This reading begins the first of two weeks in which we will look at Wittgenstein and people influenced directly by him. We will not be reading Wittgenstein himself; the closest we will come is Moore’s account of some of his lectures after he returned to Cambridge to teach. At the beginning of the assignment (pp. 253-255), Moore will describe the circumstances and outline the content of the lectures he recorded.

Moore’s report of Wittgenstein’s lectures is organized by topic (see Klemke, pp. 255-256) and was published in three installments. The first topic (A) takes up two installments, and Klemke’s anthology includes the first of these. The report of Wittgenstein’s discussions of mathematical propositions—beginning with the heading (β) matching the (α) on p. 260—forms the second installment. Topics (B)-(H) appear in the third installment, and Klemke’s anthology includes the last of these. You can find Moore’s full report on JSTOR as follows:

Wittgenstein’s thought developed considerably through the period of these lectures. He began with views close to those of the logical positivists and ended very close to the views developed in the Philosophical Investigations (which I’ll abbreviate PI), the posthumous work for which he is best known. These changes are one of the reasons why Moore sometimes finds it difficult to fit together ideas from different series of lectures he attended. Moore provides a pretty clear organization for the ideas he reports, so I’ll confine myself to suggesting some ideas from Wittgenstein’s later work to compare with the ones Moore reports here.

•  Meaning of words (cf. Moore’s (A) (a), pp. 256-259). Wittgenstein was eventually willing to say that “for a large number of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PI, §43). He emphasized the importance of recognizing a wide variety of uses and of seeing these uses as embedded in activities of various sorts. It was in the latter connection that he used the term “language games” that Moore notes on p. 259. He suggested a comparison with children’s games in which certain forms of words accompany other activities.

•  Propositions (cf. Moore’s (A) (b), pp. 259-263). Another aspect of Wittgenstein’s discussion of the meaning of words appeared first in connection with abstract terms like “proposition” and “number” though he went on to use more concrete terms like “leaf” and “game” as his examples. He said of games, “If you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that” (PI, §66). He called such similarities “family relationships” and argued that, although we have the ability to recognize new examples of games, leaves, numbers, or propositions, we can cite nothing more than such varied connections to examples we already know.

Wittgenstein has an analogous concern in the case of sentences, and that’s why he criticizes the conception of a proposition as a “shadow” (pp. 262-263). What ties an expectation to the states of affairs that fulfill it? We might think that the tie is a shadowy state of affairs that is somehow present in the expectation, but Wittgenstein says, “It is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact” (PI, §445). That is, we say that certain outcomes are what we expected.

•  Philosophy (cf. Moore’s (H), pp. 264-265). In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein didn’t compare his approach to that of traditional philosophy in the way Moore reports; but he did make related contrasts. For example, he said, “Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (PI, §38), and, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PI, §109). One of the ways he diagnoses the difficulty these quotations point to is this: we become entranced (i.e., “bewitched”) by superficial analogies between different parts of language; and, although we cannot see how language can work in the way the analogy suggests, we focus on the analogy instead of the real use of language (and thus let language “go on holiday”). Philosophy that tries to solve such false problems can be countered by philosophy that battles against bewitchment by “assembling reminders” (PI, §127) of the actual use of language.