Ludwig Witttgenstein: The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972)

Extract from ‘The Blue Book’ (pp. 34-44)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably the single most influential philosopher of the 20th Century. During his life-time, Wittgenstein published a short but hugely influential book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and one brief journal article. However, he taught in the University of Cambridge, and the fact that he did not publish his thoughts may only have added to the considerable mystique that surrounded him. After his death, his unfinished manuscripts and notes based on his lectures were published, and they have been puzzling philosophers ever since.

The Blue Book and the Brown Book were dictated by Wittgenstein for the benefit of his students, and it seems that he intended to publish the Brown Book. (They are so called because of the covers in which the original books were bound). The Blue Book, from which this extract is taken, was dictated in the years 1933-1934.

In this passage, Wittgenstein deals with a topic that he returned to throughout his career, the relationship between language and thought. My way of reading this passage is as follows: Wittgenstein is trying to move us away from a picture according to which language is an outward representation of thought, where thought is something essentially private and unknowable. Instead, he wants us to think of language, something that is essentially public, as being what makes thought possible. Language is public in that we learn it from other people, and the standards we must follow are set by a community: I cannot make a unilateral decision as to what I am going to mean by a word. We do not merely guess that you use the word ‘rabbit’ to mean what I mean by ‘rabbit’: the way in which everyone uses the word is precisely what gives it the meaning it has, and if I were not capable of joining in this shared pattern of usage (participating in the language-game, as Wittgenstein would have put it), I do not know the meaning at all.

Of course, once I have learned a language, I am able to use it in private – to write words in a journal that only I will read (and perhaps write them in a code that only I understand). I can also speak when I am alone, or speak silently to myself. Wittgenstein does not think that everyone is a mind-reader. However, notice that he is trying to persuade us that there is a close connection between what we are capable of thinking and what we are capable of expressing in language.

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