ABSTRACT
The short chapter on believing in Part II of the Philosophical Investigations generates more puzzlement per page, I think, than any other stretch of Wittgenstein’s prose. The job of making sense of the chapter as a whole is like that of forming a picture out of pieces, any of which can be shaped or coloured, not in just any way at all, but in more than one way. In such a case a number of quite different pictures would be possible, depending on how we decided to shape or colour the pieces; and also if we wanted the picture to come out in a certain way we might have to cut or stretch or colour pieces in ways they seemed to resist.
