ABSTRACT
In the Preface to the Investigations, Wittgenstein remarks that he felt it would be useful to publish his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the Investigations together, on the ground ‘that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my older way of thinking’ (PI, p. 4). Although the idea that the later philosophy should be seen ‘against the background’ of his early work suggests that he sees the former as in some sense evolving out of the latter, there is also the clear suggestion that there has been a fundamental shift in his approach to the task of understanding how language functions. When he wrote the Tractatus, he was, I believe, already convinced that the questions that concerned him –’What is the nature of a proposition?’, ‘What is the difference between a name and a proposition?’, ‘What is the nature and status of the propositions of logic?’ – are ones that are answered by means of an investigation of the workings of our language. We do not need to go outside language in order to understand how it functions. We do not need to construct theories that explain how language connects to something outside it: ‘the way in which language signifies is mirrored in its use’ (NB, p. 82). All we have to do is to look at the use of language and see, mirrored there, how it signifies in the way that it does. The idea that the way language signifies is mirrored or shown in its use is expressed in Wittgenstein’s early concept of a symbol:
In order to recognize a symbol by its sign we must observe how it is used with a sense.
(TLP 3.326)