In Our Time - Wittgenstein

Episode Date: December 4, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, work and legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is little doubt that he was a towering figure of the twentieth century; on his return to Cambridge in 1929 Maynard Keynes wrote, “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train”.Wittgenstein is credited with being the greatest philosopher of the modern age, a thinker who left not one but two philosophies for his descendents to argue over: The early Wittgenstein said, “the limits of my mind mean the limits of my world”; the later Wittgenstein replied, “If God looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of”. Language was at the heart of both. Wittgenstein stated that his purpose was to finally free humanity from the pointless and neurotic philosophical questing that plagues us all. As he put it, “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle”.How did he think language could solve all the problems of philosophy? How have his ideas influenced contemporary culture? And could his thought ever achieve the release for us that he hoped it would?With Ray Monk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and author of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius; Barry Smith, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Marie McGinn, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, there's little doubt that Ludwig Wittgenstein was a towering figure in 20th century thought. On his return to Cambridge in 1929, Maynard Keynes wrote, Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 515 train.

Wittgenstein's credited with being the greatest philosopher of the modern age, a thinker who left not one, but two philosophers for his successors to argue over. The early Wittgenstein said, The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. The later Wittgenstein replied, if God looked into our minds, he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of. Wittgenstein stated that his purpose was finally to free humanity from the pointless and neurotic philosophical questing that plagues us all, as he put it, to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle. How did he think that language could solve all the problems of philosophy? How have his ideas influenced contemporary culture? And could his thought ever achieve the release for us that he hoped it would?

With me to explore the life-work in Wittgenstein, a Ray Monk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, an author of an acclaimed biography of Wittgenstein, Marie McGinn, Senior Lecture in Philosophy at the University of York, and Barry Smith, Senior Lecture in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. Raymond Wittgenstein was born and educated in Austria before coming to Manchester as an aeronautical engineer. That's one move, and the next move is from Manchester and engineering

to Cambridge and philosophy. Can you briskly describe those two moves? Okay, starting with Vienna. He was born 1889 into a fabulously wealthy family, an immensely cultured family as well. The Wittgenstein family knew most of the leading cultural figures in Vienna at that time, and it was a particularly exciting period of Viennese cultural development. His sister was a friend of Freud, the family knew Brahms, Mala.

So he grew up at the cutting edge, so to speak, of musical, literary, intellectual culture. He actually, he was the youngest of eight children, and he was regarded as the slow one of the family. His brothers especially were immensely gifted. He chose to study engineering where his older brothers had tended to go into the arts. Two of his brothers committed suicide before he went to Manchester. One had wanted to be a composer, the other had wanted a career in theatre. And Wittgenstein's father, who practically owned the iron and steel industry in the Habsburg Empire,

wanted them to follow him into business. Now, Wittgenstein had no ambitions to be a composer or a theatre director or a writer. His interests were in the sciences and engineering in particular. He went to a fairly ordinary real schuler in Linz, which has become famous as the school that Adolf Hitler went to and is distinguished for very little else. He then decided to specialise in engineering and went to Manchester originally to study aeronautical engineering.

Now it's at Manchester that his philosophical interest developed, and very quickly they developed in this way, that he was trying to design a propeller, which to a large extent is a mathematical task. So he became very interested in mathematics, started attending mathematics lectures at the University of Manchester, became interested in the question, what is mathematics? And that led him to read the principles of mathematics by Bertrand Russell.

And being Wittgenstein, being used to going straight to the top, he didn't correspond with Russell or anything, he just went straight down to Cambridge and presented himself to Bertrand Russell at Trinity College and followed Russell everywhere. Russell, to begin with, thought he was mad, and within a few months was persuaded that Wittgenstein was a philosophical genius. What was it about, that's a terrific summary.

very much. We had Freud, we had Hitler, we had Vienna, we had the Hotsberg Empire, we went to aeronautical engineering in Manchester, that's a story in itself, but for another time. So what was it, what can you, can you equally succinctly summarise what it was about this young man from Manchester that convinced Earl Russell, Russell, of his genius? It's very difficult to know. None of Wittgenstein's work from that period, that very early period survives. Russell, in later life, told a story that after a month or so of regarding Wittgenstein as a madman, Wittgenstein came to him and said, you know, do you think I'm an idiot or not? And Russell said, well, I don't know whether you're an idiot. Write something on philosophy,

and I'll tell you. And after the Christmas vacation, Russell says, Wittgenstein produced some writing. We don't know what it was or what it was about. And Russell claims that after reading the first sentence, he said to Wittgenstein, no, you're not an idiot. We just don't know. The best guess is that Wittgenstein straightaway was hooked by the problem left unresolved by Russell's book, The Principles of Mathematics. The unresolved problem there is one that comes from Russell's paradox,

and in its broadest formulation, the problem is, what is logic? Yes, and we must emphasise how Eminent Russell himself was at the time and how well received that book of his had been. So when you said that Wittgenstein went to the top, he really did go to the top. Oh, yes. There were very few people writing on the philosophy of mathematics at that time, and Russell was certainly one of the most distinguished. The principles of mathematics had been published,

and also when Wittgenstein met him, he'd just finished with Whitehead, the three volumes of Principia Mathematica. Barry Smith, can you take us on from Ray Monks? The platform is given us there. So what have Wittgenstein and Russell working on together, the work which led to Wittgenstein's first great work, the Tractatus, Tractatus, Tractatus, Logitius, published in 1921. They're working on mathematics and logic. Can you bring those two together? Yes. Russell was very concerned with the nature of mathematics. He was himself a very distinguished mathematical scholar.

If you begin to think what is mathematics about, you're puzzled by two things as a philosopher. One is that it's very certain. Propositions of mathematics are things we know with absolute surety. At the same time, we don't really know what mathematics is about. If we talk about numbers, what are they? They don't seem to be in the world. We don't bump into them. They're not just products of our mind,

because we seem to be answerable to properties of mathematics. It's not under our control and volition. So that suddenly makes the nature of mathematical truth deeply problematic. Why is this truth so hard and so certain? and yet its subject matter so elusive. So at that time, Russell is working, basing his ideas on another philosopher in Germany, Gottlob Frege.

And Frege had thought, perhaps we can reduce the truths of mathematics, in particular truths of arithmetic, to truths of logic. So now we've got a reduction to one problem. What's logic about what gives us the status of certainty that logical propositions have? Now, Frege had a view that logic

was the most general laws there were. They were laws of thought, but there were laws that governed an abstract realm of thought. We have to think of thoughts as not being in our heads, but as it were, all the possibilities of thinking out there in some abstract platonic realm. Logic governs that realm. Now, you can think of Wittgenstein and Russell

as finding this a little bit too philosophically extravagant, a little bit too Utre. Now we want to know, can we domesticate, logic? Can we find a place for logic in the world, in the natural world? And in the tractatus, Wittgenstein is very concerned to find a home for logic, but he knows that truths of logic, propositions of logic, are not descriptions of the world. So, I know this is, you three are pouring a lifetime experience into these 45 minutes, but there we go. What did he do? What was there a central notion that he brought to bear on this, or was there

a cluster of notions. What did he do? For example, what is his picture theory? Is that someone near the middle of what he was doing? Yeah, I mean, maybe I can try to do two things at once. He's interested in how language is used by scientists and those who purport to describe the world to state facts, to describe the world and describe all the facts there are in the world. Now, if language has as its job, depicting everything that is the case, everything that we can say truly about the world? What about the propositions of logic? They don't seem to describe states of affairs in the world. They don't describe the arrangement of tables and chairs and people and cups and so on. So if truths of logic are true no matter how the world is, then here's the tantalizing thought.

Maybe the truths of logic, if they stay true regardless of how things are in the world, they're not descriptions of the world, but they're as it were the boundaries of the world. They might show us the limits of what can intelligibly be the case. Now, that combined with that, the idea that Wittgenstein sees a relationship between language and reality that goes something like this, and I'm having to be necessarily rough and crude here, if we've got a language which described all the arrangements of things in the world and all the facts of the world, take all those parts of language and think of all the possible recombinations of their parts that are legitimate, that are legitimate that the language allows. Now you describe all the possible ways the world could be,

not just the way it actually is, but all the possible ways it could be. Language then, in describing all the possibilities there are, describes the limits of reality, so the limits of language are the limits of reality. And the boundaries of what's intelligible are the boundaries of logic. If you stray beyond logic, you're just not making sense. Can we take that on, Marim again? He used the phrases that the atomic facts and elementary propositions,

the world was full of atomic facts, and language matched them with elementary propositions. One was the objects of the world, one were the names, these elementary propositions. Can we just take on what Barry Smith has said there and try to develop a little bit? Right. Well, one of the... He thinks that the key to understanding the status of logic

is to understand the nature of the proposition. If you can understand the nature of the proposition, then you will have already made clear what the nature and status of the propositions of logic are. Can you give us an example of that? It's very difficult to give examples because notoriously, Wittgenstein himself doesn't give any examples

of what he takes to be an elementary proposition. It has to meet a number of conditions. The elements of the proposition, the words that occur in it, have to stand for simples, and each elementary proposition is logically independent of any other elementary proposition. And he never gives any example of such a proposition, but perhaps one could think of something that he's thinking along the lines of some kind of phenomenal language

in which one says, red to the left of green, that one's describing one's experience, immediate experience, in using these expressions that stand for simple, the colours, for example, might be an example of a simple object in the tractators, so that these objects, something like what the word red stands for, is independent of any particular state of affairs,

but we use this word in propositions to describe states of affairs that either exist or don't exist. Is it too simplistic to say, he sees it as a real world out there, onto which we stick the label of a real world out there, on which we stick the label of words. The way that language connects with the world for Wittgenstein is through the notions of truth and falsity.

We have a system of representation in which we express propositions, and to grasp the sense of those propositions is to understand the circumstances in which it's true and the circumstances in which it's false. So that language applies to the world insofar as it's a kind of measure of the world, that we can measure propositions against reality for truth and falsity. That's, as I understand it, the primary way that he thinks language connects with the world. It's not directly through giving names to things.

It's not through saying this is blue. It's through the way that the word blue has a role in a system of representation. And that system of representation, in that system of representation, we express propositions that are either true or false. It's the application of the proposition that connects. He famously ended the tractators with the phrase, whereof one cannot speak, there of one must be silent. Can you draw this out for us?

Right. Well, this is the final remark of the tractator's, Proposition 7, and there is a sense of a kind of culmination in this remark and a kind of drawing together of themes. The book's been concerned with a number of topics, the nature of proposition, the nature of philosophy, the nature and status of the propositions of logic, solipsism and ethics. And Proposition 7 seems to be saying that

what Wittgenstein has tried to get us to see in relation to all of these topics, that what he's trying to get us to see in relation to all of those topics is something that's expressed in proposition whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. And what unifies these topics is that each of them is a focus for philosophical confusion. And the sense of seven,

wherever we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent, is that these confusions all have their origin in our desire to speak of something, to represent in a proposition, something that can't be spoken or represented in a proposition. Now, I think this is not to be understood

as him committing himself to the idea of ineffable truths, to the idea that there are deep truths about the world that have to be grasped wordlessly. it's rather that there's a danger in taking something that has nothing to do with anything's being true or false and treating it as if it can be represented as a truth. Now the idea is clearer in connection with some of the topics than others and perhaps it's clearest in connection with language,

going back to the thought that you can express a proposition only insofar as it belongs to a system of representation that stands in a projective relation to the world. I've left a lot of people behind. I might be completely wrong, but I think we have to, I think we have to break it down a bit more if you're going to get there. I honestly do. I probably get slammed on the website, but I think we've got to break that down a bit more. We've got propositions and representations, and I think we can address it a little bit more directly in this. Ray, would you have a crack? Where-on cannot speak, there of one is concerned. My view is slightly different to Marys, actually, because it seems to me that Viconstein does believe that there are truths that are ineffable. I think Wittgenstein felt this, that there are ethical truths, there are religious truths. There are truths about the meaning of life, and that all of these truths are at one and the same time enormously important and unsayable. Now, he'd already distinguished between saying and showing in discussing logic.

his view was broadly speaking this that what Russell had tried to say about logic can't be said and when Russell got into problems theorised it. Remember his original question was what is logic Russell had a go at answering that question but had got himself enmeshed

in problems, paradoxes, contradictions Viconstine's diagnosis of that was that the reason he was getting himself into such a series of messes was that he misunderstood the limits of language. He thought he could say something which has to be shown. Now, thinking of the picture theory, if you imagine a person and then a picture of the person,

the picture has to have something in common with the person in order to be a picture. There has to be some similarity, something in common between the picture and the person. Now, Wittgenstein's claim was that you can't picture what a picture has to have in common. So a proposition can picture a fact, but a proposition can't picture the victorial relationship. That has to be shown, right? It's a bit like seeing a similarity.

If you see a similarity between a mother and a daughter, you see the mother, you see the daughter, the similarity isn't a third thing that you see. right, when you see a similarity between a mother and a daughter. Well, you know, that's a rough analogy to what's going on here. You've got the proposition, you've got the picture, but you cannot have another proposition that's picturing the picturing relationship. So that has to be shown rather than said. Now, the awkward thing is that that includes everything

that Vittgenstein himself has said in the tractators. So on the traditional interpretation, which is also my interpretation, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus is trying to get across something that he himself regards as impossible to say. And he ends, you know, towards the end of the tractatus, he says that the reader who understands him sees that Vickensine's own propositions in the tractatus themselves are senseless. However, the very awkward thing is that in a preface, he talks about the truth of the thoughts contained in this book. And so I think he does think that there are truths that have to be shown, and I think there is a connection here with the various mystical traditions.

You know, after all, the thought that the deepest truths are those which are unsayable is not new to Wittgenstein. It's part of Taoism. It's part of Buddhism. It's part of a whole series of mystical traditions. Can we – is there any way, Barry Smith, in which we can get some examples of these propositions? sentences. Just to sort of throw a bit of common daylight light on this, before we move on from the tractatus, can we just do a summary of what he arrived up there and what was radical about it?

But is there any way we can get a couple of concrete examples here? I'll build up to that. Let me try and do it. Look, here's the thing that Ray's talking about that's paradoxical. The idea is that you're trying to draw the limits to language, the limits to what's intelligible in thought and language. with drawing a limit is that you seem to have to stand on both sides of the line. There's something a little bit odd about saying, here's the boundary, we can't go beyond it, because to understand the boundaries to sort of see where it's drawn.

So he's worried about how we actually describe limits without breaching them, without being outside them. Now, what are the limits? The limits are the limits of what you can say in science. Science has got a perfectly good job of trying to describe the way the world is and how things work. Now what about all the things that we can't put into scientific speak? We might want to say that the world has a certain meaning for us or that things are valuable. Now when we say that life has a value or has a meaning, as Wittgenstein points out, that's not just one more fact. It's not going to be found in the world alongside water boiling at 100 degrees Celsius

and certain facts about chemical substances. So what are we to make of that idea that the world has value or that there's a meaning to our lives. Instead of it being something that we state in another proposition or that scientists might investigate, it's not a part of the world, it's an attitude to the world. It's a way that we regard the world. So if you've got the facts in front of you, there's something else that you can do other than just list them, you can take up a stance in respect of what you find there. And that's what gives the world its ethical value. That's what we might have. have over and above. Now that's for Wittgenstein, in doing philosophy, one's doing something like that.

One's trying to say, look, philosophy's job is just to say what can intelligibly be said, and that's maybe to remind ourselves that what can be intelligibly said is said by science. But then where does philosophy belong? Is it also a science? No, it's not. So it's got to be not another body of doctrine. It's got to be an activity, a way of describing the relationship between language and the world. But if you're describing the relationship between language and the world, you seem to be slightly outside language. That's paradoxical form.

So at the end, he says, my book's deeply dishonest. If you've understood what I'm saying, that only certain propositions are meaningful, what are we to make of philosophical propositions? They look as though they're not meaningful, and now he's breached his own limits. Murray.

To go back to the question that Ray Monk said, first interested Wittgenstein in writing the tractators, what is logic, that both Russell and Fregear had treated logic as if it was a kind of science itself, that it expressed the most general truths about the world. Wittgenstein thinks there are deep problems with that. And actually it's coming to see that logic has to do with the rules

by which we can represent anything at all. It's status as the rules of representation. And that it's for that, so it's going away, from Ray's thought that it's because they're ineffable truths. It's because the status of logic is actually something to do with the rules by which we can say

anything, the condition of our expressing a proposition, that those rules can't themselves be expressed as propositions. So that's, it's a kind of clarification. It's not, I think, a kind of mysticism.

Can I move now from, so we've had some sort of roundup or look at at the tractators. When he came back to Cambridge, Marriamagin, and in 1929, having taken time off of philosophy and being a school teacher and built a house and so on and so forth,

for many years, and he came back and he began work on what became the philosophical investigations, which many people think are almost a contradiction of the tractators. In what way were they different? What had made his stuff? What was the difference in that? that made it almost a second body of work.

Yes, I don't myself see it as a contradiction, but definitely some very serious development. When he writes the tractatus, he thinks about language in terms of a thought that represents the world. The key notion in the tractators is a notion of a proposition as something that represents the world. The pen in my pocket represents the world? Yes.

Fine. And it's a thought. he's particularly concerned with our use of language to express thoughts. When we come to the investigations, the famous first paragraph in which Wittgenstein presents an image of a use of language, it's shopping. Here are people operating with words in the course of activities that are not themselves linguistic.

So language has in the investigations become woven in with. a practice, human practices, of which he lists a huge number. We go shopping, we make up riddles, we tell jokes, we describe things, we give plans from which somebody else constructs things. We do all kinds of things with language. In a way, he's no longer thinking about a thinker, representing. He's thinking about a living human being engaged in the world and using language in the course of that engagement,

using it operating with language. So language itself becomes an instrument, a tool that we use in the course of our other activities. And in a sense it's not fixed. It isn't logical. You can't sort of fix this thing and there's one truth to one proposition. I mean, there are many different ways of using it,

coming at it, many contexts, and it depends as much on the context. I understand that, but what does that mean for his overall picture of the world? But, I mean, again, he describes his own early view as a kind of a primitive view of language or a language or a view of a language that's more primitive than ours. It's idealized, it's determinate, it's precise.

And gradually through the middle period he comes to see not only the complexity of the logical structure of our language, but that our language is in its nature something elastic, ambiguous, something which we're constantly extending, using in new ways,

and that the mastery that we have of it is not something that can be described in a determinate set of rules. Raymond, given the impact that the tractators had on philosophers and still does have, what was the reaction to what was a, obviously of things in common, but a different approach to

the central notions of language in the world? Sure. Well, the reaction came in waves. you have to remember that Wittgenstein didn't publish the philosophical investigations in his lifetime. It was published posthumously. Nevertheless, he started the lectures that he gave at Cambridge from 1930 onwards gave people an idea of the way, the new ways in which his thought was moving. And so from 19, you know, from the 1930s onwards, people were aware that there was a new,

a new Wittgenstein, so to speak. Now, there were some hostile reaction. Bertrand Russell in particular, distinguished sharply the early from the later Wittgenstein. He admired the tractatus, but said about the later work, he said,

Wittgenstein has grown tired of serious thinking and invented a doctrine to make it unnecessary. But I think it's true to say that at the time of Wittgenstein's death, that was a minority view among British and American philosophers. And in the 1950s,

English speech, speaking philosophy was to a very large extent Wittgensteinian in its methods and its conception of what philosophy was. I think since then there's been a twist in the mainstream of analytic philosophy that it's become more Rasellian and less Wittgensteinian

in that it's a central view of the later Wittgenstein that there can be no such thing as a philosophical theory. And I think most analytic philosophers nowadays regard themselves as engaged in precisely the kind of philosophical theory the possibility of which Wittgenstein denied.

Byr-Smith, do you think it would be helpful if we could say he thought of language this way in the tractators and this way in the philosophical investigation? Do you think we might get a bit of like doing it like that? Can you ever go at that? Yeah. I mean, I think in the tractatus we've got the idea of meaning as belonging to a system, formal system.

Almost as it were like a science Almost like a science Underneath mathematics was a logic Mathematics was a science Logic was being looked at by Russell and Wittgenstein at the time and by Gottlob Frege as like a science And now this is a completely different

Taking off point So instead of thinking that we get at the nature of language By constructing a kind of systematic description of it Where the system shows us it's complicated in our workings And we get at the logical form And that's the essence of language each of the components of a meaningful proposition being system bound, being entities that participate in certain roles. Instead of that, he's moving to a picture where language is only in existence, only comes to have significance for us because it's human beings who use it.

So the big change is not to think of language as being systematic and scientifically describable, but instead thinking of language is bound up with human life. in human practices. Once you do that, you get away from the idea that there is an essence to language. He says in the investigations there is no essence to language. And we're not to try to look for the logical form underlying language, as though it was there for the philosopher to find by a little bit of logical burrowing. Instead, everything there is to the significance of language must lie on its surface,

must be open to view. The trouble he thinks with philosophy and perhaps even with his previous self was that he was looking for something under the surface. Now we have to see that language is showing its own nature on its face. Nothing is hidden. The danger is that we don't see what's before us, that we misperceive it or misrepresent it. So here's the idea.

In the tractatus, you get this rather precise, rather formal system. Frege and Russell wanted very formal descriptions of language when it was working well, working properly. other bits of language were sort of imperfect and messy. By the time he gets to the investigation, Wittgenstein's saying, there's nothing wrong with language. In fact, in all its richness and messiness, it's working just fine. We, the users of it, don't have trouble with it.

Now, here's the other quick change, is that you might have thought that the essence of meaning was a connection between bits of language and bits of the world. Crudely, you might think words stand for objects. By the time you get to the investigations, he says, what gives these mere dead signs, these symbols that we write on paper, what gives them life?

The only thing that gives them life is the use we make of them. It's not that they stand for objects. The meaning is use. Meaning is use is the new idea. That's the big idea. Now, you view the word, Mary used the word essence a lot, Mary. And the idea of there being something essential in language,

something behind language, something being essential in ideas, is a Socratic one, that there is one truth. And if you ask enough questions, the examples are not important, you get to the one truth. As I understand it, Wittgenstein is saying, well, the examples are what we have. Yes.

And essentialism, which is something that people have sought after in religion and science and philosophy for an approach for a very long time. Essentialism is something that is impossible to pursue with any profit. Is that right? Well, I think one has to be careful here, because he does speak of himself in the investigations, are still interested in the essence of language, the way that it functions. But he thinks that, unlike in the tractatus,

where he thought there was a common essence to all representation, which was logic, he now thinks that the way that you get a clear view of this essence is actually by looking at all the different language games, which don't share anything. So there isn't anything, I mean, that we engage in all these linguistic practices. They don't themselves have anything in. common, what we're interested in is their distinctions, their differences. We're actually now interested in getting an overview of the great city of language with all its different suburbs and

downtown areas and so on. So that we're not interested in a generalisation. We're interested in an overview. We're interested in getting a clear view of the whole through looking at this bit and then this bit, seeing the relationships between them, seeing the differences between them. seeing how this bit connects with that bit and so on. So that we do get a view of language, but that view is not something that you can express in a thesis, in a generalisation, in saying what all language is. Can I ask, Ray, the Descartes, perhaps in some ways the father of modern West philosophy,

I think, therefore I am, and the idea that we think first, we find language to cloak, describe our thoughts. Was Wittgenstein turning that on its head in a way? So how was he doing that? Okay. Through what's become known as the private language argument, the essence of which is that philosophy since Descartes has got it wrong

about the relative priority of the private and the public. I mean, as you say, Descartes' image is this, that I know that I'm thinking, there's a philosophical problem about your mind. How do I know that you're conscious? How do I know that you're thinking? So the private is certain, the public is uncertain. Vic and Stein in the private language argument turns out around and says, look, the public has to be prior to the private.

Because it's through, you know, as Barry and Marion have emphasized in the later work, The later work is all about language embodied in practice in a community. And Vicensai says, look, you know the contents of your thoughts, not prior to your acquisition of language. It's rather because you take part in a community and you know the words of the language that you can describe your own thinking. So it's being in a community first. Be in a community, acquire the language of that community,

and then you're in a position to say what it is that you're thinking. Barry Smith, he seemed to suggest that we can sign that before we have language we cannot think. Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that? No, but let me try and do my best to explain why he thought that. He criticises, early on in the investigations, he criticises Augustine for talking about how a child learns language.

He says to send Augustine. Yeah, and it's as if the child already had a language. It was just the language of thought. and then tries to work out what these public noises are and tries to engage in a bit of translation between the words in the world and the thoughts in the head. Now, that treats learning a language as something like learning a second language. And that's just not how it could be for Wittgenstein.

Where would we get the articulacy and the concepts that we use to deploy, to think about the world, to talk about the world, to think about all the parts of the world, unless they gradually formed in our minds, through our dealings with others who actually help us form the mind and help us to think. I mean, as you said, he doesn't see language as a clothing for thought. He thinks of language as perhaps the fabric of thinking. You come to be minded, you come to be a thinker by finding the words to express your thoughts,

and without those words, there might not be thought. Now, that, as you said, turns philosophy on its head. Descartes had started with the inner. world of the thinker trying to get from the inner world out there to the world and to others. There isn't going to be an inner world. It's not going to have shape and contour and structure until you're already bound up with others, until others have taught you the way of making significance in your thinking by speech. So suddenly thought has a kind of public dimension. Mari, would you like to take that on?

I agree with what Barry said. I mean, I think that it isn't that he wants to deny that animals and infants and so on are subjects in the sense that they feel pain. Perhaps animals have, you know, primitive intentions, the cat intends to catch the bird and so on, that we can use our psychological concepts to describe animals and infants,

things that don't. have language. But when we teach the child, language for giving expression to what it feels, we're beginning to open up a world for that child. I mean that it now, it begins by giving a cry to express its pain. Hickenstein says, well, first of all, in this position of recognizing the child as a subject who's in pain, we now teach it, exclamations, oh, oh, oh, and so on. And then we teach it to express its feelings in language. I'm in pain. And once it's learned I'm in pain,

it's now in a position to learn he's in pain and you're in pain and he's pretending to be in pain that the kind of the psychological possibilities for this child begin to grow more complex, more intricate

as it acquires psychological concepts so that the psychological concepts apply to things that don't have language but they apply to them in a more primitive way that there's a whole kind of complexity and intricacy that grows up with the acquisition of psychological concepts. Raymond, how did this idea

infiltrate it to the more general culture? In what way can we see? Oh, the later thought. Well, I think bit by bit, I think one thing that's crucial here in the infiltration, so to speak, a bit of science ideas outside of philosophy.

One thing that's crucially important there is the charismatic nature of Wittgenstein himself. You know, I think people, particularly academics, are reluctant to admit this, but a lot of people are drawn to Wittgenstein's work because they're drawn to Wittgenstein himself.

He was enormously interesting, intense, and as I say, charismatic individual. Now, so, and people were aware that his work isn't just a series of reflections about the nature of logic and language that he was driven by cultural concerns. He strongly disliked the way our culture was going

in its worship of science, as he put it. And I think that brings a strong chord, resonates with thoughts that a lot of people have had outside of academic philosophy. And so people in other disciplines, psychology, anthropology, theology, theology and so on, look to Wittgenstein, I think, to somebody who can give voice to a dissatisfaction with the intellectual culture of the 20th century and its overestimation of the value of science and the power of science. What would your view be on this? Well, I think there's probably something more than that.

I mean, what he's doing is he's talking about the nature of philosophy. So, you know, narcissistically, philosophers are going to be kind of interested in that. I also think that you can't talk about the nature of philosophy in itself. You have to be doing it and reflecting on it at the same time. It's very boring if we just talk about what philosophy is. But if you're concerned with philosophical problems, what's the nature of the mind, what's the nature of language? How do they connect with each other? how do they get you access to the world?

And at the same time, you're wondering what you're doing when you're engaged in this activity and what you could find out, that's getting at the heart of philosophy. I also think that Wittgenstein shows you how to do philosophy. If you get people to read them and you get them engaged with his thinking, they're already doing it. It's very hard to say on programs like this what philosophy is, but by doing it, you find out what it is,

even if you're no better able to say what it is. Ray talked about this charisma, Mary, and one of the things that is wonderful about him is this gift of the memorable phrase like he wanted to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle. What did you mean by that, briefly, I'm frightened. Right. Yes, well, philosophical problems,

he thinks that the kind of traditional problems of philosophy, scepticism about the external world, skepticism about other minds, mind-body problem, that these have their roots in a misunderstanding of how our concepts function. so that he wants to do a certain amount of diagnosis in showing how you've misunderstood those concepts, showing you how they actually function, and coming to see clearly how this bit of our language works is the way of showing the flyer out of the bottle.

Well, thank you all very much. It's convinced me this programme that we need to do several programs on Wittgenstein. But thank you very much for making it as clear as you have done. Next week we'll be talking about the devil. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.