DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2010.00402.

Thought’s Social Nature

Charles Travis

Abstract: Wittgenstein, throughout his career, was deeply Fregean.

Frege thought of thought as essentially social, in this sense: whatever
I can think is what others could think, deny, debate, investigate.
Such, for him, was one central part of judgement’s objectivity.
Another was that truths are discovered, not invented: what is true
is so, whether recognised as such or not. (Later) Wittgenstein
developed Frege’s idea of thought as social compatibly with that
second part. In this he exploits some further Fregean ideas: of a
certain generality intrinsic to a thought; of lack of that generality in
that which a thought represents as instancing some such generality.
(I refer to this below as the ‘conceptual-nonconceptual’ distinction.)
Seeing Wittgenstein as thus building on Frege helps clarify (inter
alia) his worries, in the Blue Book, and the Investigations, about
meaning, intending, and understanding, and the point of the rule
following discussion.

Not just agreement in definition, but also (strange as it may sound)

agreement in judgements, is part of what an understanding is.
(Philosophical Investigations §242. Throughout all translations are mine.)

It is not hard, and not always wrong, to see Frege and later Wittgenstein as
opponents. But it is often more productive to see Frege as bequeathing deep and
seminal insights which Wittgenstein then adopts, unfolds, and brings to full
fruition. This essay concerns a case in point. Frege’s insights, in this case, are, first
and foremost, two ideas about thoughts: one about a thought’s essentially social
character; one about a sort of generality which is intrinsic to being a thought.
Wittgenstein’s main idea here is contained in the motto above. It is thus the main
moral of the rule-following discussion of the Investigations. It is an idea he is
already working towards in the Blue Book when he says,

What one wishes to say is: ‘Every sign is capable of interpretation; but the
meaning mustn’t be capable of interpretation. It is the last interpretation.’
(Wittgenstein 1958: 34)

It is an idea of how to conceive our meaning our words as we thus must. It is

an idea Wittgenstein also is working towards in the Investigations from about
§§429–464, e.g. in this passage:

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