ABSTRACT
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was concerned about the ways in which the language that we use conditions and limits our understandings of the world. In his Philosophical Grammar he painstakingly attempts to arrive at a set of ‘rules’ for the study of meaning and understanding. In each case he comes face to face with language as a significant limitation; he concluded that ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’. Put simply, it might be the case that our experience of real life in all of its glory and detail may be significantly determined by the language that we use to explain and to describe it. Here he is addressing what is meant by understanding.
How can one talk about ‘understanding’ and ‘not understanding’ a proposition? Surely it is not a proposition until it’s understood?
Does it make sense to point to a clump of trees and ask ‘Do you understand what this clump of trees says?’ In normal circumstances, no; but couldn’t one express a sense by an arrangement of trees? Couldn’t it be a code?
One would call ‘propositions’ clumps of trees one understood; others, too, that one didn’t understand, provided one supposed the man who planted them had understood them.
‘Doesn’t understanding only start with a proposition, with a whole proposition? Can you understand half a proposition?’ – Half a proposition is not a whole proposition. – But what the question means can perhaps be understood as follows. Suppose a knight’s move in chess was always carried out by two movements of the piece, one straight and one oblique; then it could be said ‘In chess there are no half knight’s moves’ meaning: the relationship of half a knight’s move to a whole knights move is not the same as that of half a bread roll to a whole bread roll. We want to say that it is not a difference of degree.
It is strange that science and mathematics make use of propositions, but have nothing to say about understanding those propositions.
2 We regard understanding as the essential thing, and signs as something inessential. – But in that case, why have the signs at all? If you think that it is only so as to make ourselves understood by others, then you are very likely looking on the signs as a drug which is to produce in other people the same condition as my own.
Suppose that the question is ‘what do you mean by that gesture?’ and the answer is ‘I mean you must leave’. The answer would not have been more correctly phrased: ‘I mean what I mean by the sentence “you must leave”.’
In attacking the formalist conception of arithmetic, Frege says more or less this: these petty explanations of the signs are idle once we understand the signs. Understanding would be something like seeing a picture from which all the rules followed, or a picture that makes them all clear. But Frege does not seem to see that such a picture would itself be another sign, or a calculus to explain the written one to us.
What we call ‘understanding a language’ is often like the understanding we get of a calculus when we learn its history or its practical application. And there too we meet an easily surveyable symbolism instead of one that is strange to us. – Imagine that someone had originally learnt chess as a writing game, and was later shown the ‘interpretation’ of chess as a board game.
In this case ‘to understand’ means something like ‘to take in as a whole’.
If I give anyone an order I feel it to be quite enough to give him signs. And if I am given an order, I should never say: ‘this is only words, and I have got to get behind the words’. And when I have asked someone something and he gives me an answer I am content – that was just what I expected – and I don’t raise the objection: ‘but that’s a mere answer.’
But if you say: ‘How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?’ then I say: ‘How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?’
What is spoken can only be explained in language, and so in this sense language itself cannot be explained.
Language must speak for itself.
(Wittgenstein 1969: 39–40)