The grammatical investigations Wittgenstein undertakes in the Investigations largely represent a critical response to the mythology of signs and psychology in the Tractatus. The discussion of ―thinking‖ and ―thought‖ (including other intentional states) in the Investigations is prompted by Wittgenstein‘s early misconceptions about language and its use, and the role of psychological processes in representation.144 In this section I shall be concerned with clarifying what, according to later Wittgenstein, motivates the kind of thinking about ―thinking‖ that makes it something ―queer‖ and sublime.
I have shown above that in the Tractatus, internal processes of thinking, meaning, and understanding are taken to have an important function in representation. Thinking the sense of a proposition is the method of projection of a possible situation onto perceptible signs (TLP 3.11). This procedure, in the later Wittgenstein‘s idiom, ―breathes life‖ into otherwise
144
131 dead signs. The young Wittgenstein imagines thoughts to be a ―kind of language‖, only logically superior to ordinary language, and free from the problems associated with the use of ordinary signs. In his 1916 notebook, he writes;
Now it is becoming clear why I thought that thinking and language were the same. For thinking is a kind of language. For a thought too is, of course, a logical picture of the proposition, and therefore it just is a kind of proposition. (NB 82)
The language of thought does not consist of mere words but of super-words or purified signs (―symbols‖ or ―indefinables‖), which are ―psychical constituents that have the same sort of relation to reality as words‖ (NB 131). Ordinary language becomes a symbolic system only when it is used to express thoughts about possible situations.
As an upshot of neglecting crucial aspects of depth grammar, ordinary language, in the Tractatus, represents a collection of mere signs, which can be interpreted in indefinitely many ways. Understanding an ordinary sentence, on this view, always requires an interpretation. We said that the Tractatus lays down a number of representation-related requirements, all of which are the consequences of excluding the depth grammar of expressions. One of them says that only what is itself uninterpretable is apt to represent something as thus-and-so. In the Blue Book Wittgenstein expresses this requirement as follows: ―What one wishes to say is: "Every sign is capable of interpretation; but the meaning mustn't be capable of interpretation. It is the last interpretation"‖ (BB 34). That is, the thought expressed by a propositional sign is, unlike a ―mere sign‖, immune to interpretation; the thought must be absolutely determinate and uninterpretable in order to do its job of representing something truly or falsely. Wittgenstein calls such items ―shadows‖ (see BB 32).145
Construed as ―the last interpretation‖, thought and meaning are treated as doing something remarkable that no mere sign can do: ―When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we--and our meaning--do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this--is--so.‖ (PI 95). The inner realm of shadows – thoughts that
145 Travis connects the notion of shadows with uniterpretable thoughts: ―[thoughts], thus conceived, are not
open to interpretation. They are what Wittgenstein called ‗shadows‘: semantic items interpolated between words and states of affairs that make words true or false, and somehow more closely tied to those state of affairs than mere words could‖ (Travis 2008, 127).
132 provide interpretations of words without themselves admitting of interpretations – is meant to replace our ordinary practices of using signs.
The conception of thoughts as shadows of our sentences can be further elucidated by an example. In PI 1, Wittgenstein describes a use of language: a shopkeeper operates with three different words. Then the following question is raised: ―But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word 'red' and what he is to do with the word 'five'?‖. In other words, how could the shopkeeper possibly know what to do with the word ―five‖ when all he is given are dead signs and nothing more, i.e., no instruction how to interpret these signs? What will tell him what to do with the signs? In PI 1 the question is responded by drawing attention to the shopkeeper‘s way of acting: ―Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere‖.146
But, although in PI 1 the need for further explanation is dissipated by shifting the focus onto the shopkeeper‘s skill to use (as in operate with, not merely combine) words, the way of thinking about ordinary signs as intrinsically dead and interpretable is examined in the Investigations‟s remarks on ―thinking‖ and other intentional states. In that context similar questions re-emerge: ―How does he know at all what use he is to make of the signs I give him, whatever they are?‖ (PI 433), ―How do sentences manage to represent?‖ or ―How do sentences do it?‖ (PI 435). These questions express an anxiety about ordinary language‘s capacity to represent, and a concomitant anxiety about our ability to understand the indeterminate, dead signs we hear or see. The conclusion is that internal processes of understanding or thinking must accompany our utterances. The signs with which these processes operate must be uninterpretable and reach right out to reality. Hence, "only in the act of understanding is it meant that we are to do THIS. The order--why, that is nothing but sounds, ink-marks" (PI 431). In our example, only by virtue of the connection between ordinary interpretable signs and an uninterpretable thought, the shopkeeper is in a position to understand and obey the order. Understanding an expression is grasping in a flash its complete grammar. The complete grammar of a sign is tacitly contained in the inner medium of understanding.147
146
That is, an implicit answer Wittgenstein gives here is that the shopkeeper has learned what to do with the words ‗five‘ and ‗red‘; he has learned these language games or practices, he was trained how to operate with those signs (the methods of teaching the use of these signs were different).
147 As Wittgenstein describes this view in Philosophical Grammar, it is ―as if the sign contained the whole of the grammar; as if the grammar were contained in the sign like a string of pearls in a box and he had only to
133 This leads to the conclusion that thought, meaning and understanding must be something unique, because they achieve something that no mere sign could do.
However, Wittgenstein‘s rule-following considerations show that the sublime picture of thought as a kind of uninterpretable language has a fatal flaw. Namely, on the view of understanding as an interpretation of signs, there is nothing that can stop the process of interpretation from an infinite regress. No sign with content, including a sublimed ―rule of projection‖, is immune to interpretation.148
Wittgenstein raises this objection to Frege‘s view of understanding as grasping thoughts (qua pictures) which give life to otherwise dead signs in the following passage:
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. (PG 40)
The same objection applies to the Tractatus.149 Insofar as a thought-element (or a rule of projection), which is supposed to give ordinary signs their life, is itself just another sign with content, it will be, in principle, interpretable. So, each Tractarian symbol as ―the mark of a form and a content‖ (TLP 3.31) is interpretable in an infinite number of ways just like any ordinary sign is, which then implies an infinite regress of interpretations.150 If the later Wittgenstein‘s criticism is correct – and there are numerous examples of language use that
pull it out… As if understanding were an instantaneous grasping of something from which later we only draw consequences which already exist in an ideal sense before they are drawn‖ (PG 55).
148
According to Travis, the notion of ―uninterpretable representation‖ is incoherent: ―[a] rule, like any other item with content, admits of various interpretations‖ (2008, 283) and ―[there] are no interpretation-proof rules‖ (Travis, 2006, 115). To the extent that there is no such thing as representation (rule, sign, picture, symbol) that does not admit of interpretations or understandings, the role of the (inexplicit) parochial sensibilities in determining understanding the words bear on occasion (truth-conditions) is ineliminable. 149 There is an important distinction between Frege‘s conception of thought and theTractatus. Namely, what Frege means by ―thought‖ is nothing inner or mental. Thoughts are, for Frege, shared and objective senses of our sentences. In the Tractatus thinking is construed as an formal psychological, inner procedure that brings about the projection, even though Wittgenstein is explicit about it being psychological only in Notebooks and letters to Russell, not in the Tractatus.
150 As Wittgenstein emphasises: ―even if there were such a shadow it would be susceptible of different interpretations just as expression is... You can‘t give any picture which can‘t be misinterpreted... No interpolation between a sign and its fulfilment does away with the sign‖ (Quoted in Moore 1993)
134 substantiate it151 – it brings into question the feasibility of any Tractatus-style calculus whose aim is to lay bare all the internal connections between linguistic expressions in order to preclude any possibility of misunderstanding.
Once again I want to call the reader‘s attention to the inconsistency between, on the one hand, Hacker‘s optimism as regards the project of comprehensive tabulation of sense- determining rules of grammar, and, on the other hand, Wittgenstein‘s scepticism concerning the idea of uninterpretable thoughts, and his criticism of these as sublimed shadows, which are really no more than further signs, subject to interpretation. Analogously to the Tractarian symbols whose combinatorial potential is recorded in the ―rules of logical syntax‖, the role of Hacker‘s ―rules of grammar‖ is to determine combinatorial possibilities of words. To that extent, they are also an example of uninterpretable signs with content, which are there to fix the interpretation and ―give life‖ to other signs. Like the Tractarian ―symbol‖, Hacker‘s ―rule of grammar‖ inasmuch as it has content152
is just another shadow Wittgenstein criticises as part of the sublimed view of language. As Travis correctly points out commenting on Wittgenstein‘s rule-following lessons, ―[there] are no interpretation- proof rules‖ (Travis 2006, 115). Discussions of the concepts of understanding, meaning, thinking, expecting, imagining etc., in the Investigations, are aimed at shattering this picture of shadows that breathe life to our ordinary language, by showing that successful communication and understanding of what is said by our sentences are essentially connected with our practical competence to operate with signs on different occasions, rather than with the realm of shadows.