Biographical sketch

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 to a wealthy and cultured Viennese family. He decided to study aeronautical engineering, and so went to Manchester University (England) in 1908. There, he became deeply interested in the philosophy of mathematics, and eventually in the works of Gottlob Frege. He met Frege, who advised him to go to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell. He did so in 1911. Wittgenstein studied in Cambridge from 1911 to 1913. When the First World War began, he joined the Austrian army, fought, and was taken captive in 1917. The war ended while he was interned. During the war years he drafted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and after the war the book was published in German and translated into English.

Around 1920, believing that he had in the Tractatus solved the problems of philosophy, he tried a variety of jobs – gardener, teacher and architect. Finally, in 1929, he found himself again entangled in philosophical problems and he returned to Cambridge to work as a philosopher. Wittgenstein was dissatisfied in various ways with the Tractatus; the problems he had treated in it he was again puzzling over. For several years in Cambridge he worked feverishly to find new and better ways of thinking through those problems. He conducted famous and darkling seminars in which he worked out many of the ideas that would compose the Philosophical Investigations. He worked on that book for roughly twenty years, drafting and redrafting the remarks in it, as well as organizing and reorganizing them.

Introduction

In what follows, we first provide and develop an example of a grammatical investigation. We then provide a short account of what a grammatical investigation is and is not. The example is not intended to typify the form such an investigation may take, but rather to give one form it may take; the account, short as it is, is not meant to exhaust all that could or even needs to be said about such investigations.

A grammatical investigation

At Zettel §504, Wittgenstein observes that “Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not. One does not say: That was not true pain or it would not have gone off so quickly.” We like to think of this remark as a cloud of soap operas reduced to a drop of grammar.

What is Wittgenstein doing here? He is investigating the grammar of “love”. He is also contesting an assimilation of its grammar to the grammar of “pain”. Pain, Wittgenstein implies, is a feeling. Since it is a feeling, we do not typically put it to the test. We do not challenge someone when he reports being in pain. – “Ouch! That hurts.” – “No, it doesn't.” We can make sense of such an exchange, but not readily as a challenge to the report of pain. We can make sense of such an exchange, say, as occurring between a father and his young son, where the father is trying to encourage his son to gain a certain kind of control over his response to pain, teaching him how to bear pain manfully.

Philosophical remarks and Philosophical Investigations

In his always instructive essay, “The Philosophy of Wittgenstein”, Rush Rhees underscores that “If you do not see how style or force of expression are important you cannot see how Wittgenstein thought of philosophical difficulties or philosophical method” (Rhees 1970a: 38). Notice that Rhees binds together Wittgenstein's understanding of style or force of expression, and his understanding of philosophical problems and methods. In doing so, Rhees properly follows Wittgenstein. In the “Preface” of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein confesses that “the best [he] could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; [his] thoughts were soon crippled if [he] tried to force them on in any single direction against their inclination”. But, after a long pause (embodied in one of his everlastingly elongated dashes), he redirects the force of his confession by binding his need to write remarks and to follow the inclination of his thoughts to the nature of his philosophical work: “And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation.” I shall return to this binding of philosophical remarks to the nature of the investigation – but first I want to consider philosophical remarks themselves. What are they?

Philosophical remarks: a first look

Wittgenstein offers a couple of very brief characterizations of philosophical remarks. He calls them “short paragraphs”. He adds that the short paragraphs sometimes form a fairly long chain about the same subject but that they sometimes jump from one topic to another.

Introduction

In her study of Husserl's logic, Suzanne Bachelard writes

The choice is decisive for Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. It is a book of logic (a “conceptual investigation” or “grammatical investigation”) and from front to back in it, Wittgenstein considers psychologism a radical vice. And “vice” is the exact word: psychologism is not treated as a false theory but as a failure more radical – a failure so much as to recognize logic at all. But the fact that psychologism is a radical vice does not mean that combating it is easier than it would be were it a false theory. It means that combating it is more complicated and requires more patience than would combating a false theory. Wittgenstein not only has to struggle against certain beliefs in his reader but also against his reader's philosophical character.

Some background: Gottlob Frege

Before looking at Wittgenstein's treatment of psychologism, it will help to consider Frege's description of psychologism and his response to it. The locus classicus is the beginning of Frege's paper, “Thoughts”. Frege explains that