ABSTRACT
For many years, §445 of the Philosophical Investigations struck me as one of Wittgenstein’s more enigmatic remarks: ‘It is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact.’ What could this possibly mean? After rummaging around in some of Wittgenstein’s other works, I gradually came to see what (I think) Wittgenstein is saying here. I even came to the conclusion that this remark helps us understand the concept of representation as it was developed in the middle period works in reaction to what was said about it in the Tractatus.2 But it is only recently that I have come to look upon §445 as the key to an important series of remarks in the Investigations itself. It is, I now think, an interpretative filter that yields an understanding of some even more enigmatic comments about the queerness of thought and the harmony between thought and reality.
