Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) published exactly one work of philosophy in his lifetime: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921), some 75 pages of nothing but numbered propositions. He believed it had “on all essential points” finally solved the problems of philosophy, and left the subject to become a village schoolteacher.
Ten years later he was back in Cambridge, arguing that the book’s central idea was wrong. The notebooks he kept from 1929 to the end of his life were assembled after his death as the Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1953). Early and late: one philosopher who gave opposite answers to a single question — how does language work, and where are its limits?
1. Early: a proposition is a “picture” of reality
The frame of the Tractatus: the world is made not of things but of facts (1: “The world is everything that is the case”). On the language side, a proposition (Satz) is a picture (Bild) of a fact.
Der Satz ist ein Bild der Wirklichkeit. Der Satz ist ein Modell der Wirklichkeit, so wie wir sie uns denken.
A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it. (Proposition 4.01. German quotations throughout; Japanese and English are L/LAB working translations.)
A picture can be a picture only because “something must be identical” in the picture and in what it depicts (2.161). That shared thing is logical form (Form der Abbildung, 2.17). The way names are arranged in the proposition mirrors the way objects hang together in reality. So “to know whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality” (2.223) — the proposition alone never settles it. More in the picture theory.
2. Early: the far side of what can be said, and “showing”
The picture theory has a price. Only a proposition that pictures a fact can be a picture, so anything that is not a description of fact — logical form itself, ethics, value, the sense of life — in principle cannot be said. “What mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent” (4.121). “What can be shown cannot be said” (Was gezeigt werden kann, kann nicht gesagt werden, 4.1212).
Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (5.6)
Then what of the Tractatus’s own sentences — “a proposition is a picture” and the rest? They are not descriptions of fact either. Wittgenstein says so outright: his propositions serve as a ladder, and anyone who understands him “recognises them, in the end, as nonsensical (unsinnig).” “He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed it” (6.54). And the last line —
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Proposition 7)
The inside and outside of that line are the subject of the limits of language.
3. The turn — “don’t ask for the meaning, look at the use”
The Investigations opens by quoting Augustine’s Confessions: a child learns words by watching adults point at things and name them. Wittgenstein calls this “a particular picture of the essence of human language” (Investigations §1; sections cited by number hereafter). Every word is a name, and its meaning is the object it stands for — a naïve but tenacious picture, which he first shakes loose with the language of a building site (“Slab!” “Pillar!”). Is “Slab!” a name or an order? Cut off from the scene, it has no answer.
The early mistake, the late work diagnoses, was to hunt for one essence of language — to assume that everything called “language” has something in common. Look, and there is no common essence. There is only an unnumbered mass of activities: reporting, ordering, joking, translating, greeting, praying…
4. Late: language-games and “meaning is use”
The central late concept is the language-game (Sprachspiel): “the whole, of language and the activities into which it is woven” (§7). Speaking a language is “part of an activity, or of a form of life (Lebensform)” (§23). Hence the famous formula —
Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache.
The meaning of a word is its use in the language. (§43)
(It matters that §43 restricts this to “a large class of cases — though not for all cases.”) Words are compared to the tools in a toolbox (§11): a hammer, pliers, a rule, glue — different shapes, different work. Whether “Slab!” is a name or an order depends on which language-game it is used in. More in language-games and “meaning is use”.
5. Late: family resemblance — “don’t think, but look!”
What is the essence common to “games”? Wittgenstein does not answer; he issues an order —
Denk nicht, sondern schau!
Don’t think, but look! (§66)
Look at board games, card games, ball games, tag, and you see not “something common to all” but “similarities, affinities (Ähnlichkeiten, Verwandtschaften)” that “come up and disappear.” He calls this family resemblance (Familienähnlichkeiten) (§67) — the way a family’s build, features, eye colour and gait are passed on in overlapping ways, with no one trait shared by all. Categories are not essences that nature carved; they are tied together by overlapping likeness. This chimes with “meaning works by difference” in Saussure and Sapir. More in family resemblance.
6. Late: following a rule, and the private language argument
The hardest stretch of the Investigations. When I continue a number series by “+2,” I am following a rule. And yet —
„der Regel folgen” ist eine Praxis.
“Following a rule” is a practice. (§202)
Any way of continuing can be “brought into accord” with the rule under some interpretation (the paradox of §201). So what holds a rule up is not an inner interpretation but a repeated communal practice. “Hence it is not possible to follow a rule ‘privately’” (§202).
From here comes the private language argument. Could there be a language whose words name sensations only their speaker can know? Wittgenstein’s answer is no. The famous image: everyone has a box; inside is something each calls a “beetle”; no one can look into anyone else’s box. Then “the thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty” (§293). Naming a sensation means something only where it is tied to public behaviour. More in following a rule.
In sum
| Early: Tractatus (1921) | Late: Investigations (1953) | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of language | proposition = picture of a fact | utterance = a move in a language-game |
| Meaning is | the state of affairs pictured; the object named | the way a word is used |
| Essence of language | one — picturing facts | none — a manifold linked by family resemblance |
| The task of philosophy | draw the limit of the sayable from inside | dissolve confusion by returning words to ordinary use |
| Beyond the limit | silence (ethics and value are “shown”) | problems arise “when language goes on holiday” |
Why it is still read
- Two poles of the philosophy of language — “language pictures the world” (early) and “language is action” (late) still map onto the twin programmes of semantics and pragmatics.
- “Meaning is use” — locating meaning in communal practice rather than reference feeds ordinary-language philosophy, speech-act theory, and usage-based linguistics.
- Anti-essentialism — “don’t look for the definition first, look at the cases” fed directly into categorisation research (prototype theory).
- The private-language argument — the thesis that “meaning is public” remains a watershed in the philosophy of mind and of language.
In the same years, on the linguistics side, Saussure (1916) and Sapir (1921) had reached the conclusion that a unit of language is not a substance but a position in a system. By another road, the philosopher Wittgenstein moved meaning out of “the inside of the word” and into shared use.
