In philosophy, as in most other fields of
human activity, the merits of the living are much more controversial than those of the
dead. If you took a worldwide poll today among professors of philosophy on the question
"who is the best living philosopher?" I'm pretty sure no candidate would get an overall majority.
So any list of the so-called great philosophers can only end with the latest of the generally
acknowledged dead. And today, for us, that is Wittgenstein. Ludwig Wittgenstein was born
in Vienna in 1889. His father, from whom he was to inherit a fortune, was the biggest
steel magnate in Austria. Wittgenstein was fascinated by machinery from boyhood and
his education was strongly weighted in the direction of mathematics, physics, & engineering.
After studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, he spent three years at Manchester University
as a postgraduate student in aeronautics. During this period, he became absorbed in
fundamental questions about the nature of mathematics. Bertrand Russell's book, The
Principles of Mathematics, inspired him to give up engineering and go to Cambridge to
study the philosophy of mathematics under Russell himself. He soon learned all that
Russell had to teach and went on to do the original research that was to produce his
first book, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, and usually referred to
just as "The Tractatus". Wittgenstein genuinely believed that in this book he had solved
the fundamental problems of philosophy. So, he turned away from philosophy and did
other things. Meanwhile, the Tractatus acquired enormous influence, stimulating further developments
in logic at Cambridge, and on the continent, becoming the most admired text among the
famous group of logical positivists known as the Vienna Circle. But Wittgenstein himself
came to feel that it was fundamentally in error. So he went back to doing philosophy after
all. In 1929, he returned to Cambridge, where in 1939 he became professor of philosophy.
During this second period at Cambridge, he developed a completely new approach,
quite different from his earlier one. During the rest of his life, its influence spread only
through personal contact, since, apart from one very brief article, he published nothing
more before his death in 1951. However, in 1953 his book, Philosophical Investigations,
came out posthumously and proved to be the most influential work of philosophy that's
appeared since the Second World War, at least in the English-speaking world. So here we have
a most remarkable phenomenon, a philosopher of genius producing two incompatible philosophies at
different stages of his life, each of which influenced a whole generation. These two philosophies,
although incompatible, do have some basic features in common. Both are focused on the
role of language in human thinking and human life. And both are centrally concerned to
demarcate between varied and invaried uses of language; or as someone once put it, to draw
the lines at which sense ends and nonsense begins. For me, the earlier of Wittgenstein's two main
books, the Tractatus, remains hauntingly readable. But it has to be said that it's the
later one, the Philosophical Investigations, that has made him a cultural figure of international
significance during the period since his death. Here to discuss Wittgenstein's work with
me is John Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley.
Professor Searle, since Wittgenstein himself repudiated his early philosophy, and since
in any case, it's now the later philosophy that's far and away the more influential,
I don't think we ought to spend too much of our discussion on the early work. What is
it about that that we really need to know? Well, I think the key to understanding the Tractatus
is the picture theory of meaning. Wittgenstein felt that if language was to represent reality,
if sentences were to represent states of affairs, then there had to be something in common
between the sentence and the state of affairs and he saw the way to describe that on the analogy
with the way that pictures represent states of affairs. He thought there had to be some
structural similarity; that just as the sentence was made of a sequence of words that stood
for things (names), so the arrangement of words in the sentence pictured or mirrored
the arrangements of objects in the fact. Now, this gave him a remarkable sort of lever
of a metaphysical kind where he could then read off, he thought, the structure of reality from
the structure of language, because he thought that the structure of reality had to determine
the structure of language. Unless language mirrored reality in some way, it would
be impossible for sentences to mean. So the crucial point here is that we are able
to talk about reality, not just because we use words that stand for things, but because those
words have a relationship to each other within the sentence that corresponds to the relationship
that things have to each other in the world. Right. So, that's what he called the logical
structure. And the world and sentences have that structure in common. Right. But it's
important to emphasize now that we're not talking about ordinary language of the sort
that you and I are discussing which he thought concealed the logical structure. He thought
if we took ordinary sentences and did an analysis of how they mean, we would get down to
the ground floor sentences--what he called the elementary sentences--and there, there
would be this strict picturing relation between the structure of the sentence and the structure
of the fact. Now, he inherits from Frege the idea that the fundamental unit of meaning
isn't the word, but the word only functions, the name only means in the context of the
sentence. And as you said, it's the concatenation of the words in the sentence that is itself
a fact that enables the sentence to picture the structure of facts in the world. Now, I
think people will see quite easily how that can be the case when the sentence is picturing
a true fact. If I say "there's a cat on the mat" and there is a cat on the mat, I think
that relationship is easily understandable. But suppose I say "there is no cat on the mat".
How can that sort of sentence be said to be picturing something? Well, Wittgenstein thought that
words like 'not' and 'and' and 'or' and 'if'-- --the so-called logical constants--that they
actually didn't picture. They were not part of the picturing relationship. As he says, my fundamental
idea is that these logical constants don't themselves represent, they're ways we
have of stringing pictures together. And it's not so unrealistic if you think about it. For
example, across the street from my house in Berkeley there's a little park and there's
a picture of a dog with a line through it. Now, I take it that's not supposed to pick
dogs that have stripes painted on them. The line is the negation sign and that's a
Wittgensteinian sort of picture. That is, the "not" symbol there is a way of operating on the
picture, but it isn't itself part of the picture. So, he thought that what we say about the world
can be analyzed down into basic sentence structures, basic sentences, which picture the world and are
linked together or negated by particular operators --by the so-called logical constants--by the
logical constants which have this function. Now, in my introduction to this discussion,
I said that throughout his career Wittgenstein was concerned to demarcate talk that made
sense from talk that didn't make sense. How was that demarcation done in the early philosophy?
Right. Well, in the early philosophy, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein thought that the only language
which, strictly speaking, made sense was this fact-stating language. Now, unlike the positivists,
he didn't relish that. He didn't think that was wonderful. He thought that the really
important things were unsayable, were unstatable. He thought that ethics, religion, aesthetics,
were in the realm of the unsayable. And he once said about the Tractatus that the really
important part of the Tractatus is the part that's left out, the part that's not there
at all. So, he made a strict demarcation of meaningful language as fact-stating language
and the other parts of language, those parts of language that are not used to state facts
he thought were, strictly speaking, nonsense and we couldn't really say anything. So,
although ethics, religion, the arts, and so on are of a fundamental significance in life, we
can't actually ever do them justice in language. As far as the Tractatus is concerned,
they are even--it isn't that we can't do them justice, our attempt to do them justice is
meaningless. We can't say anything meaningful about them. Now, you've made the point very
clearly that central to the early Wittgenstein is this picture theory of meaning. How
did the later Wittgenstein depart from that? Well again, though Wittgenstein's ideas are
very complex, there's a rather simple answer to that question. He moved away from the picture
metaphor of the nature of meaning to the tool or use metaphor as the correct conception
of meaning. He says, think of words as tools and the way to understand language, the way
to get a correct conception of how language functions is to look at how words are used.
He says for most cases, not all but for nearly all cases, the meaning of a word is just
its use in the language. Now, just as the Tractatus gave him a certain metaphysical
conception of the world derived from language, so by changing from the picture metaphor to
the tool metaphor, he turns that metaphysics upside down. Now instead of saying that the
structure of reality determines the structure of the language, now what he says is that
the structure of the language determines what we think of as reality. We can't think of
the world, we can't discuss the world, we can't have a conception of the world independent
of the conceptual apparatus that we use for that purpose. Now you've raised a lot of very
fundamental concepts here and I think we ought to take them one at a time for the
sake of clarity. Let's begin where you began, with the distinction between a picture theory
of meaning and a tool theory of meaning. The later Wittgenstein is no longer saying that
words or sentences picture what they're about. He's saying that a word or a sentence is like
a tool and what it means is what you can do with it, so that, in fact, the meaning of
a term is the sum total of its possible uses. Now, it's in the nature of a picture that
it does in fact picture only one thing. It pictures an object or a state of affairs. Where
it's in the nature of a tool that it has many uses, perhaps an indefinite number of uses. Now
that applies to his view of language, doesn't it? Yes precisely. Yes, let me say a little bit more
about that. Wittgenstein is anxious to insist in the Investigations that language is indefinitely
extendable, and that there isn't any single thing that binds all uses of language together.
That there isn't any single essence that runs through all of language. And indeed for particular
words, they're needn't be any particular essence that marks the definition of that word. That
he says, words have a family resemblance of their uses, so that--I mean, he gives the
example of "game." He says if you ask yourself what is it that all games have in common--
and he keeps insisting, don't think what they all have in common, but look and see if you can
find anything. And then he says, if you consider board games, Olympic games, gambling games,
games played with balls on fields and so on, what you find is that there isn't any single
essence. There isn't any single thing that all games have in common. Not even the
fact that they're pastimes or diversions... If you've been to Las Vegas, it isn't that those
people are just amusing themselves, it's a pretty grim business to watch them at the gaming,
as they're called, tables. But the idea he has is that the strength of the words derives
not from some underlying essence but from the fact that there's a series of criss-crossing
relationships, similarities. And he compares that to the way that the various members of
a family resemble each other. And he calls this a "family resemblance" relation. Now, it
might seem like Wittgenstein was just saying obvious points here, but remember, he is militating against a very powerful philosophical tradition. He's militating first against the idea
of his own that words get their meanings by standing for objects. And then secondly,
an even older tradition that says words get their meanings by being associated with
ideas in the head. And he's militating against a tradition that says--this goes back to Plato--
that in order for a word to have a meaning, there must be some essence, there must
be some essential trait that the word marks. So the interest of his remarks about language
derives a lot from their revolutionary or radical attack on a pre-existing tradition.
He uses the term 'family resemblance' so often that I think it's worth saying just a word
or two about that. When we talk of a family, the different members of the family having a
marked family resemblance to each other, it need not be the case that there's one single feature
that they all have in common. It need not be the case that they all have the same nose
or all have the same chin. There's no single feature that they all have in common, just
an overlapping and crisscrossing set of features from which they all draw, as it were. Now
Wittgenstein is saying that this is true of language and meaning. That if we look at a
term or a word, it's a great mistake to look for the one thing that it means because there
is no one thing that it means. The meaning of a word is like family resemblance in that
case. Namely, a word has several different meanings, like the several different members
of a family. There may be a crisscrossing and overlapping set of relationships between
those different meanings, but there's no one thing that the meanings all have in common
which is, as it were, the essence of that word. That's what he's saying. Now, he doesn't say
that this is true for every word in the language. No doubt there are words that have
strict definitions. But he thought that this was crucial for philosophers to see because
a lot of the words that trouble us, especially in philosophy, in ethics and aesthetics,
words like 'good' & 'beautiful', which he was very suspicious of these words. But he thought
that part of our failure was we were looking for some essence of beauty or essence of
goodness. Whereas, he insists just look at the various resembling, crisscrossing similarities
in the use of these words. So he's saying, for example, that we have all sorts of different
kinds of talk. There's scientific talk, religious talk, music talk, everyday talk, philosophical
talk such as you and I are now having. And in each of these areas of discourse, language
is characteristically used in different ways and the same words will be used in different
ways. So don't ask yourself, what is the specific meaning of this term, ask yourself, how is
this term being used in that particular area of discourse. That was one of his slogans:
Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use. And at this point he introduces another metaphor.
Indeed, it's one of his few technical terms. He introduces the notion of a language game.
And the idea he has is that we should see speaking a language on analogy with playing a
game in that characteristically, it's rule-governed, we aren't ourselves entitled to lay down the
rules, not everything is determined by the rules, so there is a great deal of slack, room
for interpretation. But nonetheless, we're engaged in rule-governed forms of activity.
Now, this again is a disconcerting idea for a lot of philosophers because he wants
to insist that there isn't any foundation for the language games, any more than there's
a foundation for football or baseball. These are just human activities. And so he wants to
get out of the idea that these language games, where the word has its home, where
words get their meaning from their role in the language games---he wants to get out of
the idea that there must be some transcendental justification or foundation for the language
game. No, the language game has to look after itself. We play a language game of ethical
discourse, of aesthetic discourse, of fact-stating discourse; a language game with the word
'cause', a language game of identifying spatial & temporal relations. So, he's anxious to insist
that there are these sequences and series of human activities where the use of words
is tied up with the rest of our lives in a regular, ordered, but not in any way pre-determined
fashion. And that's really the task of the philosopher, is to describe, not to justify
or give a foundation for, but to give just a description of how the language game is
played. I must say I think it's something of a disaster that he fastened on this term
'language game' because it sounds as if what he's talking about is something frivolous.
And in fact, it even feeds a certain prejudice against philosophers that exists outside
philosophy: that they're all just playing with words or that they're somehow superficially concerned
with language. This isn't so at all. No. He used the word 'game' for serious, intellectual
reasons. Right and let me just hammer home the reasons for the analogy. First of all,
it's an activity. It isn't something sublime that just goes on in our heads and it isn't
an abstract set of relationships, it's an ongoing human activity. And secondly, it's
conventional, it's regular. There are rules involved. And those are the features that he
wanted to get, that we should look at language in action, and we should see it as
part of regular, rule-governed behavior. I mean, that sounds I think pretty uncontroversial,
at least to us. But there is a more radical aspect to this that I want to bring out. And that
is: Wittgenstein thought that there isn't any point of view outside of language where
we can, so to speak, stand back and appraise the language game from a non-linguistic point
of view. He thought there wasn't any Archimedean point from which we could get away from operating
inside a language game, stand back, and appraise the success or failure of language in representing
reality. He thought that was impossible. We're always operating within the language game.
We're always operating within some language game or other. There's no conception that we
have of appraisal or of getting at the world apart from operating within a language
game. But now what has happened to the real? For me to be able to see this as a hand or
that as a table, I must be in possession of the concepts "hand" & "table". And therefore
what I see reality as being is constituted by a whole conceptual structure that I have
which can be articulated in language. That is a great deal of it, but I think in a way
it goes even deeper than that for Wittgenstein... Wittgenstein is part of the movement in the
past 100 years. It is a characteristic feature of the 20th century that we no longer can
take language for granted. Language has become immensely problematic to us and it has moved
into the center of philosophy. And Wittgenstein is one of the great leaders in that movement.
So he would certainly agree with what you've just said, namely, that reality divides up
the way we divide it; that because we can only think of this as a hand or that is a
table because we've got the relevant concepts, the relevant words. But the point is deeper
than that. The point he wants to make is: there isn't any such thing as thinking--there isn't
even any such thing as experience as human beings have, adult full-grown human being
experiences--that cannot exist apart from language. Language permeates that at every point.
Now, a moment ago, you were saying that every language game has to be understood
from the inside. One consequence of this is as follows, isn't it. Whereas the old logical
positivists who had been influenced by Wittgenstein's early philosophy were extremely dismissive
of all religious talk, for example. And they thought that if I said something like "God
exists" that was just meaningless noise. The later Wittgenstein would've not been
intolerant in the same way. He would not have dismissed religious talk as being empty of
meaning. What he would have said is, well let's first of all examine how words are used
in a religious context, how they function; let's look at their use, let's, as it were,
get inside the religious language game, as he would have put it, and see how these terms
are being used and then we can judge whether they're being used legitimately, not legitimately,
or whatever it might be. Well, you have to be very careful about that last bit, you see,
because what Wittgenstein would say is it's not our task as philosophy to appraise the
success or failure of the religious language game, all we can do is describe how it's played.
And the important thing is to see that it isn't played like the scientific language
game. It's ridiculous, he thinks, that we should take religious utterances as if they
were sort of second-rate scientific utterances for which there was inadequate evidence. He
was always anxious to insist that we ought to look at the role that religion and
religious utterances play in people's lives. That's the meaning of these utterances, to see
what sort of role they actually play in people's lives. And he disliked the idea that we should
over-intellectualize this and make it into some kind of a theoretical enterprise where
what we were concerned to [do] was to criticize this and see if the evidence for the existence
of God was up to snuff by scientific standards. He didn't like that. Look, W.G. Grace once
jumped on a chair in a meeting & said something Wittgenstein really approved of, he thought this
was wonderful. Grace said something like this: He said "God doesn't want a head. Any old
cabbage will do for a head. What God wants is a heart." Now, Wittgenstein liked that because
he thought that was the language game in action. That was not trying to get outside it and
do some sort of pseudo-scientific appraisal. But it is important, I think, for us to make the point
that he didn't take a sort of "anything goes" attitude. I mean, he did think that philosophical
puzzlement is characteristically caused by our using the terms from one language game
as if they belonged to another. By, for example, trying to judge--as I think you just said--
trying to judge, say, moral talk, or religious talk as if it were scientific talk. And that having
got ourselves into these puzzles and problems, the way to get ourselves out of them was to
pay very strict attention to the way the words that we were using normally functioned in
actual human discourse. I think that's right. And he does have various ways that he summarizes
this. He says philosophical problems characteristically arise when we take the word out of the language
game, where it's at home, and then try to think of it as something sublime. We want
to inquire into the nature of the good, the true, or the beautiful, instead of just looking
at how these words are actually used in the language game where they get their meaning.
But there's something you said that I want to take [CUT] that Wittgenstein makes between
games and the use of language. There was one important aspect of it that we didn't take up
because we can't talk about everything at once. Um, a game is a rule-governed activity
and language is a rule-governed activity and has to be because if I didn't follow certain
linguistic rules, what I said would be unintelligible and wouldn't communicate or perform any
of the functions I want it perform. So I have to follow certain rules. Now, Wittgenstein
argued that because that was so, there could be no such thing, even in theory, as a private
language. And his argument to this effect has become one of the most controversial aspects
of his philosophy. Can you say a word about that? It sure has. Well, I would be glad to.
In a way I'm reluctant to get into this hassle because there's so much junk written about
the private language argument. But just let me say a little bit about it. First of all,
you gotta say something about rules. We've been talking as if the notion of a rule for
Wittgenstein was unproblematic, but it wasn't. His notion of a rule is itself one of his
important contributions to philosophy. What he thought was, first of all, that rules
don't block off all eventualities; that language isn't everywhere bounded by rules. Nothing
is everywhere bounded by rules. There are always lots of gaps left open by any system
of rules. He gives the example of throwing a tennis ball when you serve. There's no rule
how high you have to throw it. But I suppose if somebody could throw the thing five miles
high & we had to wait all day, they'd make a rule. I mean, the rules are never final. Another
thing he said about rules is that rules are always subject to different interpretations.
And if you've ever been through the income tax laws, you know this. I mean, the American
history of it is a series of different interpretations. So, it looks to Wittgenstein as if there's
a kind of skepticism that arises here because if anything can be made to conform to the
rule by some fancy interpretation, then anything can be made to conflict with it, and you wouldn't
get either accord nor conflict. The rule would then seem to drop out as irrelevant. Now,
his solution to that is to say obeying the rule is a social practice, it's something we learn
in society. Society just has ways of making people & training people to conform to rules.
Now he applies that to this whole private language problem. The problem of the private
language is could there be a language where I just named my own private sensations in
a way that no one else could understand it? Now the reason for all the fuss is that a lot of
people in the history of philosophy have thought that must be the basic use of language. In
the whole Cartesian tradition--that language must name inner experience. That we
get to the real world--to the external world-- by starting from our inner experiences, by starting
from inside, and working outward. Now Wittgenstein wants to say two things about that. First
of all, that isn't how the words for our inner experiences actually function. They don't
name private objects. Rather, they're used in conjunction with public criteria, behaviors,
situations. So we're not, in fact, speaking of private language when we use sensation
language. But secondly, and more controversially he says we couldn't, in fact, speak a private
language. We couldn't give a private, ostensive definition, where we just sort of point inwardly
to some private experience and name that experience. Because, he said, unless we can appeal to
some larger social gathering, there won't be any difference between my thinking I'm
using the word right and actually using it right. So his discussion of the rules and
the social character of rules is really what underlies his rejection of the idea of
a private language. And it's important for him to reject the idea of a private language
as you say because he's reacting against a whole tradition of philosophy that goes
back to I suppose Descartes, but certainly includes Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the empiricist philosophers
who say that we start by cognition of essentially private states of mind and infer the world
or build up a conception of the world from that. Now, the later Wittgenstein seems to
me to be saying this, that because the sum total of a word's possible uses constitute
its meaning, in the end, what language means and what words mean depend on forms of life,
on the social contexts within which they're used. And in fact, he uses that phrase "forms
of life" a great deal. So that all the ultimate criteria of meaning are not personal, are
not private at all. They are essentially social, are they not? That's right. And it's important
to emphasize that the notion of use is itself a social notion. It's something that I do
in conjunction with other members of a society. And it's only because I'm trained to respond
in certain ways that we avoid this skepticism that says, well, anything I do can be made
to seem to be in accord with some rule or other, or I could always interpret the rule in such
a way that would come out in accord with it. And he does emphasize the idea that
a language is a form of life, that we can't sort of carve off the language and look at
it apart from the human activities where it actually has its meaning. Now when one
tends to read him, I think they're often struck and surprised straight away by what they find
because these books are not written in the way that ordinary books are. They're not written
in continuous prose, they're written in separate paragraphs, and each paragraph is given a
number. And very often, it's not clear what the relationship is between a paragraph and
the other two on either side of it. And usually, there isn't much in the way of connected argument,
either. You get these brilliant, metaphors, brilliant examples, brilliant similes so that
the writing is wonderful and yet it's difficult usually, to see what it is he's saying. Now,
why did he write like that? Well, several reasons. But first of all, I do want to say I
entirely agree with you about the character of the prose, and it is both entrancing and
exasperating. I know I felt that when I was preparing for this program. I went and re-read
acres of Wittgenstein. And there just is a huge amount. And it is enthralling. You begin to start
thinking that way yourself. You begin to address your wife in Wittgensteinian aphorisms,
which can be very exasperating. But also, you have this feeling that when you take up
one of these books and read it, it's a bit like getting a kit for a model airplane with
no instructions as to how you're supposed to put all these pieces together. And that
can be extremely frustrating. It's a sort of do it yourself book. But why did he write
like that? Well, first of all, I think it was the only way he found natural. I mean,
he often says what a torture it is for him to try even to put these paragraphs together
consecutively, much less to write conventional prose of articles and books. But secondly, I
think there is an element almost of arrogance in this. Wittgenstein wanted it to be different
from the standard ways of doing philosophy. He hated the sort of standard articles that
appear in journals and standard books that are written to be read by undergraduates in
philosophy. By the way, he would have hated the kind of thing you and I are now doing--two
professional philosophers discussing his views on television. But he did want to be deliberately
different from other people. And then there's a third aspect of this is that he honestly and sincerely
was struggling to say something new and different. And he always had the feeling that he hadn't
said what he really meant, that he was struggling to find a mode of expression, and that
he never really succeeded. And then lastly, I think we need to say for English-speaking
viewers that though it looks strange to the English eye to see books written in this way,
it's not all that unusual in German. There is a tradition in German philosophy of writing
aphoristically. You see it in Nietzsche, it's in Schopenhauer, and Lichtenberg, just to
mention a few. And the writing is at its best wonderful. I think we ought to do him
the justice of saying that. He's a great stylist. He's a great stylist and some of the sentences
stay in your mind for the rest of your life after you've read them. In my introduction to this
discussion, I mentioned the fact that in the last --I don't even know how long one ought to say, 10
years, 15 years, probably not much more than that-- he has become an international figure
of importance quite outside philosophy. When one reads books and articles and
journalism that have nothing to do with philosophy one is beginning now, over and over again, to
come across Wittgenstein's name. Can you say just a little about the fields outside philosophy
in which he is important, and indicate at least what kind of an influence he appears
to be having? Well, at present I think it's a kind of name-dropping. It's an okay name,
and he's certainly mentioned in a lot of fields. But I think HE would feel himself that he has
not been adequately understood, and indeed has not been adequately understood in philosophy.
But some of these fields are literary criticism and aesthetics generally, Wittgenstein is
now often referred to and I think will become more influential. There is a great deal of
mention of Wittgenstein in social sciences, particularly anthropology, because he thought
of himself as doing a kind of anthropology. There is books written about the importance
of Wittgenstein for political theory. So it's what the French would call the sciences of
man that Wittgenstein has been most influential. Paradoxically, in a way, because he wrote
so much about the philosophy of mathematics. But most of his influences now are--outside
of philosophy--are in the social sciences. And it seems that the structuralists who are so
fashionable or have been fashionable for so long, seemed to be claiming Wittgenstein for their
own, do they not? Well, it's the post-structuralists, I think that have probably misunderstood
him the worst. It's the post-structuralists, yes. But that's another program. Yes. Yes. Well right, then
we won't get into that. But I think the point is worth making that, for example, if you read serious
literary criticism now, you are going to come across constant reference to Wittgenstein.
What's your personal evaluation of all this, of Wittgenstein as a philosopher? Well actually
I feel so strongly about this, I've been restraining myself all along, just trying to say what
the guy meant and not what I actually think about it. But let me start out negatively
and then I get to end on a more cheerful note. There is a kind of exasperating feature of
Wittgenstein that I wanna highlight, I wanna emphasize, and that is the anti-theoretical
bent in Wittgenstein, the idea that we mustn't have a theory, that we can't have a theory
of language. We can't have a general theory of language or of the mind. Now, when somebody
says to me, when some guy says you can't have a general theory of speech acts or you can't
have a general theory of intentionality of how words or how thoughts relate to reality,
my natural instinct is to go out and write a general theory--we'll just see if we can't
have a general theory. And in fact, I have tried to make general statements in both of
these fields. I think it's premature of Wittgenstein to say we can't have general theories of language
of a philosophical sort or general theories of how the mind functions. We won't know if we
don't try. And the sheer diversity of the phenomena should not, by themselves, discourage us.
I mean, think of physics. If you think of Niagara Falls and a pot of water boiling and an
ice skating rink, it looks like very diverse phenomena. And we could go on and on
with the diverse forms that water takes. But in fact, we've now got a pretty good general
theory that can account for all of that, and I don't see why we shouldn't seek general
theories in philosophy, in particular in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of
mind. I almost think sometimes that Wittgenstein thought since he had failed to get a general
theory, since the Tractatus failed, then any general theory must be impossible.
Roughly speaking, if I can't do it, nobody can. And a lot of people--probably what he actually
believed---a lot of his disciples have said to me well, since you reject this anti-theoretical
bent of the Investigations, you must believe in the Tractatus, as if those were the only
two options. And I want to suggest there are lots of other options. Now tied in with this
aversion to theory is a kind of waffling that goes on in certain crucial areas. Let's take
religious discourse just as an example of this, we were mentioning this earlier. See,
Wittgenstein himself obviously had a deep religious hunger. It wasn't this sort of middle-class
English attitude about religion, that it's just something for Sunday mornings. No, he
really had a religious hunger. There are these constant references to God and getting himself
right with God. And yet, I think most people would say that he was an atheist. Now, in a
way, you feel almost that he wants to have it both ways, that he wants to be able to
say things like, well, we just need to know the role that religious discourse plays in people's
lives. But of course, you won't understand that role unless you see that religious discourse
refers beyond; that the only reason that people pray is because they think there's
a God up there listening. And that's not--- whether or not God is listening is not part of the
language game. The language game of religion can only be played the way it is because people
think there's something outside the language game that gives it sense. Okay now that's for
the bad part. Let me say what I think is really terrific in Wittgenstein. Well, first of all,
I think most philosophers--what I'm gonna say right now is kind of contemporary orthodoxy--
most philosophers would agree with this--he has made terrific contributions in the philosophy
of language and in the philosophy of mind. His contribution in the philosophy of language
is that he really mounted devastating attacks on the idea that words get their meaning by
standing for things or by being associated with some introspective process, by standing
for some mental thing in the mind. And he does knock those views pretty effectively.
And also, he is pretty good--one, I think, of the most powerful--not the only one, but
certainly one of the most powerful expressions of the view--that speaking a language ought
to be seen as a form of human activity, that words are also acts; words are deeds. And
that is an important line of investigations. Now in a way, his discussion in the philosophy
of mind is just as important as his work in the philosophy of language. And it's a very
effective attack on the Cartesian tradition, on the idea that we really live in two worlds,
a mental world and a physical world. But his attack on Cartesianism is so powerful precisely
because he doesn't make the mistake of most anti-Cartesians of thinking you just have
to reject the mind; just say there isn't any such thing as mental phenomena. What he
does is a painstaking analysis of a whole lot of psychological concepts--belief and fear and
hope and expecting--and he goes through these and what he shows you is that the deep grammar
of these expressions is quite different from what you would think just looking at the surface,
where we have nouns like "mind" and "body," and where it looks like they're these two
different things, minds & bodies. What he does is by carefully describing these language
games, he gets you to see that things like hope and fear and expectation and belief are
grounded in situations, that we actually use these words in such a way where we're not inclined to
think there must be some deep Cartesian divide. We say things like "he's been groaning
and in pain for the past two hours". And we don't feel there "oh my gosh, he's mixed
categories: the physical groaning and the mental pain". It's a perfectly natural way
of talking. And he shows us that our natural way of talking does not lead to any kind of
Cartesianism. However, the most powerful part of Wittgenstein, from my own personal point
of view, is not his work in the philosophy of language and mind, but it's an idea that really
begins to acquire momentum in his last work. It also appears in his earlier work. But
in his very last work that he wrote when he was dying on certainty. And it's a rather
subtle idea, but it's this. We have, in the Western intellectual tradition going back
to Plato, we have the idea that any meaningful human behavior must somehow be the expression
of a theory, an implicit theory that we hold, that if you understand me and I understand
you, it can only be because we each have a theory of the other. Or, as you say, an
implicit theory. Chomsky thinks this, that there's an unconscious theory of language. And artificial
intelligence is based on this presupposition that there are these unconscious theories.
Now there's some truth in that, but Wittgenstein is anxious to emphasize that a great deal
of what we do is both socially and biologically primitive. It's a way of responding, it's
a way of acting. We just act. We don't need to appeal to the idea that there's some implicit
theoretical structure that enables us to act. As usual, he gives very good similes. He
says look, think of squirrels storing nuts for the winter. Now, do they do that because they
think Hume's problem of induction has been solved and we now know that the future resembles
the past? No, they just do it. Now, he says, think of yourself and putting your hand in
the fire. Is the reason you don't put your hand in the fire, is it because you think
you've refuted Hume or you think you've got very good inductive evidence? No, you
just don't do it. You couldn't be dragged into that fire. And he says a great deal of our
human activity has to be seen like that. We're just responding in ways that are both biologically
and culturally conditioned. But his ground floor statement--he keeps repeating this--
is: we just act. That's the way we do it. And this goes against a whole tradition
where we try to think, well we can only do what we do because we've got an implicit theory.
Do you think there's still a lot of juice in this or do you think that Wittgenstein
himself has made all of the really important, the creative and constructive use of these
ideas that can be made? Oh no, I think there's a great deal more to be said on this. Secondly,
he didn't do all the work, he just got started. Thank you very much, Professor Searle.
