Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is concerned with two principal topics: the philosophy of language and philosophical psychology. As soon as we open the book it is apparent that Wittgenstein’s way of treating these topics is quite unlike that of any other philosopher. First of all, the form of the book is quite unique. Instead of the usual chapters with titles indicating the topics to be discussed, the work is made up of distinct, numbered remarks, varying in length from one line to several paragraphs. Moreover, instead of presenting arguments and clearly stated conclusions, these remarks reflect on a wide range of topics – many of which recur throughout the work – without ever producing a clear, final statement on any of them. The punctuation that Wittgenstein uses is complex and distinctive; many of the remarks take the form of a conversation between Wittgenstein and an interlocutor, and it is not always clear whether we are to take the words on the page as an assertion of Wittgenstein’s, or of

his interlocutor, or simply as the expression of a thought to be considered. Remarks often include questions for which Wittgenstein appears to provide no answer, or analogies whose point we cannot immediately see. Many more remarks include descriptions of concrete examples, both real and imaginary, which are quite unlike the examples in other works of philosophy, and which Wittgenstein never seems to use as the basis of a generalization. It is Wittgenstein’s unique way of treating the topics he deals

with that makes the Investigations so difficult to understand. It is not that his style is technical or abstract, but rather it is just not possible to see, in the style of the book, what Wittgenstein’s method is or how it is supposed to work. Yet understanding Wittgenstein’s method and its connection with the form of the text is the key to understanding the Investigations. This is so not merely because it is only by means of such understanding that we can know how to read the remarks that make up the work, but because Wittgenstein himself emphasizes over and over again that it is a method or a style of thought, rather than doctrines, which characterizes his later philosophy. It is, moreover, his insistence that his philosophical aims do not involve him in putting forward ‘any kind of theory’ (PI §109) that makes the question of method, and of how to read his remarks, such a difficult one, for it suggests that we cannot approach the book in the usual way, with a view to finding and extracting the claims which are made in it. Wittgenstein himself is alive to the difficulty involved in under-

standing the remarks that make up the Investigations. In the Preface to the book, he expresses pessimism as to its being understood, and he frequently speaks of our being somehow resistant to thinking or approaching problems in the way he recommends:

We should not be surprised, therefore, if on first reading the book we cannot see the point of Wittgenstein’s remarks, or if we cannot see how we are supposed to make use of the examples he presents. At first sight, the book may well seem fragmentary and diffuse, so that it remains obscure precisely how Wittgenstein’s observations are to be brought to bear on the sort of problems about language and subjectivity which we are familiar with from traditional philosophy. The same sense of difficulty and disorientation is described by students who attended his lectures, in which the pattern of discussion closely mirrored the form of Wittgenstein’s written remarks:

Faced with these difficulties, it may be tempting to treat the apparent fragmentariness of the text as a defect which we must overcome, by discerning, behind the individual remarks, an implicit or burgeoning theory of how language functions, of how our psychological concepts work, or of the nature of psychological states. The price of this is that we must then assume that the form which Wittgenstein was so careful to give to his work is irrelevant to his philosophical aims, and reflects nothing more than a stylistic preference, or even his inability to present his views in a more conventional format. Such an approach also means that we are no longer able to make sense of the large number of remarks in which Wittgenstein insists that ‘we may not advance any kind of theory’ (PI §109), that philosophy, ‘neither explains nor deduces anything’ (PI §126), that ‘[a]ll explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place’ (PI §109).