Page 562 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
and a doubt which // removes—and so on?' (Sect. 84).) The private language discussion proceeds by stripping away the background of a user's reactions (except for a degenerate and futile case: the lone private linguist), and examining what happens. The upshot is that a language that got along entirely on its own steam would be no genuine language at all. No intelligible language could, in principle, conform to Frege's ideal.
3. More General Issues
With this outline of a new view, some questions that run persistently through all of Wittgenstein's phil- osophy will now be addressed. First, perspicuity. Wittgenstein remarks in a different connection: 'It is so difficult to find the beginning, Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back' (On Certainty, Sect. 471). We may alwaysmake fresh demands for further perspicuity, pushing the identification of an understanding farther back. But if we do so indefinitely, we will never arrive at anything. We are not en route to the Fregean ideal. So:
It is not our aim to refine, or complete, the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
(Sect. 133)
Within or without philosophy:
an explanation serves to remove or avert a mis- understanding—one, that is, that would occur but for the explanation; not every one that I can imagine.
(Sect. 87)
Complete perspicuity is achieved by our ordinary explanations (inter alia of meaning or content) when they achieve their goal; that is, when they leave no real or live doubt as to whether what was said/meant is this or that. Perspicuity so conceived is, of course, an occasion-sensitive affair.
Finally, nonsense. Nonsense, on this view, comes in many varieties. The most significant one is this. The view is that words depend on their surroundings, or the facts of their speaking, for bearing the sort of semantics words would bear where they said this or that to be so. Their mere semantics (meaning) as words of such and such language (say, English) is not enough for them to do this. The English sentence, 'The sky is blue,' viewed merely as an English sentence, in total abstraction from surroundings, says nothing in par- ticular to be so. There could be no such thing as isolating those states of affairs which would be: things being as that sentence, so viewed, says things to be. For though 'is blue' speaks of being blue, there are various 'sometimes-correct' ways of counting such things as the sky as being, or failing to be, that. Mean- ing alone does not show which of these ways to rely on in evaluating the truth of those words. We must
rely on surroundings to show this—typically those of a speaking—or the project of evaluation cannot begin. There is, then, a substantive burden on the sur- roundings in which words are used. Since it is a sub- stantive one, some surroundings may fail to provide what is needed from them (see Sects. 117, 501, 514, 515). W ords spoken in such surroundings may be fully grammatical and meaningful. Their semantics may be perfectly coherent. They will still have said nothing to be so, or at least nothing could count either as their being true or as their being false. This is a new con- ception of a way in which syntax may outstrip sem- antics: not by outrunning it entirely, nor by getting words paired with an incoherent or internally con- tradictory semantics (the English sentence is not inco-
herent), but rather by outrunning the situations in which words would have an adequate semantics— notably, adequate for evaluating them as to truth. This sort of nonsense is what one produces by ignoring the contribution surroundings must make, or by fail- ing to foresee how surroundings may fail to do so. Since philosophers tend to overlook the waysinwhich their words depend for their semantics on surround- ings, assuming that a meaningful sentence, used any old time, will say something, this is one typical sort of philosophical nonsense. It is epitomized not by patently opaque and turgid metaphysical prose, but rather by a philosopher who, clutching his nose says, 'I know I have a nose,' or, pointing at the ground, 'I am here,' or who, for no reason, remarks, 'Hamburger is red'—or who, for no reason, says of Jones, whose accomplishments he has briefly sketched, 'Jones understands the words "Aardvarks live in Africa".'
The profound implications of Wittgenstein's views on language and meaning have been felt in nearly all areas of philosophy from, for example, philosophy of science to ethics and aesthetics. A ceaseless outpouring of commentary and debate followed his death in 1951 and not only his ideas but many of his illustrative terms—'picture' from his early work or later 'game,' 'form of life,' 'family resemblance'—have become common currency in discussions of language.
See also: Family Resemblance; Language Game; Logical Form; Names and Descriptions; Picture The- ory of Meaning; Private Language.
Bibliography
Cavell S 1979 The Claim of Reason. Oxford University Press,
Oxford
Kenny A 1973 Wittgenstein. Harvard University Press, Cam-
bridge, MA
McGuinness B (ed.) 1967 Ludwig Wittgenstein and der
Wiener Kreis. BlackweU, Oxford
Pears D 1988 The False Prison. Oxford University Press,
Oxford
Rhees R (ed.) 1981 Recollections of Wittgenstein. Oxford
University Press, Oxford
540