Philosophical investigations

Philosophical Investigations is Wittgenstein's second masterpiece and, for many readers, his most important book. It replaces the idea that words get their meaning by naming things with a far more flexible picture: language is a family of activities woven into human life, and the meaning of a word lies in how it is used. Published in 1953, two years after his death, it changed how philosophers think about meaning, mind, rules and philosophy itself.

How it came about

Wittgenstein started the book in 1936, in his hut in Norway, and kept rewriting it for a decade. Scholars distinguish an early version (1936-1937), a prewar version (1938), an intermediate version (1944) and the final typescript of what became Part I, finished around 1945-1946. The preface is dated Cambridge, January 1945. In it he admits he had tried and failed to weld his thoughts into a continuous whole, and that the book is "really only an album".

A second body of remarks, written between 1946 and 1949, was added by the editors as Part II. Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees published the whole in 1953 with Blackwell, German and English on facing pages, in Anscombe's translation.

Editions, and why the 2009 edition matters

Most older books and articles quote the first three editions (1953, 1958, 2001), which share Anscombe's translation. In 2009 Wiley-Blackwell published a fourth edition revised by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Its publisher's description lists the main changes:

• the German text was corrected and the translation revised in many hundreds of places;
• remarks that earlier editions printed as footnotes or between sections now stand in the main text;
• the old Part II is printed as a separate text, Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment, with numbered remarks, so that the famous duck-rabbit passage is now cited as PPF §118 rather than "page 194";
• endnotes and essays explain the book's history and the problems of translating it.

If you buy one edition, buy this one, but keep in mind that older literature uses the page numbers of the earlier editions for Part II. For the German text in its successive versions, Schulte's critical-genetic edition (2001) is the scholarly reference.

What it says

The book opens with a quotation from Augustine describing how he learned to speak: adults named objects and pointed at them. Wittgenstein takes this as the expression of a picture that also lay behind his own Tractatus, the idea that every word names something. He then builds simple "language games" to show how much the picture leaves out. In §2, a builder calls "block", "pillar", "slab", "beam", and his assistant brings the stone. Nothing here is a description; the words are tools in an activity.

From there the book moves through a series of themes, often returning to them from new angles:

• Language games (§§7-24): speaking is part of an activity, a form of life. Giving orders, telling jokes, praying and reporting are different games.
• Family resemblance (§§65-71): the things we call "games" share no single common feature, only overlapping similarities, like the faces in a family.
• Meaning and use (§43): for a large class of cases, the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
• Rule-following (§§138-242): understanding a rule is not a mental state that contains all its applications in advance. Following a rule is a practice.
• The private language argument (§§243-315): a language that only one person could understand, naming sensations nobody else could know, turns out to make no sense. Hence the beetle in the box (§293).
• Philosophy as therapy (§§89-133): philosophical problems arise "when language goes on holiday" (§38). Philosophy does not explain; it describes, and so dissolves confusion.

Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache.

The meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Philosophical Investigations §43

The method matters as much as the content. Wittgenstein writes in short numbered remarks, asks questions he does not answer, lets an imagined opponent speak, and changes the example just when you think you have the point. In the preface he says he does not want to spare readers the trouble of thinking, but to stimulate them to thoughts of their own.

Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Philosophical Investigations §309

How to read it

The first hundred sections are surprisingly readable: everyday examples, plain language, no technical terms. Difficulty rises sharply with the rule-following and private language sections, where the dialogue structure makes it hard to tell which voice is Wittgenstein's. Read slowly, a few sections at a time, and reread. Do not look for a thesis per remark; follow the movement.

A sensible route: §§1-43 (the critique of naming), §§65-133 (family resemblance and the nature of philosophy), then §§138-315. Leave Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment for later. Marie McGinn's Routledge guide and the multi-volume analytical commentary by G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker are reliable companions, at very different scales. Dutch readers have Filosofische onderzoekingen, translated by Maarten Derksen and Sybe Terwee (Boom, 1992, fully revised 2006). The current French version is Recherches philosophiques (Gallimard, 2004).

Why it matters

The book shaped ordinary language philosophy in Oxford, the philosophy of mind of Gilbert Ryle's generation and later debates on rules and meaning. Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) turned §§138-242 into a "sceptical paradox" about meaning; many scholars, Hacker among them, reject that reading as a distortion, and the debate is still alive. Stanley Cavell and the so-called resolute readers stress the book's therapeutic aim instead. Outside philosophy, it influenced anthropology, sociology, linguistics and literary theory. A 1999 poll of North American philosophy teachers, run by Douglas Lackey, ranked it the most important philosophical book of the twentieth century.

It also has limits. Critics object that it describes without ever arguing for a positive view, that "use" is too vague to serve as a theory of meaning, and that its reluctance to theorise can become an excuse. Wittgenstein would answer that a theory was never the point, but the objection deserves to be taken seriously.

Verdict

Read this if you want to understand how twentieth-century philosophy changed its mind about language, or if you ever suspected that a philosophical problem was really a muddle about words. It is not easy, but its first hundred sections are among the most accessible pages of great philosophy, and every rereading turns up something new. Start with the 2009 Hacker and Schulte edition, take it slowly, and expect to argue with it.