Philosophical grammar

What it is and how it came about

Philosophical Grammar is a book that Wittgenstein's literary executor assembled, not one Wittgenstein completed. Soon after the Big Typescript was typed, Wittgenstein began rewriting it: in the margins, on the backs of pages and in new manuscript volumes. Rush Rhees combined these revisions with the parts Wittgenstein had left untouched and published the German text in 1969 as Philosophische Grammatik. Anthony Kenny's English translation followed in 1974. According to its current publisher, the material goes back to notebooks of 1930-1932, revised from 1933 onwards.

That history matters. Rhees had to choose between layers of revision, and the book does not always show which choice he made. Kenny himself later wrote an influential essay tracing how the text was put together. Since the full Big Typescript appeared in 2000, readers can compare the two, and many scholars now treat Philosophical Grammar as a valuable but edited witness.

What it says

The book has two parts. Part I, "The proposition and its sense", is about meaning and understanding. Its central move is to stop looking for meaning in something that accompanies a word, a mental image or an act of intending, and to look at the word's role in the language. Wittgenstein's favourite comparison is chess. What makes a piece the king is not its shape or the wood it is carved from, but the rules for moving it. In the same way, the meaning of a word is its place in a system of rules. This is a decisive step towards the idea that meaning is use.

From there come the book's best-known themes. Understanding is not an inner state hidden behind behaviour. Grammar is "autonomous": its rules are not answerable to reality the way factual statements are. Wittgenstein makes the point by contrasting grammar with cookery. Cooking rules are judged by the result, a good meal; the rules of language are not justified by some aim outside language in the same way. The same contrast returns later in Zettel §320. Long sections examine intention, expectation and fulfilment: how can a wish already "contain" what would fulfil it? His answer is that the connection is made in language, not by some mysterious bond between a mind and a future fact.

Part II, "On logic and mathematics", criticises his own Tractatus account of generality and works through number, proof, induction and infinity. It is clearly the work of someone in transition, still thinking of language largely as a calculus with fixed rules, a picture the Investigations would loosen into the more open image of language games.

How to read it

Compared with the Philosophical Remarks, this book reads more continuously, and Part I is approachable for anyone who has read some of the Investigations. Start with the opening sections on understanding and meaning, then the chapters on intention and expectation. Part II is for readers with a background in logic and the philosophy of mathematics.

Use Kenny's translation (Blackwell, now also University of California Press). Keep in mind that the order and selection are partly Rhees's. If a passage matters to your argument, check it against the Big Typescript or the manuscripts at Wittgenstein Source.

Why it matters

For three decades, from 1969 to 2000, this was the main way into Wittgenstein's thought of the early 1930s, so a large part of the secondary literature quotes it. It shows clearly that the core of the later philosophy, meaning as a place in grammar, understanding as an ability, the rejection of hidden mental mechanisms, was in place years before the Investigations. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists it among the key texts of the middle period. What it lacks is the dialogical style and the variety of examples that make the Investigations so alive.

Verdict

Read this if you want a fairly continuous presentation of Wittgenstein's ideas on meaning, understanding and rules, and do not want to work through the variants of the Big Typescript. Do not read it as your first Wittgenstein, and do not treat it as a book he signed off. As a bridge between the middle and later work, Part I is excellent.