Project:About Wittgenstein: Difference between revisions

|content= "Philosophical Investigations" is the title that Wittgenstein, starting from the mid-1930s, began to attribute to a collection of manuscripts, often converted into typescripts, which he submitted many times to extensive and compulsive revisions, in an attempt to shape a second book of philosophy that never saw the light of day during the author's lifetime: it was only in 1953 that Wittgenstein's literary executors posthumously published the text. Although the final version of the first part of the work (which we reproduce on our website... ^{for which reasons? why not the second part? etc.}) was only composed between 1943 and 1945, with some marginal rehashes thereafter, it would be flawed to argue that the ''Investigations'' reflect Wittgenstein's thought limited to the late 1940s. As he writes in the Preface, the ideas contained in the book are “the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years”. Therefore, the ''Philosophical Investigations'' can be considered a synthesis of Wittgenstein's mature thought, following his return to philosophy in 1929. Once again, the result of years of gestation was a complex work, devoid of a hierarchical structure and a definitive status unlike the ''Tractatus logico-philosophicus'', but equally rich and surprising.

In the 693 numbered paragraphs of the first part of the work, which follow slender and rarely explicit logical threads, Wittgenstein addresses many subjects, as summarized in the Preface: “the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition and sentence, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things”, without, however, providing a systematic treatment of them, but rather free remarks or, as the author puts it, “a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of those long and meandering journeys”. This method corresponds to a renewed conception of the nature of the philosophical enterprise, which Wittgenstein presents in paragraphs 109-133: as he had already argued in the ''Tractatus'', the aim is to solve philosophical pseudo-problems by dissolving the confusions that arise in the everyday use of language. However, for the author of the ''Investigations'', this activity of clarification no longer involves a refinement of the linguistic code according to ideal, logical criteria. “Every sentence in our [ordinary] language is in order as it is” (PU 98): these kind of observations convey the idea that the principles that define the meaningfulness of language reside within language itself, and its intelligibility does not derive from compliance with logical rules, but rather from "grammatical" rules, that is, from the overall evaluation of the diverse uses of signs. Consequently, the philosopher's task does not consist in providing explanations about the nature of language, but rather in offering descriptions of language use, thus elucidating the inconspicuous implications of the linguistic activity that are not immediately recognizable.

Throughout the work, therefore, Wittgenstein establishes some cornerstones of his new thought, such as the idea that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PU 43): in order to know the meaning of a sign, one must observe the situations in which that sign is used, evaluate the ways in which its usage is taught, and the customary practices by which that usage is transmitted, preserved, or transformed. Hence, Wittgenstein's constant tendency to put on scenes of instruction or plausible episodes from the lives of less civilised people, to demonstrate that even the most basic form of complex linguistic-conceptual constructions, such as mathematics or abstract reasoning, is not a system of propositions based on logical laws, but a set of elementary practices, whose rules are mastered by the owners of a given language through training.

The inclination to disappoint the rationalist perspectives with a heuristic approach to language and to present several “language games” as “objects of comparison” (PU 130) for examining the meaning of problematic expressions represents both a critique of classical theories of language, built upon the concepts of "representation", "proposition", and "logical atomism" (including those presented in the ''Tractatus logico-philosophicus''), and a renewal of the research method. Language, according to Wittgenstein, plays a role only when it is engaged in specific activities. With language, we do all sorts of things: that is why every language has sense within a specific "form of life", which is the set of contexts and circumstances that contribute to determining meanings, and the famous expression “language-''game''” is precisely intended “to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life” (PU 23).

The themes explored by Wittgenstein are too numerous and disparate to be briefly summarized. He focuses on the ostensive learning of language, challenging the ideas attributed to Augustine; he reflects on the notions of "rule" and "understanding"; he raises questions about animal language; he discusses the relationship between word and thought and the plausibility of a "private language" in a series of famous reasonings that include the example of the "beetle in the box" (from which the logo of our project is derived). But, essentially, in both the first and second parts of the work, Wittgenstein unceasingly applies the principles of his new philosophical method: by presenting several examples, thought experiments, imaginary situations, and comparisons, he examines the “misunderstandings concerning the use of words […] in different regions of our language” (PU 90) and encourages the reader to adopt a more cautious and contextual approach to understanding language, ultimately arguing that what we call “philosophical problems” are merely confusions, which are only dispelled by achieving a “perspicuous vision” of our ordinary language.