Post on 01-Feb-2023
transcript
D. Vender HPA415
1 Introduction
If you have been endeavoring to explain something to me and I suddenlystraighten up and exclaim “I see!” then you have good reason to feel pleasedwith yourself, and perhaps even feel pleased with me. It does not matterthat I did not really see anything at all. You know what I meant, we bothknow what happened, and that is the end of that.
Language is transparent to meaning in this way much of the time that weuse it, and this transparency has allowed most people, including, until quiterecently, many philosophers, to leave concerns about language to the philol-ogists, linguists, translators and poets. This philosophical trust in languagehas been eroded in different ways during the 20th century, and LudwigWittgenstein, both in his early and late philosophy, played a key role inpushing language toward centre stage.
In his Philosophical Investigations1 Wittgenstein dealt with several impor-tant aspects of meaning, language and reality. It has often been remarkedthat his later philosophy, of which the Investigations is the most importantexample, is presented in unusual forms, and that this is bound up with hisviews of what philosophy should be. These views are quite radical. His phi-losophy is largely an examination of language, and my aim is to examinesome of his remarks on natural language. To put these into context, I brieflyreview some facts and common sense ideas about what language is and howit works.
This is followed by a look at some statements from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,2 needed here so that the great development of Wittgenstein’sideas can be understood. The following sections deal with the change fromthe ‘early’ to ‘late’ philosophy and discuss some of the important ideas inthe Investigations, primarily ideas concerned with ‘following rules’.
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2 Words and Meanings
Anna Wierzbicka starts her book The Semantics of Grammar by saying that:
Nothing is as easily overlooked, or as easily forgotten, as themost obvious truths. The tenet that language is a tool for ex-pressing meaning is a case in point. Nobody would deny it—butmany influential schools and trends in modern linguistics haveignored it, and have based their work on entirely different andoften incompatible assumptions.3
This is not the place to examine these ‘influential schools and trends’. Shegoes on to state more ‘obvious truths’ in her Introduction:
Language is an integrated system, where everything ‘con-spires’ to convey meaning—words, grammatical constructions,and illocutionary devices (including intonation). [. . . ] A Mor-risian division of the study of signs into semantics, syntax andpragmatics may make good sense with respect to some artificialsign systems but it makes no sense with respect to natural lan-guage [. . . ].
In natural language, meaning cannot be defined in terms ofa relationship between linguistic units and elements of extra-linguistic reality. Attempts to develop semantic theories basedon ‘truth conditions’, ‘denotational conditions’ and the like havenot been fruitful in terms of actual descriptions of languages. [. . . ]In natural language meaning consists in human interpretation ofthe world. It is subjective, it is anthropocentric, it reflects pre-dominant cultural concerns and culture-specific modes of socialinteraction as much as any objective features of the world ‘assuch’. [. . . ]
Even concrete concepts such as ‘mouse’, ‘rat’ or ‘worm’ areculture-specific and determined in their content by the speaker’sinterests and attitudes as much as by any objective ‘discontinu-ities in the world’. “Men make sorts of things”, as Locke [. . . ]put it a long time ago.4
These are strong views, clearly stated, and I quote them extensively becauseWierzbicka’s approach to language is strongly empirical and based on a range
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of different languages. The distinction between ‘natural language’ and ‘arti-ficial sign systems’ is a crucial one, but it is clear that natural language isalso a ‘sign system’, or to put it more traditionally, a symbolism.
Alfred North Whitehead treated symbolism in his 1927 Barbour-Page Lec-tures and the resulting little book Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect is amodel of clarity and brevity. This is how Whitehead brings up language:
[There are] types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yetsuch that we could not get on without them. Language, writtenor spoken, is such a symbolism. The mere sound of a word, orits shape on paper, is indifferent. The word is a symbol, and itsmeaning is constituted by the ideas, images, and emotions, whichit raises in the mind of the hearer.
There is also another sort of language, purely a written lan-guage, which is constituted by the mathematical symbols of thescience of algebra. In some ways, these symbols are different tothose of ordinary language, because the manipulation of the al-gebraic symbols does your reasoning for you, provided that youkeep to the algebraic rules. This is not the case with ordinarylanguage. You can never forget the meaning of language, andtrust to mere syntax to help you out.5
Whitehead, who is mainly concerned with deep questions about perception,calls natural language ‘in a sense artificial’, but I prefer to keep ‘artificial’for artificial sign systems such as algebra, computer languages, and the like.Another useful word is ‘abstract’, since deliberate abstraction is involved indevising them. What is important here is Whitehead’s clear distinction be-tween manipulating symbols in natural languages and in abstract systemssuch as mathematics. This distinction is closely related to Wierzbicka’snatural-artificial distinction.
It is widely held, indeed the ‘commonsense view’, that ‘in the use of languagethere is a double symbolic reference:—from things to words on the part ofthe speaker, and from words back to things on the part of the listener’,6
and what is understood by the listener is not always (or even often) thesame as the speaker’s meaning. The two differ for myriad reasons, but bothnecessarily involve an active mind and some kind of intention on the speaker’spart and attention on the hearer’s part. Paying attention mainly to these‘active minds’ which are absolutely separate and then thinking of ‘meaning’as a kind of ‘stuff’ which flows—encoded in symbols and often unreliably—between them is, also, in some respects a problematic picture.
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Attempts to clarify the nature of meaning and the workings of language byavoiding obscurities connected with ‘minds’ and ‘meaning’ have not beenlimited by commonsense views. One strategy is to deny that language is atool and to look somewhere else:
If language were a tool, then language, too, would deteriorate andwear out.. . . But language is not a commodity, nor is it a tool oran instrument, it is not an object at all; it is nothing other thanits use. Language is language use. Hence it comes as no surprisethat use increases with use.7
Fritz Mauthner, a journalist and critic, also challenged commonsense viewsby insisting that language was in some way inescapably metaphoric. He saidthat:
Philosophy is theory of knowledge. Theory of knowledge is cri-tique of language [Sprachkritik]. Critique of language, however,is labor on behalf of the liberating thought, that men can neversucceed in getting beyond a metaphorical description [bildlicheDarstellung] of the world utilizing either everyday language orphilosophical language.8
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulman describe Mauthner as a ‘rigorous Nom-inalist [. . . ] skeptical about our capacity to know the world’ and say that‘Mauthner [. . . ] went one better [than the Nominalists] in asserting [. . . ]that names are at best metaphors for what the senses perceive.’9
Mauthner is not alone in giving metaphors a great significance in the workingsof language. In fact, judging by some of the material on metaphor,10 manypeople who discover the importance of metaphor in natural language areseized by an enthusiasm for showing that metaphors are everywhere. I don’twish to argue for this viewpoint. For my present purpose it is enough tostress how important it is to be aware of metaphors which the speakers arenot themselves aware of. Indeed, the distinction between metaphoric andliteral usage is problematic, and it appears that literal meanings are in factdead metaphors.11 In particular, all words relating to abstract concepts, andall words used to describe the inner world of the mind—with its conceptual,emotional, volitional, ethical, aesthetic and religious concerns—were oncemetaphors taken ultimately from the physical world.12 As the usage becameconventional, the metaphoric origin of these words was largely forgotten.
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Several points regarding metaphor are relevant:
1. Metaphors are closely related to analogical reasoning.
2. Metaphors rely on a tension, involving both similarities and dissimilar-ities between the usual meaning and the metaphoric meaning. Confu-sion results from indiscriminately mixing up the two meanings.
3. It is a widely held opinion that metaphors, along with other types offigurative speech, are mere literary ornaments inimical to clarity andprecision. It is also often believed that metaphors can be substitutedby literal paraphrase without loss of meaning. This is not true.
4. There is a modern tendency to avoid metaphors and create new wordsby simply attaching labels to things. The acronyms DNA and LASERare examples. Sometimes the labels are frivolous, as in ‘quark’ fora subatomic particle. These labels are born literal, with no naturalhistory. However, these labels cannot stand alone, and to say anythingabout the objects that they signify we often use metaphors to nametheir properties and relations.13
5. Metaphors do not exist in abstract sign systems such as mathemat-ics,14 symbolic logic, computer languages, etc. When one is devisingan abstract sign system, the symbols are born literals. This can in-clude formal properties and relations in an abstract system. However,when the abstract system is connected to the rest of reality, as in, forexample, an interpretation of a theory, we lose its literalness.
Philosophical discussions involving metaphors have an unsettling tendencyto polarise into the ‘mere metaphor’ camp which paints them as unnecessaryand largely irrelevant, and the ‘everything is metaphor’ camp which tries toabrogate as many things as possible within the label and its various ‘mecha-nisms’. I wish to avoid this debate here, but it is essential to point out thatin pursuing any kind of understanding we typically use similes, metaphorsand analogies. In more developed and elaborate cases we also build models,theories and entire systems. All of these have a strong family resemblance.15
I will generally use the word ‘picture’ in an extended sense to cover wordslike ‘metaphor’ or ‘theory’. ‘Picture’ is useful in several ways. It is notonly a time-honoured metaphor used in connection with human conscious-ness and understanding, it is also reasonably close to Bild, a key word forWittgenstein. And, it is also a word commonly used by scientists (especially
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physicists) as a shorthand for ‘theory’ or ‘model’—particularly when theyspeak of an interpretation of a theory or its underlying basis.
Although we have barely begun to scratch the surface of language, it is timeto move on and consider the Tractatus.
3 Physics, Logic and Language
When Galileo declared that the universe is a vast book ‘written in math-ematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geomet-rical figures’,16 he stated a fine piece of effective propaganda for a certainkind of research programme. Putting physics on a quantitative basis andexplicitly using a correspondence theory of truth to compare experimentalmeasurements to theoretical calculations is a powerful strategy. Part of theenormous attraction of mathematics lies in the (in principle limitless) quan-titative precision, and part lies in the methodological rigour which can beapplied in moving from one proposition to another. A physical theory isnot mathematics,17 but it can take advantage of both of these strengths of amathematical treatment.
Wittgenstein was attracted to mathematical ideas—he wished to study un-der Boltzmann18—and he was deeply influenced by the preoccupation withlanguage in German physics.19 One of his ambitions seems to have beennothing less than to put philosophy on a firm logical foundation. Pursuingthis project, in analogy with mathematically based science, should lend phi-losophy the certainty and rigor of symbolic logic, and help everyone avoid agreat deal of confusion and nonsense.
He felt he achieved his goal with the publication of the Tractatus. Whatis remarkable about this work is the fact that the picture of language as-sumed and elaborated in it bears little resemblance to natural languages assketched above. Wittgenstein started with physical theory and symbolic logic(abstract models of reality and formal systems, or ‘artificial sign systems’ asnoted above) and applied them to language and meaning. This attemptseems to have been motivated by a desire to show what an ideal language—alanguage free of confusion and obscurity—would be like, and how it couldrefer to reality.
In TLP 4.0031 he says that ‘All philosophy is “Critique of Language” (butnot at all in Mauthner’s sense)’ and the Tractatus can certainly be seen
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in part as a reaction to Mauthner’s views. Its main thrust is to present amodel (in the sense of Hertz’s Bild or Darstellung20) of language as a systemrepresentational of reality. It is concerned with analysing propositions anddetermining their truth value, truth value in an explicit correspondence be-tween a proposition and a given ‘state of affairs’ or ‘atomic fact’. Metaphorsapparently play no role: the vagueness of poetry is banished; clarity andprecision rule.
In his introduction to the Tractatus, Bertrand Russell goes to some lengthsto try and explain what Wittgenstein was attempting. In connection withlanguage, he makes these extraordinary remarks:
The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Giventhe syntax of language, the meaning of a sentence is determinateas soon as the meaning of the component words is known.21
The reason I find these remarks ‘extraordinary’ is that they are so deeplymisleading. There is, of course, a bit of truth in both statements,22 so theycannot simply be dismissed as wrong. But as a basis for a study of reallanguage they are worse than useless. In particular, we should contrast thesecond assertion to this: the words in a sentence or utterance do not havedeterminate meanings until we know their context. Without some knowledgeof the situation in which words are used, without additional clues to thespeaker’s meaning, words are ambiguous and largely meaningless, and thisis as true of written as it is of spoken language. Only the whole utterancein its context can (and yet still rarely does) provide enough information tounderstand what is meant.23
This view is also one-sided, but, I think, a better stab at the way thatlanguage works than Russell’s ‘building block’ model of language. On thebasis of that view, one might be tempted to assert that longer sentencescontain more meaning, and similar such absurdities. The point here is thatthe ideal language of the Tractatus is consistent with this misleading andone-sided picture of language. The main task that Wittgenstein set himselfwas to show that many philosophical problems and questions are, in essence,confusion resulting from a misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Heproposed a programme of analyzing and testing propositions against facts,but left us without instructions on how we should formulate or recognizeclear propositions.24 The reason for this lacuna is that useful descriptionsof ‘states of affairs’ or ‘atomic facts’ are couched in ordinary language anddeal with real situations. If we wish to restrict ourselves to yes/no questions,
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testing abstract propositions within our artificial sign system, we need toreduce reality to a set of abstractions for comparison.25
Now the Tractatus itself could not be written in the kind of language whichit models and advertises as an ideal and, unfortunately, it is easily misinter-preted as saying much more than it does. The restrictions explored in theTractatus apply strictly only to the ideal language discussed in it, and it isnot at all clear that they should be respected by real languages.
Let us take a closer look at two of the most interesting statements in it. Theyare: TLP 4.116 ‘Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly.Everything that can be said can be said clearly.’ and TLP 7 ‘Whereof onecannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ The statements are importantenough to be offered as a summary of the whole work in the Preface: ‘Itswhole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be saidat all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must besilent.’26 What are we to make of this?
Taking the first part, we see that, certainly, the propositions which are re-quired for the ideal language in the Tractatus need to be clear. How elsecould one decide whether they are true or false? But how good is this as acomment on real language? Usually, what can be said clearly is trivial.27 Ifwe need to say something profound, there is no choice except to appeal to ourhearer’s powers of comprehension. Analysing real statements until we obtainsimple propositions—as useful as it is in abstract models and systems—canjust run in the wrong direction in real life. The second part, about remainingsilent, appears even more dramatic in the Preface where it functions in aneither/or pair. Are we really expected to refrain from speaking in ordinary,unclear language? Wittgenstein himself respected this rule by breaking itegregiously. He famously did not reject discourse on aesthetics, religion andmorality as valueless. When he met with the philosophers of the Vienna Cir-cle, he decided to read them poems by Tagore, a mystical Indian poet.28 Healso read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, becoming ‘friendly and animated’ whenthis kind of literature was discussed.29
In making a distinction between what can be said and what can merely bepointed to, it is tempting to erect a wall between them. But if there is awall, it is crumbling and frequently breached. We need only remember thatwords are pointers. To say something ‘unsayable’, we create analogies andmetaphors, or simply show pictures to illustrate the point. So, for example,to ‘show’ feelings and desires, we point to behaviour. To ‘expect’ is originallya metaphor using ‘ex’+‘spectare’, i.e. look out, used to illustrate the hope
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and anticipation that is expectation.
Painting a picture of a language which cannot grow and flourish by this evernew sketching of pictures and analogies makes the wall solid, but speaking inordinary language releases us from any absolute distinction between pointingand saying. Making metaphors is ‘pointing’; using dead metaphors (with theoriginal picture forgotten) is ‘saying’. If we need to breach the wall ordinarylanguage is already the ideal language. While this does not (by definition!)empty the category of the ‘unsayable’, it abolishes it as a region inherentlyinaccessible to language.
4 A New Philosophy
There is a marked change between the Tractatus and the Philosophical In-vestigations and this change is not merely stylistic, nor just methodological.During the time that Wittgenstein lectured at Cambridge in the 1930’s and1940’s, and dealt with criticisms and misunderstandings of his philosophy, healso changed his way of looking at language and meaning, as well as the tasksof philosophy. These views are in some ways far removed from the austereand restrictive world of the Tractatus. The concern with building a formaltheory of language has been abandoned and replaced by an elaboration of acollection of suggestive pictures showing different aspects of real language.
The new philosophy is in some ways startling:
PI §109. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of ourintelligence by means of language.
PI §119. The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one oranother piece of plain nonsense and bumps that the understand-ing has got by running its head against the limits of language.
PI §124. Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual useof language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot giveit any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.
PI §126. Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and nei-ther explains nor deduces anything.
The radical change from the Tractatus consists of turning one’s back on thedisassembly of propositions into their logical forms and engaging instead with
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real uses of words. It is rather well put as ‘Back to the rough ground!’ inPI §107.30 It is still “Sprachkritik”, even if still not ‘in Mauthner’s sense’.31
‘Philosophy shows the misleading analogies in the use of language’, and ‘IfI correct a philosophical mistake [. . . ] I must always point to an analogyaccording to which one had been thinking, but which one did not recognizeas an analogy.’32 Theory is gone, displaced by pictures and analogies. Amongthe pictures offered are family resemblance, language-game, meaning as use,rule following. It is the last two that we now examine.
5 Playing by the Rules
In the Investigations, Wittgenstein is still concerned with the limits of lan-guage, and seeks to separate philosophical sense from nonsense,33 but theInvestigations purport to treat and use real language: ‘When I talk aboutlanguage (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day.’(PI §120.) They offer pictures of language as rule governed games:
PI §130. Our clear and simple language-games are not prepara-tory studies for a future regimentation of language[. . . ] Thelanguage-games are rather set up as objects of comparison whichare meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way notonly of similarities, but also of dissimilarities.34
In a brilliant move which shifts attention away from symbolism, minds andmeaning, Wittgenstein recommends simply considering language use:
PI §43. For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which weemploy the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaningof a word is its use in the language.And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointingto its bearer.
PI §139. When someone says the word “cube” to me, for exam-ple, I know what it means. But can the whole use of the wordcome before my mind, when I understand it in this way?Well, but on the other hand isn’t the meaning of the word also de-termined by this use? And can these ways of determining mean-ing conflict? Can what we grasp in a flash accord with a use, fit
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or fail to fit it? And how can what is present to us in an instant,what comes before our mind in an instant, fit a use?
And, from the Philosophical Grammar:
Do I understand the word ‘perhaps’?–And how do I judge whetherI do? Well, something like this: I know how it’s used, I can ex-plain its use to somebody, say in describing it in made-up cases.I can describe the occasions of its use, its position in sentences,the intonation it has in speech.—Of course this only means that‘I understand the word “perhaps”’ comes to the same as: ‘I knowhow it is used etc.’; not that I try to call to mind its entire appli-cation in order to answer the question whether I understand theword.35
So many questions! Are we asked to engage in detailed investigations ofhow words fit or fail to fit a use? Instead of beginning an examination ofsynonymy, irony, humour, figuration and a host of other uses, would it bebetter to start with how meaning is also determined by use? Is there a twoway process in which use determines meaning and meaning determines use?Is the result of this entirely self-consistent—a ‘perfect’ fit—like the wavesand ripples on a watery surface (determined by both the movement of the airand the movement of the water, leaving no gaps)?
These questions—and building any theory on their back—are largely dis-tractions from the kernel of the problem pointed to in the Investigations.Wittgenstein’s method of ‘calmly noting linguistic facts’ is not empirical lin-guistics or philology. Games, which are social activities governed by rules,and the actual use of words, which is open for everyone to see, are broughttogether in order to straighten the path to an understanding of the logic ofour ordinary, everyday language. It is in the rules or grammar of languagethat we should clearly see the ‘misleading analogies’ which give birth to andnourish insoluble philosophical problems.
Wittgenstein’s concern with rules and grammar is already prominent in theTractatus. As Baker and Hacker explain:
[. . . ] the concept of a rule of language [had] a most importantrole in the Tractatus. Any possible language is governed by acomplex system of rules of logical syntax. These rules determinethe combinatorial possibilities of symbols.36
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Furthermore:
[. . . ] in so far as a person has mastered a language, he mustbe presumed to have tacit or implicit knowledge of the rules oflogical syntax (as it were, the essential grammar of any possiblelanguage). Of course, he will not be able to formulate them ex-plicitly, but he must follow these rules all the time, for they markout boundary lines between sense and nonsense.37
Even more startling is the Tractatus itself: (TLP 4.002) ‘Man possesses thecapacity of constructing languages, in which every sense can be expressed,without having an idea how and what each word means.’ As Baker andHacker put it: ‘understanding of natural languages is held to turn on enor-mously complicated tacit conventions which make it possible for speakers toexpress every sense ‘without having any idea how each word has meaning orwhat its meaning is’.’38
This flies in the face of the common sense notion which Whitehead putsuccinctly by reminding us to ‘never forget the meaning of language, andtrust to mere syntax to help you out.’ What hidden rules should I—indeedcould I—consult in order to use the word ‘cat’ correctly? Would it make anysense to consult anything, apart from my personal knowledge of cats? Butthen if the hypothetical rules (‘enormously complicated’ and ‘hidden fromview’) are chimerical, how is it that language is demonstrably regular?
In abandoning the abstractions of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein abandoned thesearch for hidden rules: ‘what is hidden [. . . ] is of no interest to us’ (PI §126).Rules remained fundamental, but their character changed entirely. The rulesof language became the rules of the language-game. There is no more mysteryin the rules of grammar than in the rules of chess.
This does not mean that in the later philosophy Wittgenstein confined himselfto ordinary usage of words like ‘rule’ and ‘grammar’. Baker and Hacker saythat ‘Wittgenstein incorporated into the category of rules of grammar a wholehost of items which hardly anyone hitherto had ever conceived of as rules,let alone as rules of grammar.’39 We now briefly examine three aspects ofthe rules. Firstly, we consider what a ‘rule’ is.
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5.1 Are Wittgenstein’s rules restrictive or prescrip-tive?
In normal English40 usage, there is a deep ambiguity in ‘rule’. Rules are nor-mally restrictive, but they can also be prescriptive. In many important cases,including games, government, styles of life, and a whole host of regulated ac-tivities, the general character of rules is restrictive rather than prescriptive.41
Tight prescriptions deny or eliminate individual freedom, creativity, enjoy-ment, in short, that which for most makes life worth living. Rules are seen asnecessary and desirable in so far as they create a framework for ‘higher’ aims.The typical example is a ‘monastic rule’. It is tightly prescriptive, but it isnot devised to tell uncertain young people what to do between lunch and sup-per; it is set up to provide an opportunity to get closer to God—somethingwhich may or may not happen as a matter of divine grace. Similarly, onlydisgruntled employees ‘work to rule’ and no employer would encourage it.
Rules of games are simple so that they are easily remembered. Learning agame is ‘learning the rules’ but the game becomes fun only after we have‘forgotten the rules’ in the sense that we no longer need to try to consciouslyapply them or to consult the rule book when in doubt about our next move.Now if we sit down to a game and discover that it is predictable (i.e. playingby the rules and using simple strategies will produce a certain outcome), wetire of it. There are such games, tic-tac-toe, for example. Clearly, good rulesdo not determine outcomes or even the course of play. Games of chance areso popular because the indeterminacy of outcomes is even, to some extent,guaranteed.
These observations are more general. The rules of the road do not specifyour destination or which way we choose to go. The rule of law enables us togo about our business protected from some types of arbitrary threat. Therecertainly are senses of ‘rule’ which emphasize prescriptions. Governmentsrule and despots rule and they are certainly capable of putting the stress on‘do this now!’, but then it is interesting how often these rules are irregularor arbitrary. Despots can make it up as they go along and no rule has to befollowed twice. Governments hopefully try to keep away from these arbitraryrules, preferring to codify everything into laws and improvising rules (suchas temporary measures) only when it is unavoidable.
The surface grammar of ‘stop at a red light!’ might of course confuse someoneinto thinking that they are being told what to do42 and people who don’t likeany restrictions on their freedom of action typically say ‘don’t tell me what
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to do!’, but someone so easily confused by the surface grammar might alsothink that we’re telling them what to do when we say ‘do what you want!’
Let us look at how Wittgenstein used ‘rules of grammar’. The entire char-acter of ‘rules’ is expressed in the phrase ‘following rules’ [Regeln folgen],also translated as ‘obeying rules’. These rules are prescriptive—they guideus and tell us what to do. Baker and Hacker, who noted that Wittgenstein‘incorporated [. . . ] a whole host of items’ into rules (see page 12 above),‘speak of following a rule, conforming, acting in accord, or complying withit, and of obeying it’.43 Not, however, of typical usage which emphasizes theidea that rules don’t guide our actions in any useful sense, merely restrictforms of action. This is expressed by ‘respect the rules’, ‘abide by the rules’or ‘play by the rules’.
These quibbles may not yet seem significant, but they are worth illustrating.When asked ‘is chess an easy game to play?’ it would be disingenuous toreply with the true statement ‘the rules are trivial and very easy to learn’.Also, it would seem difficult to judge whether a card game will prove amusingby merely reading through the rules. We have to play it first, and the levelof enjoyment depends on who else is playing with us.
There are a number of issues here. The first is that this is little more thansaying that even if a move can be justified by or compared to a rule, exhibitingthat does not seem to be enough.44 When asked, players may or may not beable to justify their actions by an appeal to what can intelligibly be called a‘rule’. And players of language games do not point to rules of grammar whentold that someone does not understand what was said or when asked ‘whydid you say that?’ They point to intentions and meanings. Also, typically,when asked ‘what do you mean?’ we simply rephrase the utterance, usingsynonyms, offering more detailed pictures or analogies, talking ‘around’ whatwas meant, and these activities are orthogonal to any talk of rules.
It is easy enough to give an account of rule following in trivial cases. Forexample, ‘Why did you say “he goed yesterday”?’ can easily be met with‘Because I didn’t realize that to go is an irregular verb’. Also, demandingto know why someone said ‘That cat has three legs!’ is often explained by‘Go see for yourself. It really is missing a leg.’ Here the difficulty we arefaced with is how to extend rule following to enable it to become ‘fundamen-tal precisely because the rules of grammar are the measure of all things.’45
This ‘fundamentalism’ engenders a temptation to entirely cover an activ-ity by rules, rather than being content with rules that embody restrictions,restrictions which we rarely bother with because all the real action of the
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language-game is elsewhere.
In the context of a game like chess, one speaks of rules but also of strategies,styles of play, heuristics, tactics, goals and aims. All of these are to someextent regular. In wider contexts, regularities are also covered by practice,recipes, habits, algorithms, heuristics, and, when understanding fails, statis-tics. Can grammatical rules cover all regularity in language, and, explicitly,all language use?
5.2 Can rules be mechanised?
The questions just posed are neither idle nor entirely beside the point withregard to Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Wes Sharrock and Graham Buttondiscuss the ‘impulse to theorise’ in the context of sociology and point outthat:
Wittgenstein’s recommendation [is] that we resist the demandfor theory. The possibility that we first seek to see whether,with some considered reflection on the obvious facts to hand,the impression that there is a problem requiring a theoreticalsolution can be dispelled is not one which has been tried andfound wanting, but one which is rarely tried at all.46
They also say that:
Wittgenstein’s way of thinking is [rarely] taken seriously, [and hisopposition to theory is not] treated as anything other than anoptional extra, readily detachable from the rest of his thought.Wittgenstein doubts whether the demand for theory, as we en-counter it in the social sciences, originates in a genuine need forit, and treats the craving for generality as arising from a mis-placed response to a real need for clarification of the workings ofrelevant bits of language.47
Despite this, it is beside the point that talk of covering language by rulesmay be a misapplication of Wittgenstein’s methods, that rules are—mostimportantly—normative, and that one should not try to generalise, or toconjure causal mechanisms or algorithms or theories out of rule following.Regularity invites science and science needs a theoretical framework to work
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within. While Sharrock and Button’s comments can be accepted in thecontext of sociology, in considering various pictures of language we are notjust doing philosophy, we are also necessarily dealing with foundational issuesof linguistics. How could Wittgenstein’s pictures of language be consideredirrelevant to linguistics if they are—in any sense at all—pictures of language?So, is there any reason why ‘following rules’ will not do as a basis for theory?
My ‘misapplication’ of the language-game metaphor can be pushed a littlefurther. Ignoring ‘problem[s] requiring a theoretical solution’, we can go di-rectly to real problems. Science may start with theoretical means but growsthrough practical ends. In fact, it often also starts with practical problemsand only then builds theoretical means. Either way, it is only through prac-tical applications that one can really judge the merits and limitations of aparticular theory or picture. That seems to be the best place to examine‘similarities and differences’ in detail.
One practical approach to regularities in language, adopted, for example, inmaking the internet more usable, is to simply go ahead and insert metalin-guistic grammatical tags into natural language.48 This is done by peopleand it has severe limitations. Asking the computer for help is an even biggerproblem. One recent attempt49 illustrates quite clearly that paying attentionto use when looking for meaning reduces the computer to an elaborate code-breaker, a deciphering machine. The contrast between this and real languageusers could not be more stark.
In contrast to language, games are relatively easy to cover by prescriptiverules. Chess, for example, can be reduced to algorithms quite well enoughso that a cheap computer can defeat most humans. Of course, computersdon’t play chess the way humans do (‘because carbon and silicon playershave different strengths and weaknesses, the proper exploitation of whichhas not been fully worked out’50) and it is also worth remembering howmuch the ‘silicon player’ owes to the ‘carbon programmer’, but this is besidethe point. The real point is that prescriptive rules can be used to confercompetence. If the rules that humans follow are indeed ‘open to view’, thereis no reason why they cannot be encoded into the machine, enabling it tomove the pieces by conforming to the rules. From a practical point of viewit is then quite irrelevant to maintain that ‘a chess computer follows no rule’because its behaviour ‘merely conforms with the rule’.51 What mysterious‘inner process’ of checking against normative rules—additional to the actualmoves—is required to win?
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Making rules the heart of the language-game leads to the temptation toconsider language as an autonomous collection of habits and recipes. Itmay well be that this temptation should be resisted—since Wittgenstein’sgoals are philosophical and he did not attempt to provide new foundationsfor linguistics—but it is not easy to see why this picture, like any other,should not be exploited for practical ends. That is, after all, how the crucialsimilarities and differences between picture and practice come to light.
‘Rule following’ has been successful as the basis of game playing machines.It cannot be maintained that the same approach has failed for language, forit has not even been tried. Without separating semantics from syntax, andgrounding semantics by reference to some ‘real world’, one does not evenknow where to begin.
5.3 Is usage dogmatic?
It is still left for us to consider examples of what Wittgenstein’s normativerules can do in philosophical practice. Appeals to usage are provided indiscussions of ‘having’ and ‘knowing’ in the context of private sensations. InPI §398 he says that ‘this too is clear: if as a matter of logic you excludeother people’s having something, it loses its sense to say that you have it.’
This, to me, is neither clear nor compelling. There are several senses in whichit is fine to say ‘you can have my dinner’, but there is also a perfectly validsense in saying ‘you can’t have my dinner, not even in principle’. The mentionof logic can mislead us into thinking that we can appeal to an authorityexternal to the actual use of the verb ‘to have’. But what logic there is mustbe agreed to by the players of the language-game, or, in the commonsenseview, the relevant matters of fact and intention, and this applies not only tologic but to arithmetic or any other seemingly external standard. It does notmatter how hard I insist that 1+1 = 2, how carefully I show that it works forpebbles and people, it still won’t work for raindrops. For raindrops we oftenneed to write 1 + 1 = 1. Even 3 × 1 = 1 is fine! And, for some statementp, the negation of p doesn’t at all imply p except in very specialized formalsystems. Do these systems, reminiscent of the Tractatus, have some generalimplication for language use?
A related set of problems arises with knowing:
PI §246. In what sense are my sensations private?—Well, only Ican know whether I am really in pain; another person can only
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surmise it.—In one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense.If we are using the word “to know” as it is normally used (andhow else are we to use it?), then other people very often knowthat I am in pain.
There is no need to dispute that other people can know of my pains, but,in English at least,54 there certainly is a normal usage which preserves theabsolute privacy of sensations. I know in the sense that ‘I am familiar with’—as in ‘I know John’—is commonplace, and this usage makes it reasonable toassert that ‘I know’ even in situations where there cannot possibly be anydoubt.
While others may know of my pain, and suffer in sympathy, only I suffer mypain. This is what makes it impossible to ‘doubt whether I am in pain’. I amacquainted with, i.e. I know my pain in quite a different way from the way Iknow of your pain—it’s a different sense of the verb ‘to know’. As a resultthere is no sensible way to maintain that we could mistake others’ pains forour own. Examining usage of words such as ‘having’ and ‘knowing’ may ormay not help here, and it seems to me that confusion arises from the factthat it is not normal usage of words that is under investigation. The realcrux of these considerations is an attempt to dissolve problems related to the‘inner’ and the ‘outer’. It is not the grammar of ‘to have’ or ‘to know’ thatis at issue, but the semantics and use of ‘I’ and ‘you’, ‘mine’ and ‘yours’.
The use of ‘I’ suggests an unbridgeable gulf which Wittgenstein battlesagainst. His ‘battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence’ is a bat-tle with the apparently absolute separation of the self from the world. Hestrips the self of content, removes the privacy of its ‘inner’ world, and leavesit empty and unreachable, like some ghostly Kantian thing-in-itself.55 Thisis the larger picture in the Investigations, in which he seeks to show thatthe absolutely private, which cannot be shared through language even ‘inprinciple’ cannot be described, and can thus be ‘struck out’.56
If we do wish to examine the usage of words for its own sake, we need toconsider meaning shifts arising from context, the role of metaphors, andother figurative usage. Considering even the most common cases shows howdeeply the meaning of words is affected by the context. In saying ‘the catsat on the mat’ we cannot possibly maintain that the verb ‘to sit’ has thesame connotations and implications is it does when we say ‘Jack sat down’.57
Similarly, if there is a ‘logical space’ which delineates the possible use of ‘tohave’ when we use it to say things like ‘I have some keys in my pocket’, it isnot the same logical space that attends ‘to have’ when it is used to say ‘I have
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a pain in my shoulder’.58 It is too easy to forget that in describing anythingin the ‘inner world’ we are using metaphors, dead or alive, and any rule thatseems to force us to use words in a particular way is quickly violated if itfails our purpose.
That is, finally, the most important thing: to see that language does notforce anything upon us. If we are misled by the pictures we paint, or thewords we use, is it not we that have lost our way?
6 Conclusion
We have considered several aspects of Wittgenstein’s picture of language asa social game. One could hardly ask for a greater contrast with the earliereffort, carried through in the Tractatus, to define an ideal language. However,in both his early and late philosophy, Wittgenstein’s concern with languageappears to be a means to an end. He wrote of the Tractatus that it ‘consistsof two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have notwritten. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethicalis delimited from within, as it were.’59 His great task was not to provide amodel of language, it was to point to what cannot be said.
The picture of language elaborated in the Investigations also serves a partic-ular purpose. It is not a picture that offers a clear view of ordinary languageas we use it every day. Its chief merits are that it shifts attention from seem-ingly insoluble philosophical problems associated with minds, intention andmeaning, focusing instead on the social side of language and helping in thedissolution of an absolute division between the self and world.
I have raised three issues connected to Wittgenstein’s picture of languageand the fundamental role of grammatical rules in it. These rules are followedrather than respected, yet they seem remarkably difficult to ‘externalise’ intoan effective recipe collection. Nor do the rules appear to be strong enoughto provide a division between sense and nonsense, a division firm enough notto be broken in an appropriate context. Needless to say, these issues are not‘arguments’ which could possibly be used to reject Wittgenstein’s picture oflanguage: it is a picture, both faithful and misleading, as any picture is.
Many ordinary and philosophical misunderstandings arise from the fact thatlanguage is so thoroughly metaphorical and our ‘inner’ world is describedand shared through pictures borrowed from the ‘outer’ world. But these
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misunderstandings can surely be overcome when we become conscious of ourpictures, when we present and represent our experience in new and differentways, and when we let go of our attachment to whatever pictures exerciseour fascination at the present time.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge helpful and stimulating discussions withMarcelo Stamm, Bruce Wilson and Sandy Vender.
Notes
[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: BlackwellPublishing, 2001). I will refer to this work within the text as PI followedby the section number (for Part I) or page number (for Part II).
[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Rout-ledge & K. Paul, 1981). I use the C. K. Ogden translation and will referto this work within the text as TLP with each proposition numbered asin the original.
[3] Anna Wierzbicka, The Semantics of Grammar (John Benjamins B.V.,1988) p. 1.
[4] Ibid., pp. 1–2.
[5] Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (London:Cambridge University Press, 1928) p. 2.
[6] Ibid., p. 14.
[7] Fritz Mauthner, quoted in Elizabeth Bredeck, Metaphors of Knowledge:Language and Thought in Mauthner’s Critique (Detroit: Wayne StateUniversity Press, 1992), p. 86.
[8] Quoted in Allan Janik and Stephen Toulman, Wittgenstein’s Vienna(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 122.
[9] Ibid., p. 122, emphasis in original. It would be hasty to conclude thatmaintaining that language is inherently metaphorical is the same asskepticism or Nominalism.
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[10] Warren A. Shibles, Metaphor: An Annotated Bibliography and History(Wisconsin: The Language Press, 1971).
[11] A ‘dead metaphor’ is a word whose original metaphoric application hasbeen forgotten and the metaphoric meaning is now the literal or con-ventional meaning. An example is ‘mistake’ which comes from ‘taken inerror’. ‘Error’ comes from ‘err’ which is going in the wrong, or arbitrary,direction—as in erratic movement. As with any investigation of dictio-nary meanings there are of course ample opportunities for circularityand regress (e.g. mistake = taken by mistake) but I don’t wish to specu-late on what may be ‘fundamental human notions’ that may be requiredto get metaphoric usage started at all. The Oxford English Dictionaryis my source of word origins.See also Owen Barfield, ‘The Meaning of the Word ‘Literal”, in L. C.Knights and Basil Cottle (eds.), Metaphor and Symbol (London: But-terworths Scientific Publications, 1960); William P. Alston, Philosophyof Language (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 96–106.
[12] Owen Barfield, op cit., pp. 50–53.
[13] The obvious example is ‘genetic code’ in connection with the action ofDNA and RNA molecules. The implication is that there is informa-tion encoded in genes that we wish to decode. How complicated doesa physico-chemical system have to be before we use ‘information’ and‘code’ in this figurative sense?
[14] This is not strictly true of mathematics, where, for instance, the wordsreal and imaginary are applied metaphorically to numbers. This, how-ever, is inessential and it can be purged by suitable adjustments to thesymbolism.
[15] See, for example, Colin Murray Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), and especiallythe Appendix: Rolf Eberle, Models, Metaphors, and Formal Interpreta-tions, pp. 219–233.
[16] Quoted in Colin Murray Turbayne, op cit., p. 101.
[17] A simple way to illustrate this is to consider the expression a = b× c. Inalgebra there is nothing left to do, except, perhaps, to note that in somecases b × c = c × b. In integer arithmetic we can substitute b = 3 andc = 5 and get a = 15. In real life, we could interpret this as the numberof apples needed to satisfy some friends: how many apples do I need if
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I have 5 friends and want to give each 3 apples? 15 apples, but not 15friends. Now let’s consider a simple expression in physics, say, F = ma.This is like multiplying apples by oranges and getting bananas! Carehas to be taken in interpreting physical theories and models.Newton, among other things, invented a ‘new language’ to describe histheories, and was roundly ridiculed for it by Continental philosophersand scientists. See James Gleick, Isaac Newton, (London: Fourth Estate,2003). Newton did have a tendency to mistake his theories for literaltruth. How this eventually led to the replacement of ‘force’ by otherconcepts is a long and fascinating story, but only marginally relevanthere.
[18] Georg Henrik von Wright, Biographical Sketch in Norman Malcom, Lud-wig Wittgenstein (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 3. Boltz-mann committed suicide and Wittgenstein became an engineer.
[19] Kelly Hamilton, “Darstellungen in The Principles of Mechanics andthe Tractatus: The Representation of Objects in Relation in Hertz andWittgenstein”, Perspectives on Science, 10:28–68 (2002). In physics thewords ‘picture’, ‘model’ and ‘theory’ are synonymous and although thereare systematic differences in usage, they are matters of personal pref-erence. It would seem wrong-headed to try to maintain some essentialdisjunction between ‘picture’ and ‘theory’—they have a family resem-blance.
[20] Allan Janik and Stephen Toulman, op cit., p. 191.
[21] Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’ to Ludwig Wittgenstein, TractatusLogico-Philosophicus, op cit., p. 8.
[22] Using the phrase ‘essential business of language’ is loaded and prejudi-cial. Most humans, most of the time, certainly do not deal with ‘facts’.One might suppose that there is a certain group, some kind of scientificor philosophical elite, who use language mostly in that way, but it isfantasy.
[23] Virtually any statement, no matter how absurd, can make perfect sensein the right context. If I hate dogs but suddenly find myself surroundedby friendly dog lovers waxing lyrical about companionship, it is perfectlylegitimate (and intelligible) if I assert that ‘my cat is my dog’. It isinteresting how often examples of philosophical ‘nonsense’ retain anyforce as nonsense only if we remain within an abstract arena of discourse.Also highly relevant here is a gem of an article on specific brain disorders
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by Oliver Sacks, ‘The President’s Speech’ in The Man Who Mistook hisWife for a Hat (London: Pan Picador, 1986), pp. 76–80.Of course I’m not saying that a sentence isolated on an otherwise blankpage is meaningless because it somehow lacks context. I only reaffirmthat ‘the meaning of a sentence is determined jointly by the meaning ofits words and of its grammatical devices, and any line between the twois bound to be arbitrary’ and that ‘the meaning of a word in isolationis [. . . ] a fiction.’ (Anna Wierzbicka, op cit., p. 8.)
[24] G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar andNecessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 35. ‘Wittgenstein himself wasunable to give a complete analysis of any significant proposition in anylanguage or to instance a single (logically proper) name.’ (Emphasis inoriginal.)
[25] The physical sciences face this difficulty by relying on quantity andmeasurement. That’s why they are often accused of being reductionist;they are.
[26] Wittgenstein, 1981, op cit., p. 27.
[27] The proposition ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly’ is itselfunclear. It seems to be a powerful statement, (starting with ‘everything’in the main text and using ‘at all’ in the Preface), but its power isdestroyed by the second instance of the word ‘can’. What does it meanhere? Is the implication that it is easy? Can anyone say things clearly?Or is it only possible ‘in principle’ (like a colonization of Mars) requiringimpractically large doses of research funding? If that’s the case, ‘cannot’is more honest here than ‘can’ ! Further, the word ‘clear’ is a metaphorfrom visual perception. Something seen may not appear to be clear formany reasons, only one of which is that the object itself is fuzzy orindistinct. If we are to see clearly the distinctness of physical objectsis normally the least of our worries, at least with objects such as cats.Now let’s turn to ‘said clearly.’ If we succeed in saying something clearly,how do we know it is clear? Is it clear if we know what we mean? Orif everyone understands it? Must it be clear to the ‘man in the street’?Can it be maintained that clarity is a property of a statement (in analogyto physical objects which are distinct and can thus be seen clearly underfavorable conditions)? There is of course no demand that this statementin the Tractatus is itself clear. It is a methodological requirement whichcan be subscribed to, not a fact to be verified. It is on a similar level asGalileo’s mathematical language of nature.
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[28] See Allan Janik and Stephen Toulman, op cit., p. 257.
[29] See Norman Malcom, op cit., p. 52.
[30] In PI §107 the rejection of the Tractatian goal is absolute: ‘The morenarrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflictbetween it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was,of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.)’
[31] The valuable study of Mauthner’s ideas by Elizabeth Bredeck (opcit.) details a philosophical method of presenting various pictures andmetaphors of language, all more or less inconsistent, and avoiding the(perhaps futile) effort to build an overarching and self-consistent sys-tem or theory. ‘Mauthner seems to take the stance that because thereis no intelligible basis on which to discuss certain problems, let alonesolve them, he will change the topic. [. . . However,] one position doesnot completely replace another; instead, Mauthner oscillates betweenthem.’ (p. 64)The various pictures are self-consciously introduced as metaphors. Someof the more perspicuous ones are: ‘language is use’ (see page 4 above);‘Gesellschaftsspiel’, i.e. language as a social game which Mauthner en-gages in knowingly by signalling ‘his conscious participation in an on-going discussion or “language game” whose social character at leastin one sense wins out over the individual-oriented notion of language’(p. 25); philosophy as no “more than a critical attentiveness to language”(p. 124); and a ‘ladder’ of language (pp. 74–75) highly reminiscent ofWittgenstein’s comments at the end of the Tractatus.Brian McGuinness in Approaches to Wittgenstein: Collected Papers(London: Routledge, 2002) belittles Menger who ‘indulges in the ratherpointless historical exercise of pointing out that Mauthner too hadthought philosophy a critique of language’ (p. 188) with a resounding‘So what?’ My point here is of course not to cast doubt on Wittgen-stein’s originality or to trace the development of some metaphors (whichin any case don’t ‘belong’ to Mauthner in any useful sense). I simplywish to show the felicitous family resemblance between what are herecalled ‘metaphors’ and elsewhere ‘analogies’ or ‘pictures’ (see also page 5above). Incidentally, Bredeck’s intention is to ‘downplay comparisonsbetween Mauthner and other thinkers, [concentrating] primarily on ar-guments advanced in [Mauthner’s] Kritik itself.’ (Elizabeth Bredeck, opcit., p. 15.)
[32] James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (eds.), Ludwig Wittgenstein,
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Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, (Indianapolis: Hackett PublishingCompany), p. 163.
[33] PI §119.
[34] Emphasis in original.
[35] Quoted in Derek L. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Scientific Knowledge,(London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 51. Much of what Wittgenstein says isintended to point to deep philosophical issues and can hence appear puz-zling. In highlighting ‘use’ here, Wittgenstein does not describe normalbehaviour. In the vast majority of cases, when we want to explain themeaning of a word to someone, what we offer is a synonym, simile ora paraphrase. If asked, I would say ‘perhaps’ is like ‘maybe’, or ‘possi-bly’, and leave it at that. We hardly ever resort to ‘describing it[s use] inmade-up cases’ unless we ourselves don’t quite know what it means, andhence copycat cases heard elsewhere. Who (except a teacher of gram-mar) would regale someone with ‘its position in sentences’ unless theywere explicitly trying to illustrate a point of grammar?
[36] Baker and Hacker, op cit., p. 34. Emphasis in original.
[37] Baker and Hacker, op cit., p. 35. Emphasis in original.
[38] Baker and Hacker, op cit., p. 36. They are using another translationof the Tractatus. The Ogden version is less empathic on the speaker’signorance of word meanings; one could maintain that the point here isthat structured utterances rather than single words play the importantrole (c.f. Note 23).
[39] Baker and Hacker, op cit., p. 57.
[40] I cannot comment on German usage.
[41] There are examples of completely prescriptive rules, especially in math-ematics. No one in their right mind would complain of a lack of freedomwhen using the cosine rule.
[42] The statement can mislead only out of context. It is a restriction in thatit assumes that the driver is already underway somewhere and happensto come to a red light. When reading the rulebook and coming to therule ‘stop at a red light’, would anyone consider getting into their car,finding a red light and stopping there? Also, if a driver resents stoppingat red lights, she can choose an alternative route, catch the train, orwalk.
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[43] Baker and Hacker, op cit., p. 155.
[44] This issue of ‘not enough’ is unrelated to what is discussed by Baker andHacker, op cit., pp. 158–159, where they say that ‘It is only against acertain complex background that acting in accord with a rule counts asfollowing a rule.’ It is interesting that they count intention as necessaryto follow a rule and make a distinction between humans and calculatingmachines.
[45] Baker and Hacker, op cit., p. 181.
[46] Wes Sharrock and Graham Button, “Do the Right Thing! Rule Finitism,Rule Scepticism and Rule Following”, Human Studies 22:193–210 (1999),p. 195.
[47] Ibid., p. 195.
[48] Steven M. Cherry, “Weaving A Web of Ideas”, IEEE Spectrum 39:65–69(September 2002). The basic picture behind these efforts divides lan-guage into semantics, syntax and ontology.
[49] Stephen Cass, “A Fountain of Knowledge”, IEEE Spectrum 41:60–67(January 2004).
[50] Philip E. Ross, “Psyching Out Computer Chess Players”, IEEE Spec-trum 41:12–13 (February 2004).
[51] Baker and Hacker, op cit., p. 45. In building chess computers, we areof course not asking the machine to enjoy the game. It is sufficientthat it makes moves that challenge us. It is in that obvious sense thatall prescriptive rules can be mechanised. The same does not apply torestrictive rules which require something external for the game to evenbegin.
[52] c.f. PI §123.
[53] c.f. PI §124.
[54] The usage does not transfer neatly into German. Kennen and Wissendon’t map neatly onto ‘to know’. I am unable to comment further.
[55] c.f. PI §§304, 308, 398, 410.
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[56] c.f. PI §293. ‘Struck out’ seems more apt than ‘divide through’ for‘gekurzt werden’. Similarly ‘goes away’ or ‘drops out’ seem better than‘cancels out’ for ‘hebt sich weg’. The English translation seems too ‘math-ematical’ here.
[57] It is not stretching the meaning of ‘metaphor’ at all to suggest that‘to sit’ is applied to cats metaphorically, with the usual meaning of ‘tosit’ applying primarily to bipedal mammals. The metaphoric usage isobvious when we say ‘the house sat on the hill’. Anyone who heard thisand then concluded that the house (which is no longer there) simplygot up and walked away would be very confused. For many purposes,saying ‘the house stood on the hill’ makes ‘to stand’ a synonym of ‘tosit’. These simple facts may at first seem too trivial to be relevant tophilosophy, but they reach deep into language.
[58] Part of the semantics of ‘have’ is dealt with in the delightful chapter‘Why can you have a drink when you can’t *have an eat?’ in AnnaWierzbicka, op cit., pp. 293–357. Rules of grammar (i.e. syntax) whichseem so arbitrary and riddled with exceptions are shown to be pre-dictable here.
[59] Quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Lon-don: Jonathan Cape, 1990), p. 178.
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