Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book
The meaning of meanings, and philosophy’s pseudo-science generalisations
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:
THE BLUE BOOK [page 1]
What is the meaning of a word? Let us attack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; what does the explanation of a word look like?
The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question "how do we measure a length?" helps us to understand the problem "what is length?”
The questions "What is length?", "What is meaning?", "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.)
Asking first "What's an explanation of meaning?" has two advantages. You in a sense bring the question "what is meaning?" down to earth. For, surely, to understand the meaning of "meaning" you ought also to understand the meaning of "explanation of meaning". Roughly: "let's ask what the explanation of meaning is, for whatever that explains will be the meaning." Studying the grammar of the expression "explanation of meaning" will teach you something about the grammar of the word "meaning" and will cure you of the temptation to look about you for some object which you might call "the meaning".
What one generally calls "explanations of the meaning of a word” can, very roughly, be divided into verbal and ostensive [directly demonstrative] definitions. … The verbal definition, as it takes us from one verbal expression to another, in a sense gets us no further. In the ostensive definition however we seem to make a much more real step towards learning the meaning. One difficulty which strikes us is that for many words in our language there do not seem to be ostensive definitions; e.g. for such words as "one", "number", "not", etc.
Question: Need the ostensive definition itself be understood?—Can’t the ostensive definition be misunderstood? If the definition explains the meaning of a word, surely it can't be essential that you should have heard the word before. It is the ostensive definition's business to give it a meaning. …
… It seems that there are certain definite mental processes bound up with the working of language, processes through which alone language can function. I mean the processes of understanding and meaning. The signs of our language seem dead without these mental processes; and it might seem that the only function of the signs is to induce such processes, and that these are the things we ought really to be interested in. Thus, if you are asked what is the relation between a name and the thing it names, you will be inclined to answer that the relation is a psychological one, and perhaps when you say this you think in particular of the mechanism of association.—We are tempted to think that the action of language consists of two parts; an inorganic part, the handling of signs, and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking. These latter activities seem to take place in a queer kind of medium, the mind; and the mechanism of the mind, the nature of which, it seems, we don't quite understand, can bring about effects which no material mechanism could. Thus e.g. a thought (which is such a mental process) can agree or disagree with reality; I am able to think of a man who isn't present; I am able to imagine him, 'mean him' in a remark which I make about him, even if he is thousands of miles away or dead. "What a queer mechanism," one might say, "the mechanism of wishing must be if I can wish that which will never happen”.
There is one way of avoiding at least partly the occult appearance of the processes of thinking, and it is, to replace in these processes any working of the imagination by acts of looking at real objects. Thus it may seem essential that, at least in certain cases, when I hear the word "red" with understanding, a red image should be before my mind's eye. But why should I not substitute seeing a red bit of paper for imagining a red patch? The visual image will only be the more vivid. Imagine a man always carrying a sheet of paper in his pocket on which the names of colours are co-ordinated with coloured patches. You may say that it would be a nuisance to carry such a table of samples about with you, and that the mechanism of association is what we always use instead of it. But this is irrelevant; and in many cases it is not even true. If, for instance, you were ordered to paint a particular shade of blue called "Prussian Blue", you might have to use a table to lead you from the word "Prussian Blue" to a sample of the colour, which would serve you as your copy.
We could perfectly well, for our purposes, replace every process of imagining by a process of looking at an object or by painting, drawing or modelling; and every process of speaking to oneself by speaking aloud or by writing. …
… Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs. But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use. …
… Now what makes it difficult for us to [under-] take this line of investigation is our craving for generality. This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions. There is:
(a) The tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term.—We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term "game" to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap. The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful.
(b) There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that the man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term "leaf", has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. He was shown different leaves when he learnt the meaning of the word “leaf"; and showing him the particular leaves was only a means to the end of producing 'in him' an idea which we imagine to be some kind of general image. We say that he sees what is in common to all these leaves; and this is true if we mean that he can on being asked tell us certain features or properties which they have in common. But we are inclined to think that the general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image, but one which only contains what is common to all leaves. This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated to the word. (This roughly means, we are looking at words as though they all were proper names, and we then confuse the bearer of a name with the meaning of the name.)
(c) Again, the idea we have of what happens when we get hold of the general idea 'leaf', 'plant', etc., is connected with the confusion between a mental state, meaning a state of a hypothetical mental mechanism, and a mental state meaning a state of consciousness (toothache, etc.).
(d) Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is ‘purely descriptive’.
(Think of such questions as "Are there sense data?" and ask: What method is there of determining this? Introspection?.)
Instead of "craving for generality" I could also have said "the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case". If, e.g., someone tries to explain the concept of number and tells us that such and such a definition will not do or is clumsy because it only applies to, say, finite cardinals I should answer that the mere fact that he could have given such a limited definition makes this definition extremely important to us. (Elegance is not what we are trying for.) For why should what finite and transfinite numbers have in common be more interesting to us than what distinguishes them? Or rather, I should not have said “why should it be more interesting to us?"—it isn't; and this characterizes our way of thinking. …
… We said that it was a way of examining the grammar (the use) of the word "to know", to ask ourselves what, in the particular case we are examining, we should call "getting to know". There is a temptation to think that this question is only vaguely relevant, if relevant at all, to the question: "what is the meaning of the word 'to know?” We seem to be on a side-track when we ask the question "What is it like in this case 'to get to know'?" But this question really is a question concerning the grammar of the word "to know", and this becomes clearer if we put it in the form: "What do we call 'getting to know’?" It is part of the grammar of the word "chair" that this is what we call "to sit on a chair", and it is part of the grammar of the word “meaning" that this is what we call "explanation of a meaning"; in the same way to explain my criterion for another person's having toothache is to give a grammatical explanation about the word "toothache" and, in this sense, an explanation concerning the meaning of the word "toothache".
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. I want you to remember that words have those meanings which we have given them; and we give them meanings by explanations.
I may have given a definition of a word and used the word accordingly, or those who taught me the use of the word may have given me the explanation. Or else we might, by the explanation of a word, mean the explanation which, on being asked, we are ready to give. That is, if we are ready to give any explanation; in most cases we aren’t.
Many words in this sense then don't have a strict meaning. But this is not a defect. To think it is would be like saying that the light of my reading lamp is no real light at all because it has no sharp boundary. Philosophers very often talk about investigating, analysing, the meaning of words. But let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it. There are words with several clearly defined meanings. It is easy to tabulate these meanings. And there are words of which one might say: They are used in a thousand different ways which gradually merge into one another. No wonder that we can't tabulate strict rules for their use.
The Source:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Blackwell 1958 [pp. 1-4, 17-19, 23-4, 27-28]
Addendum:
Wittgenstein said to his students —
You know that all science started afresh at the time of Galileo, with the laws of gravitation and the observation of the planets – with the discovery of the regularities which were the most obvious. The encouragement for all science was the observation of regularities when they were obvious. For instance, in shooting: there you see real regularity. This is what Galileo really started with, the ballistics.
[Wittgenstein's Whewell's Court Lectures 1938-1941, From the Notes by Yorick Smythies, edited by Volker Munz and Bernhard Ritter, Wiley Blackwell 2017]
Addendum 2:
Anthony Kenny wrote —
Those who ignore Wittgenstein’s criticism of false philosophy and pseudo-science run the risk of constructing imposing edifices of thought that turn out to be nothing but houses of cards. But in a scientistic climate the philosophical seeds he planted have a poor chance of flourishing. It is in the United States especially that a scientistic view of philosophy has prevailed. On the continent of Europe, on the other hand, the philosophical harvest has been threatened by winds from an opposite point of the compass. Philosophy has been assimilated not to science but to rhetoric … ‘In philosophy we do not draw conclusions’, Wittgenstein said. ‘Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.’ ‘Philosophy only states what everyone admits’ (PI, i, 126, 599). Unlike some other commentators, I believe that Wittgenstein seriously maintains that, strictly speaking, there are no arguments in philosophy, and that philosophical methods lead to no conclusions.
[Wittgentein by Anthony Kenny, ‘Introduction to the Revised Edition’, Harvard University Press 1973, Blackwell 2006
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.