ABSTRACT

Augustine’s picture of language constitutes the mise-en-scène for the Investigations. Its ramifications are sketched in §§1-27. The confusions of atomism, with its misconceptions of logically proper names, simple objects and complexes, of a ‘connection between language and reality’, and of analysis, are anatomized in §§27b-64. Sections 65-88 investigate misunderstandings about vagueness and determinacy of sense. In §§89-133, Wittgenstein turns to philosophical methodology. This sequence of remarks constitutes the bulk of his definitive later reflections on philosophy and its nature, its pitfalls and proper path. The remarks fall into two groups, §§89-108a and §§108b-133. Although the Tractatus is barely mentioned (only in §§97 and 114), its presence is everywhere felt, and its misconceptions are under constant scrutiny in §§89-108a. By contrast with the sequel (§§108b-133), which was written for the most part1 in the early 1930s and cannibalized from The Big Typescript, these remarks were written in 1937 specifically for incorporation into the Early Version. So they constitute Wittgenstein’s final reflections on the methodological sins of the Tractatus. They diagnose what had been awry with his conception of the task of philosophy, and with his philosophical method. Wittgenstein held those misconceptions to be not personal idiosyncrasies, but characteristic philosophical temptations and tendencies. When he completed the Tractatus, he believed that he had solved the fundamental problems of philosophy (TLP, Preface). Now, ‘forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book’ (PI, Preface), he thought of its misconceptions as exemplary. Small wonder that he wanted to publish his old thoughts and the new ones together, and held that the latter could be seen aright only by contrast with, and against the background of, his old way

whole examination needed to be turned around,2 but about the pivotal point of our real need (PI §108). This is a dark remark. What counts as turning our examination around? And what is ‘our real need’? This rotation will, Wittgenstein writes, rid us of our misguided preconception of the ‘crystalline purity’ of logic – but what precisely he means by ‘logic’ here needs to be clarified. Exactly what preconception of crystalline purity he had in mind must be pinned down. Ridding us of this preconception, he avers, will enable us to see that the rigour of logic is not in any way compromised by the realization that the concepts of language and of proposition are familyresemblance concepts. But to understand this observation we must be clear why the family-resemblance character of these concepts might appear to compromise logic. For this we must apprehend what role Wittgenstein allocated to logic in the Tractatus, and why that was misconceived. Interestingly, in his notes (MS 157a, 48v), he observed that even if the concept of language were not a family-resemblance concept, his present conception would still be different from that of the Tractatus. So, although acknowledging the family character of language is important, it is still not the crucial matter vis-à-vis this radical transformation in our way of thinking that is being advocated. So what is?