Page 560 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
Natural language, being defective, may fail to be univocal: there may fail to be any one thing fixed by the ideal language which is correctly said to be the thought some natural sentence expresses. Still, Frege insists, we may understand such a sentence in one way or another, as saying this or that. Any of us, on hear- ing it, may take it to state thus and so, even if, strictly speaking, it does not univocally do that. The maximal ideal language reveals what we do in doing that: it exhibits all the understandings it is possible to have, the ways in which words may be understood, in taking them to say something in particular. To take them to say something specific to be so is always to associate them with an item in that language. That is the sense in which it is a language of thought, or better, of thoughts.
Wittgenstein's early interest centered on the ques- tion of what an ideal language would be like, leading hun to another early and abiding interest: the bounds of sense, or the distinction between sense and nonsense. Both ideas are prominent in the Tractatus. Within the picture just sketched, a sentence of one of our defective natural languages expresses nonsense
just in case there is nothing in the maximal ideal lan- guage which says what it does, if anything. In that case, there is nothing which it says, or says to be so. To express nonsense is to express, and say, exactly nothing. The interesting sort of nonsense is that where, so to speak, 'syntax outstrips semantics'; we produce words which seem grammatically in order, but they lack the semantic properties they must actually have if they are to say something. That notion is central in Wittgenstein's later, as well as in his early, philosophy. But in the later philosophy he has very different ideas as to the specific causes of such failure.
In 1914, Wittgenstein entered the Austrian army. In 1918 he became a prisoner of war in Italy. Between 1919 and 1929, he remained quasi-retired from the philosophical arena. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 with a new view of philosophy and of language; with ideas in terms of which the old leading ideas may be seen as false ideals. (It is important to keep in mind that, like any philosopher, Wittgenstein had to struggle with, and thereby develop, the new ideas. He did not always see clearly what they were, and cer- tainly did not see the same thing in them from 1929 on. Nor did he always have the words, or the uses of them, to state those ideas perspicuously, whether to himself or to others. To think otherwise would be idolatry.)
2. Wittgenstein's Later Work on Language
The old leading ideas remained central to Wittgen- stein's later philosophy, though his new concern was to exhibit in detail what is wrong with them. Thus, for example, he aims to show exactly why it is wrong 'to think that if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it he is operating a calculus according to
definite rules' (Philosophical Investigations, Sect. 81). Or why it is not 'as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially unanalyzed, as if there were some- thing hidden in them that had to be brought to light... as if we were moving towards a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation' (Sect. 91). Or exactly what the mistake is in the following:
'The essence is hidden from us': this is the form our prob- lem now assumes. We ask:' What is language?,'' What is a proposition?' And the answer to these questions is to be given once and for all; and independent of any future experience.'
(Sect. 92)
Wittgenstein was also guided continuously during his later period by another thought, which G. E. Moore reports as follows:
One chief view about propositions to which he was opposed w a s . . . that a proposition is a sort of 'shadow* intermediate between the expression... and the fact... hesaid...[thisview]wasanattempt tomakeadistinction between a proposition and a sentence — it regarded the supposed 'shadow' as something 'similar' to the fact in question; and he said that, even if there were such a 'shadow* it would not 'bring us any nearer to the fact/ since 'it would be susceptible of different interpret- ations . . . ' . . . 'No interpolation between a sign and its fulfillment does away with a sign.' He said... 'the expression of an expectation contains a description of the fact that would fulfill it,' pointing out that if I expect to see a red patch my expectation is fulfilled if and only if I do seea redpatch....
(Moore 1959: 260-61) (Compare Sects. 95,429)
Wittgenstein's rule was thus: do not try to solve a problem by drawing technical distinctions between different types of items that might bear semantic properties, as between 'proposition' and sentence, or between concepts and predicates. He had various reasons for the rule. The one that matters here is that the same sorts of problems which arose for the original items (words, for example, which may bear various understandings) are bound to arise for the newly intro- duced items as well; fresh items are not the means for solving problems. That rule, combined with his insights about the false Fregean/RusseUian ideals just discussed, yielded a truly radical approach to seman- tics, and to understandings.
2.1 Naming and Meaning
To see what the new view is, we should look at the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations. Here Wittgenstein's first concern is, ostensibly, with the relation between naming and meaning. (Meaning thus and so is what words of a language do. Though Witt- genstein sometimes uses 'meaning,' or a word that so translates, to apply to words as used on a particular occasion, here he does not.) Take the English word 'blue.' We might say that that names a certain color,
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