again and again through the same || identical process. But ask yourself: Is this also the process which we usually go through when on various occasions – – not philosophizing – – we name the colour of an object?
 
The problem which we are concerned with we also encounter in thinking about volition, deliberate and involuntary action. Think, say, of these examples: I deliberate whether to lift a certain heavyish weight, decide to do it, I then apply my force to it and lift it. Here, you might say, you have a full-fledged case of willing and intentional action. Compare with this such a case as reaching a man a lighted match after having lit with it one's own cigarette and seeing that he wishes to light his; or again the case of moving your hand while writing a letter, or moving your mouth, larynx, etc. while speaking. ‒ ‒ Now when I called the first example a full fledged case of willing, I deliberately used this misleading expression. For this expression indicates that one is inclined in thinking about volition to regard this sort of example as one exhibiting most clearly the typical characteristic of willing. One takes one's ideas, and one's language, about volition from this kind of example and thinks that they must apply – – if not in such an
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,115}} obvious way – – to all cases which one can properly call cases of willing. ‒ ‒ It is the same case that we have met over and over again: The forms of expression of our ordinary language fit most obviously certain very special applications of the words “willing”, “thinking”, “meaning”, “reading”, etc. etc. And thus we might have called the case in which a man “first thinks and then speaks” as the full fledged case of thinking and the case in which a man spells out the words he is reading as the full fledged case of reading. We speak of an “act of volition” as different from the action which is willed, and in our first example there are lots of different acts clearly distinguishing this case from one in which all that happens is that the hand and the weight lift: there are the preparations of deliberation and decision, there is the effort of lifting. But where do we find the analogues to these processes in our other examples and in innumerable ones we might have given?
 
Now on the other hand it has been said that when a man, say, gets out of bed in the morning, all that happens may be this: he deliberates, “Is it time to get up?”, he tries to make up his mind, and then suddenly he finds himself getting up. Describing it this way emphasizes the absence of an act of volition. Now first: where do we find the paradigm || prototype of such a thing, i.e., how did we come by the idea of such an act? I think the prototype of the act of volition is the experience of muscular effort. ‒ ‒ Now there is something in this above description which tempts us to contradict it; we say: “We don't just
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,116}} ‘find’, observe, ourselves getting up, as though we were observing someone else: It isn't like, say, watching certain reflex actions. If, e.g., I place myself sideways close to a wall, my wall side arm hanging down outstretched, the back of the hand touching the wall, and if now keeping the arm rigid I press the back of the hand hard against the wall, doing it all by means of the delta muscle, if then I quickly step away from the wall, letting my arm hang down loosely, my arm without any action of mine, of its own accord begins to rise; this is the sort of case in which it would be proper to say, ‘I find my arm rising’.”
 
Now here again it is clear that there are many striking differences between the cases of observing my arm rising in this experiment or watching someone else getting out of bed and the case of finding myself getting up. There is, e.g., in this case a perfect absence of what one might call surprise, also I don't look at my own movements as I might look at someone turning about in bed, e.g., saying to myself, “Is he going to get up?”. There is a difference between the voluntary act of getting out of bed and the involuntary rising of my arm. But there is not one common difference between so-called voluntary acts and involuntary ones, viz., the presence or absence of one element, the “act of volition.”
 
The description of getting up in which a man says, “I just find myself getting up”, suggests that he wishes to say that he observes himself getting up. And we may certainly say that an attitude of observing is absent in this case. But the observing attitude again is not one continuous state of mind or
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,117}} otherwise which we are in the whole time while, as we should say, we are observing. Rather, there is a family of groups of activities and experiences which we call observing attitudes. Roughly speaking one might say there are observation elements of curiosity, observant expectation, surprise, and there are, we should say, facial expressions and gestures of curiosity, of observant expectation, and of surprise; and if you agree that there is more than one facial expression characteristic for each of these cases, and that there can be these cases without any characteristic facial expression, you will admit that to each of these three words a family of phenomena corresponds.
 
If I had said, “When I told him that the train was leaving at 3.30, believing that it did, nothing happened than that I just uttered the sentence”, and if someone contradicted me saying, “Surely this couldn't have been all, as you might ‘just say a sentence’ without believing it”, – – my answer should be, “I didn't wish to say that there was no difference between speaking, believing what you say, and speaking, not believing what you say; but the pair ‘believing’::‘not believing’ refers to various differences in different cases (differences forming a family), not to one difference, that between the presence and the absence of a certain mental state.”
 
Let us consider various characteristics of voluntary and involuntary acts. In the case of lifting the heavy weight, the various experiences of effort are obviously most characteristic for lifting the weight voluntarily. On the other hand, compare with this the case of writing, voluntarily, here in most
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,118}} of the ordinary cases there will be no effort; and even if we feel that the writing tires our hands and strains their muscles, this is not the experience of “pulling” and “pushing” which we would call typical voluntary actions. Further compare the lifting of your hand when you lift a weight with lifting your hand when, e.g., you point to some object above you. This will certainly be regarded as a voluntary act, though the element of effort will most likely be entirely absent; in fact this raising of the arm to point at an object is very much like raising the eye to look at it, and here we can hardly conceive of an effort. ‒ ‒ Now let us describe an act of involuntary raising your arm. There is the case of our experiment, and this was characterized by the utter absence of muscular strain and also by our observant attitude towards the lifting of the arm. But we have just seen a case in which muscular strain was absent, and there are cases in which we should call an action voluntary although we take an observant attitude towards it. But in a large class of cases it is the peculiar impossibility of taking an observant attitude towards a certain action which characterizes it as a voluntary one: Try, e.g., to observe your hand rising when you voluntarily raise it. Of course you see it rising as you do, say, in the experiment; but you can't somehow follow it in the same way with your eye. This might get clearer if you compare two different cases of following lines on a piece of paper with your eye; A) some irregular line like this: , B) a written sentence. You will find that in A) the eye, as it were, alternately slips and gets stuck, whereas
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,119}} in reading a sentence it glides along smoothly.
 
Now consider a case in which we do take up an observant attitude towards a voluntary action, I mean the very instructive case of trying to draw a square with its diagonals by placing a mirror on your drawing paper and directing your hand by what you see by looking at it in the mirror. And here one is inclined to say that our real actions, the ones to which volition immediately applies || for which volition is immediately responsible, are not the movements of our hand but something further back, say, the actions of our muscles. We are inclined to compare the case with this: Imagine we had a series of levers before us, through which, by a hidden mechanism, we could direct a pencil drawing on a sheet of paper. We might then be in doubt which levers to pull in order to get the desired movement of the pencil; and we could say that we deliberately pulled this particular lever, although we didn't deliberately produce the wrong result that we thereby produced. But this comparison, though it easily suggests itself, is very misleading. For in the case of the levers which we saw before us, there was such a thing as deciding which one we were going to pull before pulling it. But does our volition, as it were, play on a keyboard of muscles, choosing which one it was going to use next? ‒ ‒ For some actions which we call deliberate it is characteristic that we, in some sense, “know what we are going to do” before we do it. In this sense we say that we know what object we are going to point to, and what we might call “the act of knowing” might consist in looking at the object before we point to it or in describing its position by words or
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,120
 
pictures. Now we could describe our drawing the square through the mirror by saying that our acts were deliberate as far as their motor aspect is concerned but not as far as their visual aspect is concerned. This could || would, e.g., be demonstrated by our ability to repeat a movement of the hand which had produced a wrong result, on being told to do so. But it would obviously be absurd to say that this motor character of voluntary motion consisted in our knowing beforehand what we were going to do, as though we had had a picture of the kinaesthetic sensation before our mind and decided to bring about this sensation. Remember the experiment (?) p. 62; if here, instead of pointing from a distance to the finger which you order the subject to move, you touch that finger, the subject will always move it without the slightest difficulty. And here it is tempting to say, “Of course I can move it now, because now I know which finger it is I'm asked to move.” This makes it appear as though I had now shown you which muscle to contract in order to bring about the desired result. The word “of course” makes it appear as though by touching your finger I had given you an item of information telling you what to do. (As though normally when you tell a man to move such-and-such a finger he could follow your order because he knew how to bring the movement about.)
 
(It is interesting here to think of the case of sucking a liquid through a tube; if asked what part of your body you sucked with, you would be inclined to say your mouth, although the work was done by the muscles by which you draw your breath.)
 
Let us now ask ourselves what we should call “speaking
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,121}} involuntarily”. First note that when normally you speak, voluntarily, you could hardly describe what happened by saying that by an act of volition you move your mouth, tongue, larynx, etc. as a means to producing certain sounds. Whatever happens in your mouth, larynx, etc. and whatever sensations you have in these parts while speaking would almost seem secondary phenomena accompanying the production of sounds, and volition, one wishes to say, operates on the sounds themselves without intermediary mechanism. This shews how loose our idea of this agent “volition” is.
 
Now to involuntary speaking. Imagine you had to describe a case, – – what would you do? There is of course the case of speaking in one's sleep; here the characteristic is that you know nothing about it while it happens and don't remember having done it afterwards. || this is characterized by our doing it without being aware of it and not remembering having done it. But this obviously you wouldn't call the characteristic of an involuntary action.
 
A better example of involuntary speaking would I suppose be that of involuntary exclamations: “Oh!”, “Help!”, and such like, and these utterances are akin to shrieking with pain. (This, by the way, could set us thinking about “words as expressions of feelings.”) One might say, “Surely these are good examples of involuntary speech, because there is in these cases not only no act of volition by which we speak, but in many cases we utter these words against our will.” I should say: I certainly should call this involuntary speaking; and I agree that an act of volition preparatory to or accompanying these words is absent, – – if by “act of volition” you refer to certain acts of
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,122}} intention, premeditation, or effort. But then in many cases of voluntary speech I don't feel an effort, much that I speak || say voluntarily is not premeditated, and I don't know of any acts of intention preceding it.
 
Crying out with pain against our will could be compared with raising our arm against our will when someone forces it up while we are struggling against him. But it is important to notice that the will – – or should we say “wish” – – not to cry out is overcome in a different way from that in which our resistance is overcome by the strength of the opponent. When we cry out against our will, we are as it were taken by surprise; as though someone forced up our hands by unexpectedly sticking a gun into our ribs, commanding, “Hands up!”
 
Consider now the following example, which is of great help in all these considerations: In order to see what happens when one understands a word, we play this game: You have a list of words, partly these words are words of my native language, partly words of foreign languages more or less familiar to me, partly words of languages entirely unknown to me, (or, which comes to the same, nonsensical words invented for the occasion.) Some of the words of my native tongue, again, are words of ordinary, everyday usage; and some of these, like “house”, “table”, “man”, are what we might call primitive words, being among the first words a child learns, and some of these again, words of baby talk like “Mamma”, “Papa”. Again there are more or less common technical terms such as “carburetor”, “dynamo”, “fuse”; etc. etc. All these words are read out to me, and after each one I have to say “Yes” or “No” according to whether I understand the word or
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,123}} not. I then try to remember what happened in my mind when I understood the words I did understand, and when I didn't understand the others. And here again it will be useful to consider the particular tone of voice and facial expression with which I say “Yes” and “No”, alongside of the so-called mental events. ‒ ‒ Now it may surprise us to find that although this experiment will shew us a multitude of different characteristic experiences, it will not shew us any one experience which we should be inclined to call the experience of understanding. There will be such experiences as these: I hear the word “tree” and say “Yes” with the tone of voice and sensation of “Of course”. Or I hear “corroboration” – – I say to myself, “Let me see”, vaguely remember a case of helping, and say “Yes”. I hear “gadget”, I imagine the man who always used this word, and say “Yes”. I hear “Mamma”, this strikes me as funny and childish, – – “Yes”. A foreign word I shall very often translate in my mind into English before answering. I hear “spinthariscope”, and say to myself, “Must be some sort of scientific instrument”, perhaps try to think up its meaning from its derivation and fail, and say “No”. In another case I might say to myself, “Sounds like Chinese” – – “No”. Etc. There will on the other hand be a large class of cases in which I am not aware of anything happening except hearing the word and saying the answer. And there will also be cases in which I remember experiences (sensations, thoughts), which, as I should say, had nothing to do with the word at all. Thus amongst the experiences which I can describe there will be a class which I might call typical experiences of understanding and some typical experiences of
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,124}} not understanding. But opposed to these there will be a large class of cases in which I should have to say, “I know of no particular experience at all, I just said ‘Yes’, or ‘No’.”
 
Now if someone said, “But surely something did happen when you understood the word ‘tree’, unless you were utterly absent minded when you said ‘Yes’”, I might be inclined to reflect and say to myself, “Didn't I have a sort of homely feeling || sensation when I took in the word ‘tree’?” But then, do I always have this feeling which now I referred to when I hear that word used or use it myself, do I remember having had it, do I even remember a set of, say, five sensations some one of which I had on every occasion when I could be said to have understood the word? Further, isn't that “homely feeling” I referred to an experience rather characteristic for the particular situation I'm in at present, i.e., that of philosophizing about “understanding”?
 
Of course in our experiment we might call saying “Yes” or “No” characteristic experiences of understanding or not understanding, but what if we just hear a word in a sentence where there isn't even a question of this reaction to it? ‒ ‒ We are here in a curious difficulty: on the one hand it seems we have no reason to say that in all cases in which we understand a word one particular experience – – or even one of a set – – is present. On the other hand we may feel it's plainly wrong to say that in such a case all that happens may be that I hear or say the word. For that seems to be saying that part of the time we act as mere automatons. And the answer is that in a sense we do and in a sense we don't.
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,125}} If someone talked to me with a kindly play of facial expressions, is it necessary that in any short interval his face should have been || looked such that seeing it at any other time || under any other circumstances I should have called its expression distinctly kindly? And if not, does this mean that his “kindly play of expression” was interrupted by periods of inexpressiveness? ‒ ‒ We certainly should not say this under the circumstances which I am assuming, and we don't feel that the look at this moment interrupts || interrupted the expressiveness, although taken alone we should call it inexpressive.
 
Just in this way we refer by the phrase “understanding a word” not necessarily to that which happens while we are saying or hearing it, but to the whole environment of the event of saying it. And this also applies to our saying that someone speaks like an automaton or like a parrot. Speaking with understanding certainly differs from speaking like an automaton, but this doesn't mean that the speaking in the first case is all the time accompanied by something which is lacking in the second case. Just as when we say that two people move in different circles this doesn't mean that they mayn't walk the street in identical surroundings.
 
Thus also, acting voluntarily (or involuntarily) is, in many cases, characterized as such by a multitude of circumstances under which the action takes place rather than by an experience which we should call characteristic of voluntary action. And in this sense it is true to say that what happened when I got out of bed – – when I should certainly not call it involuntary – – was that I found myself getting up. Or rather, this is a
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,126}} possible case; for of course every day something different happens.
 
The troubles which since ) we have been discussing || turning over were all closely bound up || connected with the use of the word “particular”. We have been inclined to say that seeing familiar objects we have a particular feeling, that the word “red” came in a particular way when we recognized the colour as red, that we had a particular experience when we acted voluntarily.
 
Now the use of the word “particular” is apt to produce a kind of delusion and roughly speaking this delusion is produced by the double usage of this word. On the one hand, we may say, it is used preliminary to a specification, description, comparison; on the other hand, as what one might describe as an emphasis. The first usage I shall call the transitive one, the second the intransitive one. Thus, on the one hand I say, “This face gives me a particular impression which I can't describe.” The latter sentence may mean something like: “This face gives me a strong impression.” These examples would perhaps be more striking if we substituted the word “peculiar” for “particular”, for the same applies || same comments apply to “peculiar”. If I say, “This soap has a peculiar smell: it is the kind we used as children”, the word “peculiar” may be used merely as an introduction to the comparison which follows it, as though I said, “I'll tell you what this soap smells like: … .” If on the other hand, I say, “This soap has a peculiar smell!” or “It has a most peculiar smell”, “peculiar” here stands for some such expression as “out of the ordinary”, “uncommon”, “striking”.
 
We might ask, “Did you say it had a peculiar smell, as
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,127}} opposed to no peculiar smell, or that it had this smell, as opposed to some other smell, or did you wish to say both the first and the second?” ‒ ‒ Now what was it like when, philosophizing, I said that the word “red” came in a particular way when I described something I saw as red? Was it that I was going to describe the way in which the word “red” came, like saying, “It always comes quicker than the word ‘two’ when I'm counting coloured objects” or “It always comes with a shock,” etc.? ‒ ‒ Or was it that I wished to say that “red” comes in a striking way? ‒ ‒ Not exactly that either. But certainly rather the second than the first. To see this more clearly, consider another example: You are, of course, constantly changing the position of your body throughout the day; arrest yourself in any such attitude (while writing, reading, talking, etc. etc.) and say to yourself in the way in which you say, “‘Red’ comes in a particular way … ”, “I am now in a particular attitude.” You will find that you can quite naturally say this. But aren't you always in a particular attitude? And of course you didn't mean that you were just then in a particularly striking attitude. What was it that happened? You concentrated, as it were stared at, your sensations. And this is exactly what you did when you said that “red” came in a particular way.
 
“But didn't I mean that ‘red’ came in a different way from ‘two’?” ‒ ‒ You may have meant this, but the phrase, “They come in different ways”, is itself liable to cause confusion. Suppose I said, “Smith and Jones always enter my room in different ways”: I might go on and say, “Smith enters quickly, Jones
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,128}} slowly”, I am specifying the ways. I might on the other hand say, “I don't know what the difference is”, intimating that I'm trying to specify the difference, and perhaps later on I shall say, “Now I know what it is; it is … ” ‒ ‒ I could on the other hand tell you that they came in different ways, and you wouldn't know what to make of this statement, and perhaps answer, “Of course they come in different ways; they just are different.” ‒ ‒ We could describe our trouble by saying that we feel as though we could give an experience a name without at the same time committing ourselves about its use, and in fact without any intention to use it at all. Thus when I say “red” comes in a particular way … , I feel that I might now give this way a name if it hasn't already got one, say “A”. But at the same time I am not at all prepared to say that I recognize this to be the way “red” has always come on such occasions, nor even to say that there are, say, four ways, say A, B, C, D, in one of which it always comes. You might say that the two ways in which “red” and “two” come can be identified by, say, exchanging the meaning of the two words, using “red” as the second cardinal numeral, “two” as the name of a colour. Thus, on being asked how many eyes I had, I should answer “red”, and to the question, “What is the colour of blood?”, “two”. But the question now arises whether you can identify the “way in which these words come” independently of the ways in which they are used, – – I mean the ways just described. Did you wish to say that as a matter of experience, the word when used in this way always comes in the way A, but may, the next time, come in the way “two” usually comes? You will see then that
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,129}} you meant nothing of the sort.
 
What is particular about the way “red” comes is that it comes while you're philosophizing about it, as what is particular about the position of your body when you concentrated on it was concentration. We appear to ourselves to be on the verge of giving a characterization of the “way” || describing the way, whereas we aren't really opposing it to any other way. We are emphasizing, not comparing, but we express ourselves as though this emphasis was really a comparison of the object with itself; there seems to be a reflexive comparison. Let me express myself in this way: suppose I speak of the way in which A enters the room, I may say, “I have noticed the way in which A enters the room”, and on being asked, “What is it?”, I may answer, “He always sticks his head into the room before coming in.” Here I'm referring to a definite feature, and I could say that B had the same way, or that A no longer had it. Consider on the other hand the statement, “I've now been observing the way A sits and smokes.” I want to draw him like this. In this case I needn't be ready to give any description of a particular feature of his attitude, and my statement may just mean, “I've been observing A as he sat and smoked.” ‒ ‒ “The way” can't in this case be separated from him. Now if I wished to draw him as he sat there, and was contemplating, studying, his attitude, I should while doing so be inclined to say and repeat to myself, “He has a particular way of sitting.” But the answer to the question, “What way?” would be, “Well, this way”, and perhaps one would give it by drawing the characteristic outlines of his attitude. On the other hand, my phrase, “He has a particular way … ”, might
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,130
 
just have to be translated into, “I'm contemplating his attitude.” Putting it in this form we have, as it were, straightened out the proposition; || our expression; whereas in its first form its meaning seems to describe a loop, that is to say, the word “particular” here seems to be used transitively and, more particularly, reflexively, i.e., we are regarding its use as a special case of the transitive use. We are inclined to answer the question, “What way do you mean?” by “This way”, instead of answering: “I didn't refer to any particular feature; I was just contemplating his position.” My expression made it appear as though I was pointing out something about his way of sitting, or, in our previous case, about the way the word “red” came, whereas what makes me use the word “particular” here is that by my attitude towards the phenomenon I am laying an emphasis on it: I am concentrating on it, or retracing it in my mind, or drawing it, etc.
 
Now this is a characteristic situation to find ourselves in when thinking about philosophical problems. There are many troubles which arise in this way, that a word has a transitive and an intransitive use, and that we regard the latter as a particular case of the former, explaining the word when it is used intransitively by a reflexive construction.
 
Thus we say, “By ‘kilogram’ I mean the weight of one liter of water”, “By ‘A’ I mean ‘B’”, where B is an explanation of “A”. But there is also the intransitive use: “I said that I was sick of it and meant it.” Here again, meaning what you said could be called “retracing it”, “laying an emphasis on it.” But using the word “meaning” in this sentence makes it appear that
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,131}} it must have sense to ask, “What did you mean?”, and to answer, “By what I said I meant what I said”; treating the case of “I mean what I say” as a special case of “By saying ‘A’ I mean ‘B’.” In fact one uses the expression, “I mean what I mean” to say, “I have no explanation for it.” The question, “What does this sentence p mean?”, if it doesn't ask for a translation of p into other symbols, has no more sense than “what sentence is formed by this sequence of words?”
 
Suppose to the question, “What's a kilogram?” I answered, “It is what a liter of water weighs”, and someone asked, “Well, what does a liter of water weigh?” ‒ ‒
 
We often use the reflexive form of speech as a means of emphasizing something. And in all such cases our reflexive expressions can be “straightened out”. Thus we use the expression, “If I can't, I can't”, “I am as I am”, “It is just what it is”, also “That's that.” This latter phrase means as much as, “That's settled”, but why should we express “That's settled” by “That's that”? The answer can be given by laying before ourselves a series of interpretations which make a transition between the two expressions. Thus || So for “That's settled” I will say, “The matter is closed.” And this expression, as it were, files the matter and shelves it. And filing it is like drawing a line around it, as one sometimes draws a line around the result of a calculation, thereby marking it as final. But this also makes it stand out, it is a way of emphasizing it. And what the expression, “That's that” does is to emphasize the “That”.
 
Another expression akin to those we have just considered
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,132}} is this: “Here it is; take it or leave it!” And this again is akin to a kind of introductory statement which we sometimes make before remarking on certain alternatives, as when we say: “It either rains or it doesn't rain; if it rains we'll stay in my room, if it doesn't … ” The first part of this sentence is no piece of information (just as “Take it or leave it” is no order). Instead of, “It either rains or it doesn't rain” we could have said, “Consider the two cases … ” Our expression underlines these cases, presents them to your attention.
 
It is closely connected with this that in describing a case like 30) || 30) or 31) (?) we are tempted to use the phrase, “There is, of course, a number beyond which no one of the tribe has ever counted; let this number be … ” Straightened out this reads: “Let the number beyond which no one of the tribe has ever counted be … ” Why we tend to prefer the first expression to the one straightened out is that it more strongly directs our attention to the upper end of the range of numerals used by our tribe in their actual practice.
 
Let us now consider a very instructive case of that use of the word “particular” in which it does not point to a comparison || in which it doesn't indicate that I'm making a comparison, and yet seems most strongly to do so, – – the case when we contemplate the expression of a face primitively drawn in this way: . Let this face produce an impression on you. You may then feel inclined to say: “Surely I don't see mere strokes. || dashes. I see a face with a particular expression.” But you don't mean that it has an outstanding expression nor is it said as an introduction to a description of the expression, though we
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,133}} might give such a description and say, e.g., “It looks like a complacent business man, stupidly supercilious, who though fat, imagines he's a lady killer.” But this would only be meant as an approximate description of the expression. “Words can't exactly describe it”, one sometimes says. And yet one feels that what one calls the expression of the face is something that can be detached from the drawing of the face. It is as though we could say: “This face has a particular expression: namely this” (pointing to something). But if I had to point to anything in this place it would have to be the face || drawing I am looking at. (We are, as it were, under an optic delusion which by some sort of reflection makes us think that there are two objects where there is only one.) The delusion is assisted by our using the verb “to have”, saying “The face has a particular expression.” Things look different when, instead of this, we say: “This is a peculiar face.” (What a thing is, we mean, is bound up with it; what it has can be separated from it.)
 
“This face has a particular expression.” ‒ ‒ I am inclined to say this when I am letting it make || trying to let it make its full impression upon me.
 
What goes on here is an act, as it were, of digesting it, getting hold of it, and the phrase, “getting hold of the expression of this face” suggests that we are getting hold of a thing which is in the face and different from it. It seems we are looking for something, but we don't do so in the sense of looking for a model of the expression outside the face we see, but in the sense of sounding the thing with our attention. It is,
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,134}} when I let the face make an impression on me, as though there existed a double of its expression, as though the double was the prototype of the expression and as though seeing the expression of the face was finding the prototype to which it corresponded – – as though in our mind there had been a mould and the picture we see had fallen into that mould, fitting it. But it is rather that we let the picture sink into our mind and make a mould there.
 
When we say, “This is a face, and not mere strokes”, we are, of course, distinguishing such a drawing from such a one . And it is true: If you ask anyone: “What is this?” (pointing to the first drawing) he will certainly say: “It's a face”, and he will be able straight away to reply to such questions as, “Is it male or female?”, “Smiling or sad?”, etc. If on the other hand you ask him: “What is this?” (pointing to the second drawing), he will most likely say, “This is nothing at all”, or “These are just dashes”. Now think of looking for a man in a picture puzzle; there it often happens that what at first sight appears as “mere dashes” later appears as a face. We say in such cases: “Now I see it is a face.” It must be quite clear to you that this doesn't mean that we recognize it as the face of a friend or that we are under the delusion of seeing a “real” face: rather, this “seeing it as a face” must be compared with seeing this drawing either as a cube or as a plane figure consisting of a square and two rhombuses; or with seeing this “as a square with diagonals”, or “as a swastika”, that is, as a limiting case of this ; or again with seeing these four dots .... as two pairs of dots side by side with
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,135}} each other, or as two interlocking pairs, or as one pair inside the other, etc.
 
The case of “seeing as a swastika” is of special interest because this expression might mean being, somehow, under the optical delusion that the square is not quite closed, that there are the gaps which distinguish the swastika from our drawing. On the other hand it is quite clear that this was not what we meant by “seeing our drawing as a swastika”. We saw it in a way which suggested the description, “I see it as a swastika.” One might suggest that we ought to have said, “I see it as a closed swastika”; – – but then, what is the difference between a closed swastika and a square with diagonals? I think that in this case it is easy to recognize “what happens when we see our figure as a swastika.” I believe it is that we retrace the figure with our eyes in a particular way, viz., by starting at the centre, looking along a radius, and along a side adjacent to it, starting at the centre again, taking the next radius and the next side, say in a right handed sense of rotation, etc. But this explanation of the phenomenon of seeing the figure as a swastika is of no fundamental interest to us. It is of interest to us only in so far as it helps one to see that the expression, “seeing the figure as a swastika” did not mean seeing this as that, seeing one thing as something else, when, essentially, two visual objects entered the process of doing so. ‒ ‒ Thus also seeing the first figure as a cube did not mean “taking it to be a cube.” (For we might never have seen a cube and still have this experience of “seeing it as a cube”).
 
And in this way “seeing dashes as a face” does not involve
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,136}} a comparison between a group of dashes and a real human face; and on the other hand, this form of expression most strongly suggests that we are alluding to a comparison.
 
Consider also this example: Look at W once “as a capital double-U”, and another time as a capital M upside down. Observe what doing the one and doing the other consists in.
 
We distinguish seeing a drawing as a face and seeing it as something else or as “mere dashes.” And we also distinguish between superficially glancing at a drawing (seeing it as a face), and letting the face make its full impression on us. But it would be queer to say: “I am letting the face make a particular impression on me”, (except in such cases in which you can say that you can let the same face make different impressions on you). And in letting the face impress itself on me and contemplating its “particular impression”, no two things of the multiplicity of a face are compared with each other; there is only one which is laden with emphasis. Absorbing its expression, I don't find a prototype of this expression in my mind; rather, I, as it were, cut a seal from || after the impression.
 
And this also describes what happens when in ) we say to ourselves, “The word ‘red’ comes in a particular way … ” The reply could be: “I see, you're repeating to yourself some experience and again and again gazing at it.”
 
We may shed light on all these considerations if we compare what happens when we remember the face of someone who enters our room, when we recognize him as Mr. So-and-so, – – when we compare what really happens in such cases with the representation we are sometimes inclined to make of the events.
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,137}} For here we are often obsessed by a primitive conception, viz., that we are comparing the man we see with a memory image in our mind and we find the two to agree. I.e., we are representing “recognizing someone” as a process of identification by means of a picture (as a criminal is identified by his photo.) I needn't say that in most cases in which we recognize someone no comparison between him and a mental picture takes place. We are, of course, tempted to give this description by the fact that there are memory images. Very often, for instance, such an image comes before our mind immediately after having recognized someone. I see him as he stood when we last saw each other ten years ago.
 
I will here again describe the kind of thing that happens in your mind and otherwise when you recognize a person coming into your room by means of what you might say when you recognize him. Now this may just be: “Hello!” And thus we may say that one kind of event of recognizing a thing we see consists in saying “Hello!” to it in words, gestures, facial expressions, etc. ‒ ‒ And thus also we may think that when we look at our drawing and see it as a face, we compare it with some paradigm, and it agrees with it, or it fits into a mould ready for it in our mind. But no such mould or comparison enters into our experience, there is only this shape, not any other to compare it with, and as it were, say “Of course!” to it. As when in putting together a jig-saw puzzle, somewhere a small space is left unfilled and I see a piece obviously fitting it and put it in the place saying to myself “Of course!” But here we say, “Of course!” because the piece fits the mould
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,138}} whereas in our case of seeing the drawing as a face, we have the same attitude for no reason.
 
The same strange illusion which we are under when we seem to seek the something which a face expresses whereas, in reality, we are giving ourselves up to the features before us,– – that same illusion possesses us even more strongly if repeating a tune to ourselves and letting it make its full impression on us, we say, “This tune says something”, and it is as though I had to find what it says. And yet I know that it doesn't say anything in which I might express in words or pictures what it says. And if, recognizing this, I resign myself to saying, “It just expresses a musical thought”, this would mean no more than saying, “It expresses itself.” ‒ ‒ “But surely when you play it you don't play it anyhow, you play it in this particular way, making a crescendo here, a diminuendo there, a caesura in this place, etc.”‒ ‒ Precisely, and that's all I can say about it, or may be all that I can say about it. For in certain cases I can justify, explain the particular expression with which I play it by a comparison, as when I say, “At this point of the theme, there is, as it were, a colon”, or, “This is, as it were, the answer to what came before”, etc. (This, by the way, shews what a “justification” and an “explanation” in aesthetics is like.) It is true I may hear a tune played and say, “This is not how it ought to be played, it goes like this”; and I whistle it in a different tempo. Here one is inclined to ask, “What is it like to know the tempo in which a piece of music should be played?” And the idea suggests itself that there must be a paradigm somewhere in our mind, and that we have
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,139}} adjusted the tempo to conform to that paradigm. But in most cases if someone asked me, “How do you think this melody should be played?”, I will as an answer just whistle it in a particular way, and nothing will have been present to my mind but the tune actually whistled (not an image of that).
 
This doesn't mean that suddenly understanding a musical theme may not consist in finding a form of verbal expression which I conceive as the verbal counterpoint of the theme. And in the same way I may say, “Now I understand the expression of this face”, and what happened when the understanding came was that I found the word which seemed to sum it up. || characterize its expression.
 
Consider also this expression: “Tell yourself that it's a waltz, and you will play it correctly.”
 
What we call “understanding a sentence” has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think. But I don't mean that understanding a musical theme is more like the picture which one tends to make oneself of understanding a sentence; but rather that this picture is wrong, and that understanding a sentence is much more like what really happens when we understand a tune than at first sight appears. For understanding a sentence, “we say”, || one says, points to a reality outside the sentence || language. Whereas one might say, “Understanding a sentence means getting hold of its content; and the content of the sentence is in the sentence”.
 
We may now return to the ideas of “recognizing” and “familiarity”, and in fact to that example of recognition and familiarity which started our reflections on the use of these terms and of a multitude of terms connected with them. I mean the
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,140
 
example of reading, say, a written sentence in a well-known language. ‒ ‒ I read such a sentence to see what the experience of reading is like, what “really happens” when one reads, and I get a particular experience which I take to be the experience of reading. And, it seems, this doesn't simply consist in seeing and pronouncing the words, but, besides, in an experience of what I might call an intimate character || experience of an intimate character, as I should like to say. (I am || am as it were on an intimate footing with the words “I read”).
 
In reading the spoken words come in a particular way, I am inclined to say; and the written words themselves which I read don't just look to me like any kind of scribbles. At the same time I am unable to point to, or get a grasp on, that “particular way.”
 
The phenomenon of seeing and speaking the words seems enshrouded by a particular atmosphere. But I don't recognize this atmosphere as one which always characterized reading || the situation of reading. Rather, I notice it when I read a line, trying to see what reading is like.
 
When noticing this atmosphere I am in the situation of a man who is working in his room, reading, writing, speaking, etc., and who suddenly concentrates his attention on some soft uniform noise, such as one can almost always hear, particularly in a town (the dim noise resulting from all the various noises of the street, the sounds of wind, rain, workshops, etc.). We could imagine that this man might think that a particular noise was a common element of all the experiences he had in this
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,141}} room. We should then draw his attention to the fact that most of the time he hadn't noticed any noise going on outside, and secondly, that the noise he could hear wasn't always the same (there was sometimes wind, sometimes not, etc.)
 
Now we have used a misleading expression when we said that besides the experiences of seeing and speaking in reading there was another experience, etc. This is saying that to certain experiences another experience is added. ‒ ‒ Now take the experience of seeing a sad face, say, in drawing, – – we can say that to see the drawing as a sad face is not “just” to see it as some complex of strokes, (think of a puzzle picture). But the word “just” here seems to intimate that in seeing the drawing as a face some experience is added to the experience of seeing it as mere strokes; as though I had to say that seeing the drawing as a face consisted of two experiences, elements.
 
You should now notice the difference between the various cases in which we say that an experience consists of several elements || experiences or that it is a compound experience. We might say to the doctor, “I don't have one pain; I have two: toothache and headache.” And one might express this by saying, “My experience of pain is not simple, but compound, I toothache and headache.” Compare with this case that in which I say, “I have got both pains in my stomach and a general feeling of sickness.” Here I don't separate the constituent experiences by pointing to two localities of pain. Or consider this statement: “When I drink sweet tea, my taste experience is a compound of the taste of sugar and the taste of tea.” Or again: “If I hear
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,142}} the C major chord my experience is composed of hearing C, E, and G.” And, on the other hand, “I hear a piano playing and some noise in the street.” A most instructive example is this: in a song words are sung to certain notes. In what sense is the experience of hearing the vowel a sung to the note C a composite one? Ask yourself in each of these cases: What is it like to single out the constituent experiences in the compound experience?
 
Now although the expression that seeing a drawing as a face is not merely seeing strokes seems to point to some kind of addition of experiences, we certainly should not say that when we see the drawing as a face we also have the experience of seeing it as mere strokes and some other experience besides. And this becomes still clearer when we imagine that someone said that seeing the drawing as a cube consisted in seeing it as a plane figure plus having an experience of depth.
 
Now when I felt that though while reading a certain constant experience went on and on, I could not in a sense lay hold of that experience, my difficulty arose through wrongly comparing this case with one in which one part of my experience can be said to be an accompaniment of another. Thus we are sometimes tempted to ask: “If I feel this constant hum going on while I read, where is it?” I wish to make a pointing gesture, and there is nothing to point to. And the words “lay hold of” express the same misleading analogy.
 
Instead of asking the question, “Where is this constant experience which seems to go on all through my reading?”, we should ask, “What is it in saying, ‘A particular atmosphere
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,143}} enshrouds the words which I am reading’, that I am contrasting this case with?”
 
I will try to elucidate this by an analogous case: We are inclined to be puzzled by the three-dimensional appearance of the drawing in a way expressed by the question, “What does seeing it three-dimensionally consist in?” And this question really asks, “What is it that is added to simply seeing the drawing when we see it three dimensionally?” And yet what answer can we expect to this question? It is the form of this question which produces the puzzlement. As Hertz says: “Aber offenbar irrt die Frage in Bezug auf die Antwort, welche sie erwartet” (p.9, Einleitung, Die Prinzipien der Mechanik). The question itself keeps the mind pressing against a blank wall, thereby preventing it from ever finding the outlet. To show a man how to get out you have first of all to free him from the misleading influence of the question.
 
Look at a written word, say, “read”, – – “It isn't just a scribble, it's ‘read’”, I should like to say, “It has one definite physiognomy.” But what is it that I am really saying about it?! What is this statement, straightened out? “The word falls”, one is tempted to explain, “into a mould of my mind long prepared for it.” But as I don't perceive both the word and a mould, the metaphor of the word's fitting a mould can't allude to an experience of comparing the hollow and the solid shape before they are fitted together, but rather to an experience of seeing the solid shape accentuated by a particular background. 1) , 11) .
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,144}} 1) would be the picture of the hollow and the solid shape before they are fitted together. We here see two circles and can compare them. 11) is the picture of the solid in the hollow. There is only one circle, and what we call the mould only accentuates, or as we sometimes said, emphasizes it.
 
I am tempted to say, “This isn't just a scribble, but it's this particular face.” ‒ ‒ But I can't say, “I see this as this face”, but ought to say, “I see this as a face.” But I feel I want to say, “I don't see this as a face, I see it as this face!” But in the second half of this sentence the word “face” is redundant, and it should have run, “I don't see this as a face, I see it like this.”
 
Suppose I said, “I see this scribble like this”, and while saying “this scribble” I look at it as a mere scribble, and while saying “like this”, I see the face, – – this would come to something like saying, “What at one time appears to me like this at another appears to me like that”, and here the “this” and the “that” would be accompanied by the two different ways of seeing. ‒ ‒ But we must ask ourselves in what game is this sentence with the processes accompanying it to be used. E.g., whom am I telling this? Suppose the answer is, “I'm saying it to myself.” But that is not enough. We are here in the grave danger of believing that we know what to do with a sentence if it looks more or less like one of the common sentences of our language. But here in order not to be deluded we have to ask ourselves: What is the use, say, of the words “this” and “that”? – – or rather, What are the different uses which we make of them? What we call their meaning the meaning of these words is
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,145}} not anything which they have got in them or which is fastened to them irrespective of what use we make of them. Thus it is one use of the word “this” to go along with a gesture pointing to something: We say, “I am seeing the square with the diagonals like this”, pointing to a swastika. And referring to the square with diagonals I might have said, “What at one time appears to me like this at another time appears to me like that .” And this is certainly not the use we made of the sentence in the above case. ‒ ‒ One might think the whole difference between the two cases is this, that in the first the pictures are mental, in the second, real drawings. We should here ask ourselves in what sense we can call mental images pictures, for in some ways they are comparable to drawn or painted pictures, and in others not. It is, e.g., one of the essential points about the use of a “material” picture that we say that it remains the same not only on the ground that it seems to us to be the same, that we remember that it looked before as it looks now. In fact we shall say under certain circumstances that the picture hasn't changed although it seems to have changed; and we say it hasn't changed because it has been kept in a certain way, certain influences have been kept out. Therefore the expression, “The picture hasn't changed”, is used in a different way when we talk of a material picture on the one hand, and of a mental one on the other. Just as the statement, “These ticks follow at equal intervals”, has got one grammar if the ticks are the tick of a pendulum and the criterion for their regularity is the result of measurements which we have made on our apparatus, and another grammar if the ticks are ticks which
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,146}} we imagine. I might for instance ask the question: When I said to myself, “What at one time appears to me like this, at another … ”, did I recognize the two aspects, this and that, as the same which I got on previous occasions? Or were they new to me and I tried to remember them for future occasions? Or was all that I meant to say, “I can change the aspect of this figure”?
 
The danger of delusion which we are in becomes most clear if we propose to ourselves to give the aspects “this” and “that” names, say A and B. For we are most strongly tempted to imagine that giving a name consists in correlating in a peculiar and rather mysterious way a sound (or other sign) with something. How we make use of this peculiar correlation then seems to be almost a secondary matter. (One could almost imagine that naming was done by a peculiar sacramental act, and that this produced some magic relation between the name and the thing.)
 
But let us look at an example; consider this language-game: A sends B to various houses in their town to fetch goods of various sorts from various people. A gives B various lists. On top of every list he puts a scribble, and B is trained to go to that house on the door of which he finds the same scribble, this is the name of the house. In the first column of every list he then finds one or more scribbles which he has been taught to read out. When he enters the house he calls out these words, and every inhabitant of the house has been trained to run up to him when a certain one of these sounds is called out, these sounds are the names of the people. He then addresses himself to each one of them in turn and shews to each two
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,147}} consecutive scribbles which stand on the list against his name. The first of these two, people of that town have been trained to associate with some particular kind of object, say, apples. The second is one of a row || series of scribbles which each man carries about him on a slip of paper. The person thus addressed fetches, say, five apples. The first scribble was the generic name of the objects required, the second, the name of their number.
 
What now is the relation between a name and the object named, say, the house and its name? I suppose we could give either of two answers. The one is that the relation consists in certain strokes having been painted on to the door of the house. The second answer I meant is that the relation we are concerned with is established, not just by painting these strokes on the door, but by the particular role which they play in the practice of our language as we have been sketching it. ‒ ‒ Again, the relation of the name of a person to the person in ) consists in the person having been trained to run up to someone who calls out the name; or again, we might say that it consists in this and the whole of the usage of the name in the language-game.
 
Look into this language-game and see if you can find the mysterious relation of the object and its name. ‒ ‒ The relation of name and object we may say, consists in a scribble being written on an object (or some other such very trivial relation), and that's all there is to it. But we are not satisfied with that, for we feel that a scribble written on an object in itself is of no importance to us, and interests us in no way. And this is true; the whole importance lies in the particular use
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,148}} we make of the scribble written on the object, and we, in a sense, simplify matters by saying that the name has a peculiar relation to its object, a relation other than that, say, of being written on the object, or of being spoken by a person pointing to an object with his finger. A primitive philosophy condenses the whole usage of the name into the idea of a relation, which thereby becomes a mysterious relation. (Compare the ideas of mental activities, wishing, believing, thinking etc., which for the same reason have something mysterious and inexplicable about them.)
 
Now we might use the expression, “The relation of name to || and object does not merely consist in this kind of trivial, ‘purely external’, connection”, meaning that what we call the relation of name and object is characterized by the entire usage of the name, but then it is clear that there is no one relation of name to object, but as many as there are uses of sounds or scribbles which we call names.
 
We can therefore say that if naming something is to be more than just uttering a sound while pointing to something, there must come to it, in some form or other, the knowledge of how in the particular case the sound or scratch is to be used.
 
Now when we proposed to give the aspects of a drawing names, we made it appear that by seeing the drawing in two different ways, and each time saying something, we had done more than performing just this uninteresting action; whereas we now see that it is the usage of the “name” and in fact the detail of this usage which gives the naming its peculiar significance.
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,149
 
It is therefore not an unimportant question, but a question about the essence of the matter: “Are ‘A’ and ‘B’ to remind me of these aspects; can I carry out such an order as ‘See this drawing in the aspect ‘A’; are there, in some way, pictures of these aspects correlated with the names ‘A’ and ‘B’ (like and ); are ‘A’ and ‘B’ used in communicating with other people, and what exactly is the game played with them?”
 
When I say, “I don't see mere dashes (a mere scribble) but a face (or word) with this particular physiognomy”, I don't wish to assert any general characteristic of what I see, but to assert that I see that particular physiognomy which I do see. And it is obvious that here my expression is moving in a circle. But this is so because really the particular physiognomy which I saw ought to have entered my proposition. ‒ ‒ When I find that, “In reading a sentence, a peculiar experience goes on all the while”, I have actually to read over a fairly long stretch to get the peculiar impression uttered in this way || which makes one say this.
 
I might then have said, “I find that the same experience goes on all the time”, but I wished to say: “I don't just notice that it's the same experience throughout, I notice a particular experience.” Looking at a uniformly coloured wall I might say, “I don't just see that it has the same colour all over, but I see the || a particular colour.” But in saying this I am mistaking the function of a sentence. ‒ ‒ It seems that you wish to specify the colour you see, but not by saying anything about it, nor by comparing it with a sample, – – but by pointing to it; using it at the same time as the sample and that which
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,150
 
the sample is compared with.
 
Consider this example: You tell me to write a few lines, and while I am doing so you ask, “Do you feel something in your hand || notice a feeling in your hand while you are writing?” I say, “Yes, I have a peculiar feeling.” ‒ ‒ Can't I say to myself when I write, “I have this feeling”? Of course I can say it, and while saying “this feeling”, I concentrate on the feeling. ‒ ‒ But what do I do with this sentence? What use is it to me? It seems that I am pointing out to myself what I am feeling, – – as though my act of concentration was an “inward” act of pointing, one which no one else but me is aware of, this however is unimportant. But I don't point to the feeling by attending to it. Rather, attending to the feeling means producing or modifying it. (On the other hand, observing a chair does not mean producing or modifying the chair.)
 
Our sentence, “I have this feeling while I'm writing”, is of the kind of the sentence, “I see this.” I don't mean the sentence when it is used to inform someone that I am looking at the object which I am pointing to, nor when it is used, as in ), to convey to someone that I see a certain drawing in the way A and not in the way B. I mean the sentence, “I see this”, as it is sometimes contemplated by us when we are brooding over certain philosophical problems. We are then, say, holding on to a particular visual impression by staring at some object, and we feel it is most natural to say to ourselves, “I see this”, though we know of no further use we can make of this sentence.
 
“Surely it makes sense to say what I see, and how better
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,151}} could I do this than by letting what I see speak for itself!”
 
But the words, “I see” in our sentence are redundant. I don't wish to tell myself that it is I who see this, nor that I see it. Or, as I might put it, it is impossible that I should not see this. This comes to the same as saying that I can't point out to myself by a visual hand what I am seeing; as this hand does not point to what I see but is part of what I see.
 
It is as though the sentence was singling out the particular colour I saw; as if it presented it to me.
 
It seems as though the colour which I see was its own description.
 
For the pointing with my finger was ineffectual. (And the looking is no pointing, it does not, for me, indicate a direction, which could mean contrasting a direction with other directions.)
 
What I see, or feel, enters my sentence as a sample does; but no use is made of this sample; the words of my sentence don't seem to matter, they only serve to present the sample to me.
 
I don't really speak about what I see, but to it.
 
I am in fact going through the acts of attending which could accompany the use of a sample. And this is what makes it seem as though I was making use of a sample. This error is akin to that of believing that an ostensive definition says something about the object to which it directs our attention.
 
When I said, “I am mistaking the function of a sentence”, it was because by its help I seemed to be pointing out to myself which colour it is I see, whereas I was just contemplating a
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,152}} sample of a colour. It seemed to me that the sample was the description of its own colour.
 
Suppose I said to someone: “Observe the particular lighting of this room.” ‒ ‒ Under certain circumstances the sense of this order || imperative will be quite clear, e.g., if the walls of the room were red with the setting sun. But suppose at any other time when there is nothing striking about the lighting I said, “Observe the particular lighting of this room”: – – Well, isn't there a particular lighting? So what is the difficulty about observing it? But the person who was told to observe the lighting when there was nothing striking about it would probably look about the room and say, “Well, what about it?” Now I might go on and say, “It is exactly the same lighting as yesterday at this hour”, or “It is just this slightly dim light which you see in this picture of the room.”
 
In the first case, when the room was lit a striking red, you could have pointed out the peculiarity which you were meant, though not explicitly told, to observe. You could, e.g., have used a sample of the particular colour in order to do so. We shall in this case be inclined to say that a peculiarity was added to the normal appearance of the room.
 
In the second case, when the room was just ordinarily lighted and there was nothing striking about its appearance, you didn't know exactly what to do when you were told to observe the lighting of the room. All you could do was to look about you waiting for something further to be said which would give the first order its full sense.
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,153
 
But wasn't the room, in both cases, lit in a particular way? Well, this question, as it stands, is senseless, and so is the answer, “It was … ” The order, “Observe the particular lighting of this room”, does not imply any statement about the appearance of this room. It seemed to say: “This room has a particular lighting, which I need not name; observe it!” The lighting referred to, it seems, is given by a sample, and you are to make use of the sample; as you would be doing in copying the precise shade of a colour sample on a palette. Whereas the order is similar to this: “Get hold of this sample!”
 
Imagine yourself saying, “There is a particular lighting I must observe || which I'm to observe.” You could imagine yourself in this case staring about you in vain, that is, without seeing the lighting.
 
You could have been given a sample, e.g., a piece of colour material, and been asked: “Observe the colour of this patch.” ‒ ‒ And we can draw a distinction between observing, attending to, the shape of the sample and attending to its colour. But, attending to the colour can't be described as looking at a thing which is connected with the sample, rather, as looking at the sample in a peculiar way.
 
When we obey the order, “Observe the colour … ”, what we do is to open our eyes to colour. “Observe the colour … ” doesn't mean “See the colour you see.” The order, “Look at so-and-so”, is of the kind, “Turn your head in this direction”; what you will see when you do so does not enter this order. By attending, looking, you produce the impression; you can't look at the impression.
 
 
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,154}} Suppose someone answered to our order: “Yes || “All right, I am now observing the particular lighting this room has”, – – this would sound as though he could point out to us the particular lighting || which lighting it was. The order, that is to say, may seem to tell || have told you to do something with this particular lighting, as opposed to another one (like “Paint this lighting, not that”). Whereas you obey the order by taking in lighting, as opposed to dimensions, shapes, etc.
 
(Compare, “Get hold of the colour of this sample” with “Get hold of this pencil”, i.e., there it is, take hold of it.)
 
I return to our sentence: “This face has a particular expression.” In this case too I did not compare or contrast my impression with anything, I did not make use of the sample before me. The sentence was an utterance of a state of attention.
 
What has to be explained is this: Why do we talk to our impression? ‒ ‒ You read, put yourself into a state of attention || particular state of attention and say: “Something peculiar happens undoubtedly.” You are inclined to go on: “There is a certain smoothness about it”; but you feel that this is only an inadequate description and that the experience can only stand for itself. “Something peculiar happens undoubtedly” is like saying, “I have had an experience.” But you don't wish to make a general statement independent of the particular experience you have had but rather a statement into which this experience enters.
 
You are under an impression. This makes you say, “I am under a particular impression”, and this sentence seems to say, to yourself at least, under what impression you are. As though you were referring to a picture ready || in readiness in your mind and said,
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,155}} “This is it” || and said, “This is what my impression is like”. Whereas you have only pointed to your impression. In our case), saying “I notice the particular colour of this wall” is like drawing, say, a black rectangle enclosing a small patch of the wall and thereby designating that patch as a sample for further use.
 
When you read, as it were attending closely to what happened when you read || in reading, you seemed to be observing reading as under a magnifying glass and to see the reading process. (But the case is more like that of observing something through a coloured glass.) You think you have noticed the process of reading, the particular way in which signs are translated || pass over into spoken words.
 
I have read a line with a peculiar attention; I am impressed by the reading, and this makes me say that I have observed something besides the mere seeing of the written signs and the speaking of words. I have also expressed it by saying that I have noticed a particular atmosphere round the seeing and speaking. How such a metaphor as that embodied in the last sentences can arise || can come to suggest || present itself to me may be seen more clearly by looking at this example: If you heard sentences spoken in a monotone, you might be tempted to say that the words were all enshrouded in a particular atmosphere. But wouldn't it be using a peculiar way of representation to say that speaking the sentence in a monotone was adding something to the mere saying of it? Couldn't we even conceive speaking in a monotone as the result of taking away from the sentence its inflexion. Different circumstances would make us adopt different
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,156}} ways of representation. If, e.g., certain words had to be read out in a monotone, this being indicated by a staff and a sustained note beneath the written words, this notation would very strongly suggest the idea that something had been added to the mere speaking of the sentence.
 
I am impressed by the reading of a sentence, and I say the sentence has shewn me something, that I have noticed something in it. This made me think of the following example: A friend and I once looked at beds of pansies. Each bed shewed a different kind. We were impressed by each in turn. Speaking about them my friend said, “What a variety of colour patterns, and each says something.” And this was just what I myself wished to say.
 
Compare such a statement with this: “Every one of these men says something.” ‒ ‒
 
If one had asked what the colour pattern of the pansy said, the right answer would have seemed to be that it said itself. Hence we could have used an intransitive form of expression, say, “Each of these colour patterns impresses one.”
 
It has sometimes been said that what music conveys to us are feelings of joyfulness, melancholy, triumph, etc. etc. and what repels us in this account is that it seems to say that music is a means to || an instrument for producing in us sequences of feelings. And from this one might gather that any other means of producing such feelings would do for us instead of music. ‒ ‒ To this || such an account we are tempted to reply “Music conveys to us itself!”
 
It is similar with such expressions as, “Each of these
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,157}} colour patterns impresses one.” We feel we wish to guard against the idea that a colour pattern is a means to producing in us a certain impression – – the colour pattern being like a drug and we interested merely in the effect this drug produces. ‒ ‒ We wish to avoid any form of expression which would seem to refer to an effect produced by an object on a subject. (Here we are bordering on the problem of idealism and realism and on the problem whether statements of aesthetics are subjective or objective.) Saying, “I see this and am impressed” is apt to make it seem as though || that the impression was some feeling accompanying the seeing, and that the sentence said something like, “I see this and feel a pressure.”
 
I could have used the expression, “Each of these colour patterns has meaning”; – – I didn't say “has meaning”, for this would provoke the question, “What meaning?”, which in the case we are considering is senseless. We are distinguishing between meaningless patterns and patterns which have meaning; but there is no such expression in our game as, “This pattern has the meaning so-and-so.” Nor even the expression, “These two patterns have different meanings”, unless this is to say: “These are two different patterns and both have meaning.”
 
It is easy to understand though why we should be inclined to use the transitive form of expression. For let us see what use we make of such an expression as, “This face says something”, that is, what the situations are in which we use this expression, what sentence would precede or follow it, (what kind of conversation it is a part of). We should perhaps follow up such
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,158}} a remark by saying, “Look at the line of these eyebrows” or “The dark eyes and the pale face!”; these expressions would draw attention to certain features. We should in the same connection use comparisons, as for instance, “The nose is like a beak”, – – but also such expressions as “The whole face expresses bewilderment”, and here we have used “expressing” transitively.
 
We can now consider sentences which, as one might say, give an analysis of the impression we get, say, from a face. Take such a statement as, “The particular impression of this face is due to its small eyes and low forehead.” Here the words, “the particular impression”, may stand for a certain specification, e.g., “the stupid expression.” Or, on the other hand, they may mean, “what makes this expression a striking one” (i.e. an extraordinary one); or, “what strikes one about this face” (i.e., “what draws one's attention”). Or again, our sentence may mean, “If you change these features in the slightest the expression will change entirely (whereas you might change other features without changing the expression nearly so much)”. The form of this statement, however, mustn't mislead us into thinking that there is in every case a supplementing statement of the form, “First the expression was this, after the change it's that.” We can, of course, say, “Smith frowned, and his expression changed from this to that”, pointing, say, at two drawings of his face. – – (Compare with this the two statements: “He said these words”, and “His words said something”).
 
When, trying to see what reading consisted in, I read a written sentence, let it || the reading of it impress itself upon me, and said that
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,159}} I had a particular impression, one could have asked me such a question as whether my impression was not due to the particular handwriting || whether it was not, say, the handwriting which had given me the particular impression. This would be asking me whether my impression would not be a different one if the writing had been a different one, or say, if each word of the sentence were written in a different handwriting. In this sense we could also ask whether that impression wasn't due after all to the sense of the particular sentence which I read. One might suggest: Read a different sentence (or the same one in a different handwriting) and see if you would still say that you had the same impression. And the answer might be: “Yes, the impression I had was really due to the handwriting.” ‒ ‒ But this would not imply that when I first said the sentence gave me a particular impression I had contrasted one impression with another, or that my statement had not been of the kind, “This sentence has its own expression || character.” This will get clearer by considering the following example: Suppose we have three faces drawn side by side: a) , b) , c) . They should be absolutely identical, but for an additional stroke in b) and two dots in c). I contemplate the first one, saying to myself, “This face has a peculiar expression.” Then I am shewn the second one and asked whether it has the same expression. I answer “Yes”. Then the third one is shewn to me and I say, “It has a different expression.” In my two answers I might be said to have distinguished the face and its expression: for b) is different from a) and still I say they have the same expression, whereas the difference between c) and a) corresponds to a
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,160
 
difference of expression; and this may make us think that also in my first utterance I distinguished between the face and its expression.
 
Let us now go back to the idea of a feeling of familiarity which arises when I see familiar objects. Pondering about the question whether there is such a feeling or not, we are likely to gaze at some object and say, “Don't I have a particular feeling when I look at my old coat and hat?” But to this we now answer: What feeling do you compare this || it with, or oppose it to? Should you say that your old coat gives you the same feeling as your old friend A with whose appearance too you are well acquainted, or that whenever you happened to look at your coat you get that feeling, say of intimacy and warmth?
 
“But is there no such thing as a feeling of familiarity?” ‒ ‒ I should say that there are a great many different experiences, some of them feelings, which we might call “experiences (feelings) of familiarity.”
 
Different experiences of familiarity: a) Someone enters my room, I haven't seen him for a long time, and didn't expect him. I look at him, say or feel, “Oh, it's you.” ‒ ‒ (Why did I in giving this example say that I hadn't seen the man for a long time? Wasn't I setting out to describe experiences of familiarity? And whatever the experience was I alluded to, couldn't I have had it even if I had seen the man half an hour ago? I mean, I gave the circumstances of recognizing the man as a means to the end of describing the precise situation of the recognition. One might object to this way of describing the experience, saying that it brought in irrelevant things, and in
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,161}} fact wasn't a description of the feeling at all. In saying this one takes as the prototype of a description, say, the description of a table, which tells you the exact shape, dimensions, the material which it is made of, and its colour. Such a description one might say pieces the table together. There is on the other hand a different kind of description of a table, such as you might find in a novel, e.g., “It was a small, rickety table decorated in Moorish style, the sort that is used for smoker's requisites.” Such a description might be called an indirect one; but if the purpose of it is to bring a vivid image of the table before your mind in a flash, it might serve this purpose incomparably better than a detailed “direct” description. ‒ ‒ Now if I am to give the description of a feeling of familiarity or recognition, – – what do you expect me to do? Can I piece the feeling together? In a sense of course I could, giving you many different stages and the way my feelings changed. Such detailed descriptions you can find in some of the great novels. Now if you think of descriptions of pieces of furniture as you might find them in a novel, you see that to this kind of description you can oppose another making use of drawings, measures such as one should give to a cabinet maker. This latter kind one is inclined to call the only direct and complete description (though this way of expressing ourselves shews that we forget that there are certain purposes which the “real” description does not fulfil). These considerations should warn you not to think that there is one real and direct description of, say, the feeling of recognition as opposed to
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,162}} the “indirect” one which I have given.)
 
b) the same as a), but the face is not familiar to me immediately. After a little, recognition “dawns upon me.” I say, “Oh, it's you”, but with totally different inflexion than in a). (Consider tone of voice, inflexion, gestures, as essential parts of our experience, not as inessential accompaniments or mere means of communication. (Compare p. 104–5)). c) There is an experience directed towards people or things which we see every day when suddenly we feel them to be “old acquaintances” or “good old friends”; one might also describe the feeling as one of warmth or of being at home with them. d) My room with all the objects in it is thoroughly familiar to me. When I enter it in the morning do I greet the familiar chairs, tables, etc., with a feeling of “Oh, hello!”? or have such a feeling as described in c)? But isn't the way I walk about in it, take something out of a drawer, sit down, etc. different from my behaviour in a room I don't know? And why shouldn't I say therefore, that I had experiences of familiarity whenever I lived amongst these familiar objects? e) Isn't it an experience of familiarity when on being asked, “Who is this man?” I answer straight away (or after some reflection), “It is so-and-so”? Compare with this experience, f), that of looking at the written word “feeling” and saying, “This is A's handwriting” and on the other hand g) the experience of reading the word, which also is an experience of familiarity.
 
To e) one might object saying that the experience of saying the man's name was not the experience of familiarity, that he had to be familiar to us in order that we might know his name,
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,163}} and that we had to know his name in order that we might say it. Or, we might say, “Saying his name is not enough, for surely we might say the name without knowing that it was his name.” And this remark is certainly true if only we realise that it does not imply that knowing the name is a process accompanying or preceding saying the name.
 
Consider this example: What is the difference between a memory image, an image that comes with expectation, and say, an image of a day dream. You may be inclined to answer, “There is an intrinsic difference between the images”. ‒ ‒ Did you notice that difference, or did you only say there was one because you thought there had to be one? || think there must be one?
 
“But surely I recognize a memory image as a memory image, an image of a day dream as an image of a day dream, etc.” ‒ ‒ Remember that you are sometimes doubtful whether you actually saw a certain event happening or whether you dreamt it, or just had heard of it and imagined it vividly. But apart from that, what do you mean by “recognizing an image as a memory image”? I agree that (at least in most cases) while an image is before your mind's eye you are not in a state of doubt as to whether it is a memory image, etc. Also, if asked whether your image was a memory image, you would (in most cases) answer the question without hesitation. Now what if I asked you, “When do you know what sort of an image it is?”? Do you call knowing what sort of image it is not being in a state of doubt, not wondering about it? Does introspection make you see a state or activity of mind which you would call knowing that the image was a memory image, and which takes place while the image is before
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,164}} your mind? ‒ ‒ Further, if you answer the question, what sort of image it was you had, do you do so by, as it were, looking at the image and discovering a certain characteristic in it? (as though you had been asked by whom a picture was painted, looked at it, recognized the style, and said it was a Rembrandt.)
 
It is easy, on the other hand, to point out experiences characteristic of remembering, expecting, etc. accompanying the images, and further differences in the immediate or more remote surrounding of them. Thus we certainly say different things in the different cases, e.g., “I remember his coming into my room”, “I expect his coming into my room”, “I imagine his coming into my room.” ‒ ‒ “But surely this can't be all the difference there is!” It isn't all: There are the three different games played with these three words surrounding these statements.
 
When challenged, do we understand the word “remember”, etc., is there really a difference between the cases besides the mere verbal one, our thoughts moving in the immediate surroundings of the image we had or the expression we used. I have an image of dining in Hall with T. If asked whether this is a memory image, I say, “Of course”, and my thoughts begin to move on paths starting from this image. I remember who sat next to us, what the conversation was about, what I thought about it, what happened to T later on, etc. etc.
 
Imagine two different games both played with chess men on a chess board. The initial positions of both are alike. One of the games is always played with red and green pieces, the other with black and white. Two people are beginning to play, they have the chess board between them with the red and green
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,165}} pieces in position. Someone asks them, “Do you know what game you're intending to play?” A player answers, “Of course; we are playing No.2.” “What is the difference now between playing no.2 and no.1?” ‒ ‒ “Well, there are red and green pieces on the board and not black and white ones, also we say that we are playing no.2.” ‒ ‒ “But this couldn't be the only difference; don't you understand what ‘no.2’ means and what game the red and green pieces stand for?” Here we are inclined to say, “Certainly I do” and to prove this to ourselves we actually begin to move the pieces according to the rules of game no.2. This is what I should call moving in the immediate surrounding of our initial position.
 
But isn't there also a peculiar feeling of pastness characteristic of images as memory images? There certainly are experiences which I should be inclined to call feelings of pastness, although not always when I remember something is one of these feelings present. ‒ ‒ To get clear about the nature of these feelings it is again very || most useful to remember that there are gestures of pastness and inflexions of pastness which we can regard as representing the experiences of pastness. (Aristotle).
 
I will examine one particular case, that of a feeling which I shall roughly describe by saying it is the feeling of “long, long ago.” These words and the tone in which they are said are a gesture of pastness. But I will specify the experiences which I mean still further by saying that it is that corresponding to a certain tune (Davidsbündlertänze – – “Wie aus weiter Ferne”). I'm imagining this tune played with the right
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,166}} expression and thus recorded, say, for a gramophone. Then this is the most elaborate and exact expression of a feeling of pastness || exact gesture of pastness which I can imagine.
 
Now should I say that hearing this tune played with this expression is in itself that particular experience of pastness, or should I say that hearing the tune causes the feeling of pastness to arise and that this feeling accompanies the tune? I.e., can I separate what I call this experience of pastness from the experience of hearing the tune? Or, can I separate an experience of pastness expressed by a gesture from the experience of making this gesture? Can I discover something, the essential feeling of pastness, which remains after abstracting all those experiences which we might call the experiences of expressing the feeling?
 
I am inclined to suggest to you to put the expression of our experience instead of the experience. “But these two aren't the same.” This is certainly true, at least in the sense in which it is true to say that a railway train and a railway accident aren't the same thing. And yet there is a justification for talking as though the expression, “the gesture ‘long, long ago’” and the expression, “the feeling ‘long, long ago’” had the same meaning. Thus I could give the rules of chess in the following way: I have a chess board before me with a set of chess men on it. I give rules for moving these particular chess men (these particular pieces of wood) on this particular board. Can these rules be the rules of the game of chess? They can be converted into them by the usage of a single
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,167}} operator, such as the word “any”. Or, the rules for my particular set may stand as they are and be made into rules of the game of chess by changing our standpoint towards them.
 
There is the idea that the feeling, say, of pastness, is an amorphous something in a place, the mind, and that this something is the cause or effect of what we call the expression of feeling. The expression of feeling then is an indirect way of transmitting the feeling. And people have often talked of a direct transmission of feeling which would obviate the external medium of communication.
 
Imagine that I tell you to mix a certain colour and I describe the colour by saying that it is that which you get if you let sulphuric acid react on copper. This might be called an indirect way of communicating the colour I meant. It is conceivable that the reaction of sulphuric acid on copper under certain circumstances does not produce the colour I wished you to mix, and that on seeing the colour you had got I should have to say, “No, it's not this”, and to give you a sample.
 
Now can we say that the communication of feelings by gestures is in this sense indirect? Does it make sense to talk of a direct communication as opposed to that indirect one? Does it make sense to say, “I can't feel his toothache, but if I could I'd know what he feels like”?
 
If I speak of communicating a feeling to someone else, mustn't I in order to understand what I say know what I shall call the criterion of having succeeded in communicating?
 
We are inclined to say that when we communicate a feeling
 
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,168}} to someone, something which we can never know happens at the other end. All that we can receive from him is again an expression. This is closely analogous to saying that we can never know when in Fitzeau's experiment the ray of light reaches the mirror.
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