Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein
118. Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.
119. The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.
125. […] The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules.
129. The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.—And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
132. […] The confusions which occupy us (ed. in this investigation) arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.
194. […] We mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these things; we do not understand them, however, but misinterpret them. When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.
198. […] any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.
203. Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.
208. […] We should distinguish between the “and so on” which is, and the “and so on” which is not, an abbreviated notation. “And so on ad inf.” is not such an abbreviation. The fact that we cannot write down all the digits of π is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.
210. “But do you really explain to the other person what you yourself understand? Don’t you get him to guess the essential thing? You give him examples,—but he has to guess their drift, to guess your intention.”
217. “How am I able to obey a rule?”—if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.
If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”
(Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the definition a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.)
244. […] the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it.
254. The substitution of “identical” for “the same” (for instance) is another typical expedient in philosophy. As if we were talking about shades of meaning and all that were in question were to find words to hit on the correct nuance. That is in question in philosophy only where we have to give a psychologically exact account of the temptation to use a particular kind of expression. What we ’are tempted to say’ in such a case is, of course, not philosophy; but it is its raw material. Thus, for example, what a mathematician is inclined to say about the objectivity and reality of mathematical facts, is not a philosophy of mathematics, but something for philosophical treatment.
255. The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.
258. Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign “S” and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation.——I will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated.—But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition.—How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation—and so, as it were, point to it inwardly.—But what is this ceremony for? for that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign.—Well, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.—But “I impress it on myself” can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about “right”.
265. Let us imagine a table (something like a dictionary) that exists only in our imagination. A dictionary can be used to justify the translation of a word X by a word Y. But are we also to call it a justification if such a table is to be looked up only in the imagination?—“Well, yes; then it is a subjective justification.”—but justification consists in appealing to something independent.—“But surely I can appeal from one memory to another. For example, I don’t know if I have remembered the time of departure of a train right and to check it I call to mind how a page of the time-table looked. Isn’t it the same here?”—No; for this process has got to produce a memory which is actually correct. If the mental image of the time-table could not itself be tested for correctness, how could it confirm the correctness of the first memory? (As if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.)
Looking up a table in the imagination is no more looking up a table than the image of the result of an imagined experiment is the result of an experiment.
272. The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible—though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another.
278. “I know how the colour green looks to me”—surely that makes sense!—Certainly: what use of the proposition are you thinking of?
279. Imagine someone saying: “But I know how tall I am!” and laying his hand on top of his head to prove it.
280. Someone paints a picture in order to shew how he imagines a theatre scene. And now I say: “This picture has a double function: it informs others, as pictures or words inform—but for the one who gives the information it is a representation (or piece of information?) of another kind: for him it is the picture of his image, as it can’t be for anyone else. To him his private impression of the picture means what he has imagined, in a sense in which the picture cannot mean this to others.”—And what right have I to speak in this second case of a representation or piece of information—if these words were rightly used in the first case?
298. The very fact that we should so much like to say: “This is the important thing”—while we point privately to the sensation—is enough to shew how much we are inclined to say something which gives no information.
299. Being unable—when we surrender ourselves to philosophical thought—to help saying such-and-such; being irresistibly inclined to say it—does not mean being forced into an assumption, or having an immediate perception or knowledge of a state of affairs.
304. “And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing”—Not at all. It is not a something., but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here.
The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts—which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please.
308. How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise?—The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them—we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)—And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them.
354. The fluctuation in grammar between criteria and symptoms makes it look as if there were nothing at all but symptoms.
358. But isn’t it our meaning it that gives sense to the sentence? (And here, of course, belongs the fact that one cannot mean a senseless series of words.) And ’meaning it’ is something in the sphere of the mind. But it is also something private! It is the intangible something; only comparable to consciousness itself.
How could this seem ludicrous? It is, as it were, a dream of our language.
362. Rather it seems to us as though in this case the instructor imparted the meaning to the pupil—without telling him it directly; but in the end the pupil is brought to the point of giving himself the correct ostensive definition. And this is where our illusion is.
372. Consider: “The only correlate in language to an intrinsic necessity is an arbitrary rule. It is the only thing which one can milk out of this intrinsic necessity into a proposition.”
401. You have a new conception and interpret it as seeing a new object. You interpret a grammatical movement made by yourself as a quasi-physical phenomenon which you are observing. (Think for example of the question: “Are sense-data the material of which the universe is made?”)
But there is an objection to my saying that you have made a ’grammatical’ movement. What you have primarily discovered is a new way of looking at things. As if you had invented a new way of painting; or, again, a new metre, or a new kind of song.—
417. Do I observe myself, then, and perceive that I am seeing or conscious? And why talk about observation at all? Why not simply say “I perceive I am conscious”?—But what are the words “I perceive” for here?—why not say “I am conscious”?—But don’t the words “I perceive” here shew that I am attending to my consciousness?—which is ordinarily not the case.—If so, then the sentence “I perceive I am conscious” does not say that I am conscious, but that my attention is disposed in such-and-such a way.
428. “This queer thing, thought”—but it does not strike us as queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: “How was that possible?” How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net.
437. A wish seems already to know what will or would satisfy it; a proposition, a thought, what makes it true—even when that thing is not there at all! Whence this determining of what is not yet there? This despotic demand? (“The hardness of the logical must.”)
438. “A plan as such is something unsatisfied.” (Like a wish, an expectation, a suspicion, and so on.)
445. It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact.
449. […]We fail to get away from the idea that using a sentence involves imagining something for every word. […]
455. We want to say: “When we mean something, it’s like going up to someone, it’s not having a dead picture (of any kind).” We go up to the thing we mean.
456. “When one means something, it is oneself meaning”; so one is oneself in motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead. Indeed not.
469. And yet one can say that thinking has been found to pay. That there are fewer boiler explosions than formerly, now that we no longer go by feeling in deciding the thickness of the walls, but make such-and-such calculations instead. Or since each calculation done by one engineer got checked by a second one.
470. So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.
471. It often happens that we only become aware of the important facts, if we suppress the question “why?”; and then in the course of our investigations these facts lead us to an answer.
480. Thus one could in fact take “grounds” for an opinion to mean only what a man had said to himself before he arrived at the opinion. The calculation that he has actually carried out. If it is now asked: But how can previous experience be a ground for assuming that such-and-such will occur later on?—the answer is: What general concept have we of grounds for this kind of assumption? This sort of statement about the past is simply what we call a ground for assuming that this will happen in the future.—And if you are surprised at our playing such a game I refer you to the effect of a past experience (to the fact that a burnt child fears the fire)
481. If anyone said that information about the past could not convince him that something would happen in the future, I should not understand him. One might ask him: What do you expect to be told, then? What sort of information do you call a ground for such a belief? What do you call “conviction”? In what kind of way do you expect to be convinced?—If these are not grounds, then what are grounds?—If you say these are not grounds, then you must surely be able to state what must be the case for us to have the right to say that there are grounds for our assumption.
For note: here grounds are not propositions which logically imply what is believed.
Not that one can say: less is needed for belief than for knowledge.[…]
494. I want to say: It is primarily the apparatus of our ordinary language, of our word-language, that we call language; and then other things by analogy or comparability with this.
504. But if you say: “How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?” then I say: “How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?”
654. Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to look at what happens as a “proto-phenomenon”. That is, where we ought to have said: this language-game is played.