Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein an Austrian-British philosopher (1889-1951), one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, whose two very different philosophies of language shaped analytic philosophy and its conception of meaning. His early Tractatus and his later Philosophical Investigations set the terms of debate for generations.

Life and Education

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 into one of the wealthiest families in Austria. He studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester before turning to philosophy, and he went to Cambridge to work with Bertrand Russell, who soon recognised his genius. He served in the Austrian army during the First World War and was taken prisoner in Italy.

After the war he gave away his inheritance and worked as a village schoolmaster and a gardener, believing that he had solved the problems of philosophy in the Tractatus. He returned to Cambridge in 1929, submitted the Tractatus as his doctoral thesis and eventually succeeded G. E. Moore as professor. He resigned his chair in 1947 to write in seclusion.

He was a man of intense and sometimes difficult character, admired and feared by those around him. He died of cancer in Cambridge in 1951, and his later manuscripts were edited and published after his death, transforming his reputation once again.

The Tractatus and the Picture Theory

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, is a work of extraordinary compression, written in numbered aphorisms. It advances a picture theory of meaning, according to which a proposition is meaningful because it shares a logical form with the possible fact it depicts. Language, on this account, mirrors the structure of the world.

From this theory Wittgenstein drew a sharp limit to what can be said. The propositions of logic are tautologies that say nothing about the world, and ethical, aesthetic and religious utterances lie beyond the boundary of sense. The book ends with the famous instruction that one must pass over such matters in silence.

The work was read by the Vienna Circle as a statement of logical positivism, though Wittgenstein's intentions were different and more mystical. Its demand for logical clarity and its conception of philosophy as the clarification of language left a deep mark on the analytic tradition.

The Later Philosophy and Language Games

In the Philosophical Investigations, written over many years and published in 1953, Wittgenstein abandoned the picture theory and developed a very different view. Meaning, he now held, is to be found in use: to understand a word is to know how it is employed in the activities, or language games, in which it has a role.

He argued that there is no single essence shared by all uses of a word, but rather a network of overlapping similarities that he called family resemblances. The search for a general definition of terms such as game or knowledge is therefore mistaken. Philosophical problems arise, he thought, when language goes on holiday and philosophers mistake grammatical rules for facts about the world.

The task of philosophy, on this view, is not to construct theories but to describe the actual workings of language and thereby to dissolve confusion. His method of assembling reminders and examples, and his insistence that philosophy leaves everything as it is, marked a decisive break with the systematic ambitions of his early work.

Mind, Certainty and Rule-Following

Wittgenstein's later thought contains a celebrated private language argument, which holds that a language intelligible to only one person is impossible because meaning depends on public criteria and on the practices of a community. This argument bears on the philosophy of mind and on the nature of sensations and inner experience.

He also discussed the problem of following a rule, arguing that no interpretation can determine by itself how a rule is to be applied, so that rule-following rests on shared training and custom rather than on mental acts. This line of thought influenced later debates about meaning, normativity and social practice.

In On Certainty, written in his final months, he examined the framework of assumptions that makes doubt possible. Some propositions, he argued, are exempt from doubt not because they are known with certainty but because they belong to the scaffolding of our inquiries and form the background against which questions can be asked.

Influence and Legacy

Wittgenstein's influence on twentieth-century philosophy is difficult to overstate. His early work shaped logical positivism and the pursuit of an ideal logical language, while his later work gave rise to ordinary language philosophy and to a conception of philosophy as therapy. Both phases continue to be studied and disputed in detail.

His ideas spread to linguistics, anthropology, psychology and the theory of culture, and his notion of language games was taken up by many disciplines. His personal example, of a philosopher who renounced wealth and academic comfort in pursuit of clarity, has itself become part of his legend.

He is remembered as a thinker of rare originality who asked again and again what it is to mean something. By turning attention from hidden logical structures to the visible use of words in human life, he changed the way philosophy understands its own task and its own limits.

See also

• Philosophy of language
• Language game
• Logical positivism
• Ordinary language philosophy