Philosophical Investigations - Relation To The Tractatus

Relation To The Tractatus

According to the standard reading, in the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein repudiates many of his own earlier views, expressed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Tractatus, as Bertrand Russell saw it (though it should be noted that Wittgenstein took strong exception to Russell's reading), had been an attempt to set out a logically perfect language, building on Russell's own work. In the years between the two works Wittgenstein came to reject the idea that underpinned logical atomism, that there were ultimate "simples" from which a language should, or even could, be constructed.

In remark #23 of Philosophical Investigations he points out that the practice of human language is more complex than the simplified views of language that have been held by those who seek to explain or simulate human language by means of a formal system. It would be a disastrous mistake, according to Wittgenstein, to see language as being in any way analogous to formal logic.

Instead, language has many context-sensitive expressions, such as indexicals. To show this, Wittgenstein provided examples of sentences or expressions that can be interpreted in more than one way. One of the most famous is, "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language", which could mean either one of the following:

• philosophers use language to combat bewitchments, or
• philosophers battle bewitchments caused by language itself.

This ambiguity can only be resolved in context, showing that language cannot be broken down into self-contained units of meaning.

Besides stressing the Investigation's opposition to the Tractatus, there are critical approaches which have argued that there is much more continuity and similarity between the two works than supposed. One of these is the New Wittgenstein approach.

Norman Malcolm credits Piero Sraffa with providing Wittgenstein with the conceptual break that founded the Philosophical Investigations, by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part:

"Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?'"