Word and Meaning: Investigating Philosophical Investigations

Joshua Kates
December 2021

When discussing or interpreting PI, how to go about doing so today is a large and much

debated question. Some of what is to come, thanks to attributing something on the order of

positions, explanations, accounts, and standpoints to Wittgenstein and his text, may set off

alarms bells on this score, appearing to some as “non-Wittgensteinian.” In fact I am in

sympathetic to such concerns; I also believe that in PI Wittgenstein did not aim to establish

doctrines or fixed teachings concerning speech and language. I retain a complementary worry,

however: namely, that the belief that no positions are taken by Wittgenstein, when held in

advance of the concrete study of Wittgenstein’s text, can block access to what his work actually

does, to the richness, strangeness, and complexity of Wittgenstein’s actual writings. Such

outcomes need to be earned, by Wittgenstein’s own lights, and it is unclear that Wittgenstein

always succeeds at leaving everything as it is.

Moreover, the stew of beliefs, intuitions, prejudices, suspicions and commonplaces into

which Wittgenstein dives concerning such matters as our body, our thoughts, our selves, and our

language are not necessarily consistent nor shape themselves into any kind of whole. As found in

the everyday or in philosophy, the topics treated by Wittgenstein in aggregate are ultimately

uncharted waters; nothing ensures that various Scylla, Charybides, and Cyclopides do not lurk

among their byways. Doubtless most of our beliefs and our talk about them go to work, as

Wittgenstein sometimes says—our entire language as used is not on holiday, and there is no

point, then, nor really any possibility of subjecting our beliefs and practices to some sort of

anticipatory dubito. Nevertheless, various communities have harbored many certitudes, from
 2

phlogiston to the inevitability of progress, without their being coherent, including with other

things these communities believed.

What concretely guides the present engagement with PI, then, emerges in a passage, §203

of part I, in which Wittgenstein himself offers an uncanny mapping of his relation to his subject

matters (one not so different from the dream of walking in a foreign city and mistakenly

believing one has been there before and knows its terrain, that he proposes in part II). In §203,

Wittgenstein, or the speaker, who seem to be one and the same at this moment, notes that

“language (die Sprache) is a labyrinth of paths.” It is such a labyrinth, the speaker further

specifies, because despite coming to the “same place” (“der selben Stelle”) that place appears not

the same when approached from a different direction. Broached from “one side” a given aspect

is familiar and “you know your way about”; from another the supposedly same feature appears

foreign and unfamiliar.

The cartography offered by §203, on the present view, most aptly describe Wittgenstein’s

relation to the material he treats and thus the present study’s. It captures Wittgenstein’s own

living and open-ended engagement with PI’s subject matters. Not only are Wittgenstein’s topics

in PI enormously varied (number, pain, sensation, imagination and so on), but so, too, is the

manner in which each Wittgenstein approaches them. In PI, Wittgenstein repeatedly returns to

what seem the same subjects from different directions. Doing so, he pursues different lines of

inquiry: some taken from language learning, some from the consequences of the viewpoint in

question, others from thought experiments, and so on. Apparently, no one of these offers that

perspicuous representation that Wittgenstein and some readers highlight and sense must be made

of the relationship among these various takes on a given subject.

 3

Furthermore, Wittgenstein regularly peppers his texts with what some might call

metalevel exclamations and injunctions; a seemingly authoritative voice makes

recommendations, delivers suggestions and announces prohibitions, including at times

proscriptions of what appear to be commonly held beliefs (about pain, picturing, words, their

meanings and so on). Wittgenstein labels seemingly commonplace views of these and other

subjects as what speakers are merely "inclined to say," "dream," or versions of a “straightway

permanently closed.” How these moments are to be reconciled with Wittgenstein’s commitment

to leave everything as it is, to this reader, remains unclear.

Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophies, or at least certain received versions of them, do not,

then, always square with his text. Of course, these and other manifestations of heterogeneity and

tentativeness are by no means largely a function of flaw. The Investigations’ open-ended

character follows from the terrain it maps. The logical framework of TLP, no longer being at

hand, neither language and its workings, nor philosophy and its misprisions, in PI can be

addressed as wholes. Wittgenstein’s logical standpoint permitted him to approach language,

discourse, and truth-speaking as at least potentially raising a single, surveyable set of problems,

albeit some commentators doubt how far such continuity holds sway in TLP. In PI, without

doubt, however, Wittgenstein can only inquire into the varied and differentiated circumstances,

viewpoints and assumptions, surrounding the different instances of language and its use that he

brings to our attention. (“Rags and a mouse” §52). The necessity for numerous interlocutors in

PI, some of whom doubtless pose Wittgenstein’s own questions and suggestions, attests to to this

demand: to scratch, as it were, an inherently open-ended series of itches.

It is necessary, then, to sort through Wittgenstein's different tacks on different (and yet

connected) themes and questions, without anticipating their outcomes in advance. This demand,
 4

is all the greater, when it comes to the the two admittedly vast matters here taken up: meaning

and words. Wittgenstein's diversification of topics and modes of treating them in the case of

meaning, to be clear, is not just an unavoidable feature of the terrain his discourse finds itself on.

PI’s astonishing multiplication of analyses and approaches is instead central to what PI hopes to

accomplish in meaning’s treatment; such diversity facilitates meaning (as usually understood)

being replaced by what Wittgenstein calls “use” or taken as the latter’s equivalent (cf. §§ 1, 664).

Multiplying instances and examples is arguably Wittgenstein’s primary strategy for exhibiting

use’s primacy over standard pictures of linguistic meaning. Exhibiting the heterogeneity and

diversity of uses moves understanding away from traditional construals of meaning, by showing

that the notion of meaning framed as some self-same entity or attribute—perhaps resulting from

a process, or an intuition—cannot be maintained; meaning so construed cannot perform the work

done by our expressions when instances of their use are examined, explored, and compared in

concreto. To take use seriously entails recognizing the differences among uses themselves and

their various occasions and how these conflict with meaning’s standard construal, with the result

that the generality of meaning and rules gives way to the primacy of uses in context.

When it comes to words and language, however, PI’s diversification of topics and

multiplications of approaches yields a situation arguably more complex and difficult to navigate

than meaning’s already narrow straits. Meaning's reconceptualization, whether ultimately a

transient phenomenon or no, after all, itself evidently depends on words and language and their

invocation. Words, summoned up in Wittgenstein’s now famous language-games, themselves

appear to be the means for reworking meaning’s understanding. Words and language are

invoked, usages of them examined, in the service of getting straight various conundra, above all

these related to meaning, but also rule-following, pain, and so forth. Uses of words and the
 5

circumstances surrounding them are laid out, but in all this, what is being used, words and

language themselves receive less explicit pressure and at points appear virtually as givens.

Hence, the standard enlistment of Wittgenstein’s PI in the so-called “ linguistic turn.”

Reenvisioning meaning with PI’s profundity and radicality, however, must and does

affect the status of words, language, and signs. After all, words taken on their own, as usually

understood, cannot be envisioned, nor arguably even identified, without their presumed

meanings. Similarly, tokens, or in another parlance signifiers, “language as a spatial and

temporal phenomenon,” as Wittgenstein at one point puts it, as is further discussed below,

without their corresponding type cannot be recognized as tokens (§108). Accordingly, perturbing

the belief that “every word has a meaning,” as Wittgenstein already begins to do in PI §1,

implicates what many take to be meaning’s default or replacement: words and language.

Wittgenstein in PI, of course, also does attend to these topics: names and naming, signs,

words, and language, as we shall further see. (Recall §65: “you speak of language but you do not

ask what these all have in common…”) Though these remarks tend to be overlooked, the present

view of these themes will be drawn from Wittgenstein’s remarks. Still not only are language-

related conceptions perhaps more deeply engrained, their “pictures” still more difficult to free

ourselves from than many logical and philosophical apprehensions (especially now, some

seventy years “after Wittgenstein”); in addition, PI addresses these topics more sporadically and

more laterally than meaning—the recurrence to which theme explicitly closes all of part I.

PI itself, then, may seem stretched, like Heracleitus’ bow, between meaning’s revision

thanks to language and that revision’s consequences (or lack thereof) for language and words

themselves. Some commentators, accordingly, deem inadequate Part I’s portrayal of words; they

take the the famous builder’s game at Part I’s start to be a parody, or at least a gravely etiolated
 6

view, of our working relation to words and language.1 They look to part II of PI, a now

contested, yet still presumably significant addendum, to right this wrong. In part II, Wittgenstein

more explicitly and sustainedly takes on verbal meaning and offers an account of words

apparently closer to their traditional conception.

At present how far each of these developments, Part I’s treatment of meaning and II’s of

words, comport with one another, remains unplumbed and from this question derives the present

essay’s task. It first turns to Part I to unearth an often overlooked treatment of words or language,

entirely on all fours with use, where words are conceived as wholly immanent to the occasions of

their employment. Words and language only, or primarily, exist in use and thus have no

regulative standing for the latter in their own right. Part II of PI is canvassed, in turn, in part to

discover whether what it says about words and our experience of them differs from what

Wittgenstein signposts in respect to these topics in part I. The present work in fact concludes that

this is not the case; it suggests that certain decisive sections of Part II have either been

overlooked or misread. Nevertheless, in a class of instances not treated in part I, words

themselves do become relevant and are thematized on this basis. Aspect-seeing furnishes an

apprehension of words, where the possibilities it gestures toward—of likenesses, comparisons,

and “lived structure” as Wittgenstein calls it—come into play; with these, words as words

emerge, claimed capable of having both primary and secondary uses or meanings. This

distinction between primary and secondary, and the corresponding one among subject matters—

aesthetics, ethics, philosophy and the arts, among them—where secondary uses and aspectual

apprehensions hold sway has its roots, I will argue, in some of Wittgenstein’s most longstanding

1
See, e.g., Warren Goldfarb, “"I want you to bring me a slab: Remarks on the opening sections
of the Philosophical Investigations," Synthese (1983).
 7

views on truth and the limits of what can be said under its aegis. The present work, accordingly,

closes by bringing both references points into question: both the new efflorescence of words and

language (generically split between primary and secondary) and this divide in respect to subject

matters purportedly not able to branded true and false (and more generally lacking criteria or

Wittgensteinian “grammar”) over and against those more established ones where speakers are

dispose of settled agreements in judgements.

1 Language in Use

a) Meaning and Words: The Problem

An overview of Wittgenstein’s treatment of meaning in Pt I and the questions it raises for

the conception of words can be gleaned from a careful look at section 1. §1, of course, gives no

indication, or very little, of the variety topics that PI.I goes on to treat, nor the different

approaches and considerations that Wittgenstein brings to bear. There is, as noted, a richness and

diversity to PI that can only really be grasped by traversing it, and, even then, Wittgenstein’s

work proves an openended weave, leaving unresolved the connections to be made between its

various themes, concerns, and treatments.

Section 1 does suffice, however, to give a taste of the strategy Wittgenstein takes toward

the topic that furnishes PI I’s central throughline, the problem of meaning. At the same time, §1

introduces the question at the center of the present consideration of Wittgenstein’s text:

meaning’s consequences for language and words.

§1 begins, as is well-known, with a passage from Augustine's Confessions, in which

Augustine recounts his beliefs concerning his learning of language as a child. §1 thus starts from

language and its consideration. Nevertheless, though language is Augustine’s main theme, and it

and words are clearly implicated in Wittgenstein’s own comments on Augustine’s remarks, the
 8

status of the latter ends up being less transparent than the preview of meaning’s handling that §1

offers.

Augustine’s text foregrounds language, including a reference to what Augustine calls

“the natural language of all peoples,” “gestures.” Guided by these gestures, in a setting informed

by the desires and dislikes of its speakers, Augustine claims to have learned his native tongue.

(This reference to desire, including ultimately Augustine’s own, though not explicitly noted by

Wittgenstein doubtless is responsible for the banausic, practical character of the language game

Wittgenstein frames in this citation’s wake.)2

Wittgenstein recognizes Augustine’s focus on language. “His words,” Wittgenstein

states, furnish “a particular picture of the essence of human language.” It is, however, the role

played by names in that picture, and, thanks to this, ultimately a certain optics of meaning, upon

which Wittgenstein dilates in §1. On Augustine’s picture, Wittgenstein explains, “individual

words name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.” In turn, on this basis, we find

“the roots of the following idea,” Wittgenstein declares: “Every word has a meaning. This

meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.”

This model of meaning, which tracks that Wittgenstein himself offered in TLP, is focused

on names: meanings are furnished by the object for which the word stands.3 Accordingly,

Wittgenstein underscores Augustine’s failure to “mention any difference between kinds of

2
Augustine writes in PI’s English translation “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly
moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they
meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the
natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the
body, and the tone of voice …Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I
gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified….” (PI I.1 note).
3
Cf. TLP 2.0201. (Names in both TLP and PI are discussed further below.) Juliet Floyd in “Wittgenstein and the
Inexpressible,” on behalf of her self-avowed Jacobin stance toward TLP has questioned whether Wittgenstein
endorses TLP’s opening sections and suggests a different manner of understanding his so-called “picture theory” of
the proposition, which Wittgenstein is in the course of introducing in the passage referred to here (in Alice Crary
ed., Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond [MIT Press, 2007] pp. 177-234).
 9

words.” PI’s alternative optics highlights this difference among sorts of words and it leads to the

introduction of use as a substitute for, or a more apt characterization of, meaning. Wittgenstein

indeed offers a “use of language” similar to Augustine’s that involves different kinds of words,

not only names, but also colors and numbers. (Someone, is given “a slip of paper ‘marked five

red apples,’ and is sent “shopping,” Wittgenstein hypothesizes.) Narrating the various uses to

which the words for colors and and numbers and apples are put in this scenario, Wittgenstein

arrives as his main point. When the interlocutor queries, specifically in regard to "five,'" what its

“meaning” may be and what it “designates,” Wittgenstein answers: neither “object nor meaning”

are in fact in question, only how "five" is "used.”

Use, correspondingly, from the start of PI replaces or displaces meaning as a reference

point, its parameters continuing to be unfolded along the lines here begun to be sketched (cf.

§23). What might be called the centrifugal motion of the early stages of Wittgenstein’s text at

this moment gets underway. Wittgenstein will go on to offer multiply examples of language in

use, stressing differences among different games or uses and within each one (or what purport to

be such), thereby exhibiting the inadequacy of our standard models of meaning. Of course, much

else happens in the following pages; not only uses, but circumstances and varieties of uses are set

forth in challenging and thought provoking ways, as well as possible misapprehensions about

how they function. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, PI’s following sections illuminate the variety

of workings of use, at least as straightforwardly as anything to be found in PI.

The fate of words and language is, however, arguably less evident than meaning, both in

§1 and thereafter. The crux of the matter turns on names. In question from the start of §1 appears

to be the very conception of verbal meaning, the notion that “every word has a meaning,” as

Wittgenstein himself puts it. This comes into doubt, however, owing to having its “roots
 10

(Werzel)” in Augustine’s “ picture” of the essence of human language, where every word is taken

as a name. §1 thus leave opened the question of whether verbal meaning is being interrogated

only to the extent that all words are understood (incorrectly) as names or is verbal meaning itself

more generally at issue when Augustine’s picture of language is asked about?

Wittgenstein himself, after all, talks of words at this same section’s end. About “the word

‘five,’” he asks what it does or does not designate. Accordingly, by the conclusion of §1, the

effect of use’s displacement or replacement of meaning on words remains obscure. Words, when

taken solely as names are clearly problematic for Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein in also seemingly

goes further than this and questions verbal meaning generally; yet he continues to trade on it or

at least on words themselves taken individually. Can, then, some version of the word survive

meaning’s questioning? Whether words as such continue to be in play, and if so, how, once use

comes to the fore, remains unresolved, accordingly at the end of §1.

b) A contextualism of words?

Our pictures pertaining to language’s surface, the lenses through which language appears

homogenous and manifests itself as a single identifiable entity at all—those of words or signs—

are impacted in some way, it seems, by meaning’s reenvisioning in PI; how is less obvious as

these themes, as in §1, also elsewhere are addressed in this some somewhat hesitant and lateral

manner. Wittgenstein nevertheless doe touch on these topics repeatedly in PI I, even as early

§10, as is about to be seen. When the various indications Wittgenstein gives are put together, a

view of language’s purported constituents, of words and/or signs, emerges in which, I am about

to suggest, their operation is confined entirely to use, yielding what might be called a verbal

contextualism: a contextualism of the linguistic, parallel to that contextualism associated with

François Recanati and that occasionalism with Charles Travis. Leaving aside Travis, where
 11

further complications enter, according to the former, sentences only serve as truth-bearers in

contexts, where they lack any capacity to be translated back into an independent semantics and

still retain their relevance for truth and falsehood.4 On the present view, language and words

would similarly function only in contexts, on which would depend their identities, these contexts

including “second-order” instances like dictionary accounts and discussions of verbal meaning.

Hence these last do not govern words’ operations, but are themselves contextualized occasions in

their own right. Words, signs, the identifiable components of language appear in these second-

order situations, while they function there and everywhere wholly and solely on concrete

occasions.

In §10, then, the interlocutor inquires about one such linguistic lens: signs. Wittgenstein’s

response begins to sketch what is here being called contextualism, though questions pertaining to

it, including whether Wittgenstein himself genuinely avows such a view, remain.

The interlocutor asks how do signs and signification figure in the uses that Wittgenstein

has begun to present explicitly in terms of language games starting in §7? What do the words

used (in the builders’ game, for example) signify (bezeichen) beyond their use? The respondent

rejects the question’s relevance and thus any pertinence of the notion of the sign to use. “Making

the uses of these words similar in this way,” by speaking of of their significations, is illegitimate,

he answers, since what other than uses might the interlocutor have in mind; the uses themselves,

however, are “wholly unlike” (ganz und gar ungleichartig).

Viewing use in terms of signs and signification is dismissed by Wittgenstein, on the

grounds that this viewpoint renders the unlike like. The relevance to use of the surface of

language as language thereby is called into question. Our view of language as a single

4
See François Recanati, Literal Meaning (Cambridge University Press [2002]); esp. chapter nine.
 12

homogeneous entity is rejected, in favor of uses in their plural and their apparently extreme

unlikeness.

A similar rejection of our everyday optics on language, it should be noted, arises in §65, a

development where much other business gets done and to which discussion will soon return.

Insisting that Wittgenstein has avoided what he calls “the great question,” the interlocutor

inquires what is “the essence of a language-game and hence of language…what makes them

[these games] into language or parts of language” (my emphasis).5 Wittgenstein, it is here being

underscored, again refuses the obvious answer; he does not appeal to words (or signs) as

tendering what is common to all language and language- games. “I’m saying that these

phenomena have no one thing in common,” Wittgenstein responds, just as he appears to in §10.

To be clear, Wittgenstein’s posture remains ambiguous even now, since at this moment,

he himself continues to refer to words, “these phenomena have no one thing in common that

makes us use the same word,” he states. Wittgenstein does not himself perhaps seem entirely

ready to abandon talk of words nor perhaps of signs, then, and already in §10, he has indicated a

possible way out of this conundrum: an explanation of how he can continue in some contexts, at

least, to speak about words, while seemingly rejecting words or signs as such as relevant to in

use.

In §10, the question of what these terms signify, Wittgenstein indeed insists, is irrelevant,

their uses being wholly unlike. In specific situations and contexts, however, talk of signs may be

5
In his treatment of this section in Claim, Cavell may seems to deny the meaningfulness of the
question at issue; he suggests that “it makes no sense at all to give a general explanation for the
generality of language”; yet he asserts that this is because “it makes no sense to suppose words in
general might not recur” (The Claim of Reason [Oxford UP, 1979; 188). Hence, it should be no
surprise that Cavell in this same portion of Claim give an of account of something like this, of
how words, in his view, generally recur, in his now canonical account of “projecting a word.”
 13

warranted. For example, if it is unclear whether a stretch of marks or sounds, potentially

belonging to a foreign language or script, genuinely are expressions, then signs and signification

may be invoked. Talk of signs and words would operate in specific contexts of use, while

offering nothing probative concerning use itself. Speaking of words and signs would depend on

use and not the other way around.

Denying these optics any relevance or grip generally in respect to the multivarying

instances of discourse, insisting that talk of words and signs itself arises in contexts, Wittgenstein

in PI, then, may, then, be offering something like what I am calling a contextualism of words. At

the very least, as we shall further see, even if words are somehow retained, what their role as

such is in use, remains far more undefined, far more up for grabs than most other matters treated

by Wittgenstein (private language, rule-following, intending and expecting and so on).

Contextualism as such, arguably already presents a single aspect or facet of what

Wittgenstein invites us to think in PI—Recanati refers to the later Wittgenstein when presenting

his own view that only in contexts can sentences be truth-bearers (Recanati 84n1.) Wittgenstein,

of course, interests himself in a great many other uses than truth-bearing speech, and in fact he

ultimately contests models of use that make this capacity central, as would Recanati. Recanati,

moreover, though he points toward the present model, verbal contextualism, does not go as far as

Wittgenstein himself appears to do at points. Recanati labels his own viewpoint a radical

contextualism precisely because it denies lexemes, individual words, on their own any role in

(contextualist) discourse (Recanati 147); Recanati never questions the identity of verbal tokens

as such. Though for him, to be sure, current uses exclusively relate to prior uses, especially those

involved in language learning, such that words as individuals, correspondingly, do not

themselves make contributions to speaking or understanding, nevertheless, tokens as tokens are

 14

what permit connecting earlier uses to present ones; accordingly, they retain their identity as

across uses and may be identified as such (Recanati 152). By contrast, Wittgenstein’s analyses in

PI, as will become clearer, reach down even to what is called tokening; his remarks on signs

already indicate the possibility that the entire optics of language, including verbal tokens, may

wax and wane with the occasion—and thus that tokens, like signs, are not an architectonic

phenomenon in the way Recanati still envisions.

A development that begins in section §48, at the very least, buttresses this view: that

Wittgenstein goes further than Recanati in the direction of questioning all standard linguistic

identities, including that of tokens themselves. To take a step back, the type/token distinction to

which Wittgenstein himself is about to appeal governs the approach to words in more traditional

philosophical contexts. “Types” are the individuals recognized as the same in all the different

uses of a given word; “tokens” are the physical embodiment of that type found in each iteration.

On this construal, there is, for example, only one English word “there”; the latter represents a

single type. By contrast, there are obviously many tokens of this same type merely on the present

page.

Numerous unresolved problems plague this seemingly straightforward distinction,

however. Types as such appear to be ideal or abstract, objects, not real ones—objects necessarily

involving a non spatio-temporal register. Their being abstract or ideal is implied by there being

only one type for any given word. Indeed, types themselves can never be numerically distinct

real beings, on pain of losing their function, namely, of providing one and the same meaning. To

get around such inherently questionable ontological appeals, it is, then, tempting to start from the

tokens and make the types “free riders” on them, as it were. The problem this initiative

encounters, however, is that tokens vary enormously among themselves: across media (spoken,
 15

gestural, inscribed) and within each medium (there is, e.g. a guide to Australian pronunciation

entitled “Let Stalk Strine”). No putative physical resemblances among tokens suffices to

establish their identity and thus types cannot be channeled by token, since to identify any token

as a given token it turns out to be necessary to grasp its type.6

In §48 PI I, as noted, Wittgenstein himself invokes the type/token distinction and

considers its applicability to his own understanding of language in use. More specifically,

Wittgenstein inquires into what are to be considered the elements of a “game” that he has just set

out, in which some of the letters of the alphabet serve as “words.” Wittgenstein offers the

sentence “RRBGGGRWW” as the description of a 9x9 grid of colored squares, where each letter

designates a colored square (“R” a red one, “G” a green one, and so on). Are the elements of his

game, asks Wittgenstein, the supposed words, “the types of letters,” “or the letters.”

Wittgenstein’s resolution, or perhaps better, dissolution, of this issue consists in once

again rejecting this distinction’s relevance, thereby further making words’ very existence as

words entirely dependent on context as set out above. In response to the question of whether the

elements of this sentence are types or tokens, the type of the letter or the physical letters, and

thus whether in his chosen example there are four or eight “elements,” Wittgenstein responds

that it does not matter, as long as no confusion results on a given occasion. Does “the sentence

consist of four letters or of nine—And which are its elements?” To these questions, Wittgenstein

suggests, no answer can or should be given: “Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid

misunderstandings in any particular case?”

6
The above argument (including the Australian example) follow Linda Wetzel’s presentation in her Types and
Tokens: On Abstract Objects (MIT Press, 2009). In contrast to the present view, Wetzel herself argues for
understanding words as a type of “abstract object.” In the course of doing so, she rebuts other well-known
suggestions for accounting for tokens not based on physical resemblance: specifically, those of W. V. O. Quine,
Nelson Goodman, and Donald Davidson (chapters 3 and 5).
 16

Again, then, if Wittgenstein retains words, he does so under very unusual circumstances.

For §48 indeed seems to signal that all verbal identities, that of the tokens as well as the types, is

specific to discursive contexts, entirely subject to use, just as was set out above. The elements’

identities, the very question of their existence is entirely contextual. They are only in (some)

uses, while within use, they do not appear as such; use once more does not depend on them, but

they on them. At the very least, questions of use, use’s optics, and questions of signs, words

(types, tokens), Wittgenstein here indicates, seriously diverge from one another. There would

seem to be neither need nor possibility of distinguishing types and tokens, having recourse to

language and its supposed elements, once use is in the picture, beyond those rare occasions when

a reason to worry actually arises, Wittgenstein seems to hold.

c) Names and Naming: Is Word-Contextualism’s Wittgenstein’s and is it Viable?

Two questions, then, arise. First, is this really Wittgenstein’s view (albeit whether this is

so may not finally be determinative for die Sache selbst in any case)? Is what some might call

metalevel talk, talk of words, language, and signs itself contextualized, as subject to

circumstances of use as any other talk, really only bearing on discourse occasionally and hence

fleetingly? Secondly, if the first is right, what are the consequences of such thoroughgoing

contextualization for our understanding of speech, discourse, words, signs, and language

themselves? Along with “meaning eliminativism” do we now have “language eliminativism,”

and what could that possibly entail for our relation to speech, discourse, and their understanding?

Staying for the moment with the first question (the next section handles the second), the

question of whether Wittgenstein would eliminate words becomes especially pointed and

complex in the case of names. As §1 already indicated, names, according to Wittgenstein, are the

part of language responsible for the modeling of words generally as independent bearers of
 17

meaning. On the model of names, words are assigned independent meanings and seemingly

individuated on that basis, especially since, as we have seen, tokens alone will not suffice; they

can never do this work on their own. Names, however, seemingly are able to stand on their own;

in their case, something like this autonomy is at least provisionally plausible. The “meaning” of a

name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer,” according to Wittgenstein (§43).

Something like ostensive definition appears relevant in the case of names and this gives the

impression that the meaning of names and words might be what they name, thus founding the

more general perception that independent words with independent meanings exist.

Accordingly, §48 and those sections immediately following, return to and concretely

engage the derivation in question in §1: the emergence from language grasped in terms of names

of an optics of independent words and meanings. Wittgenstein’s game with the colored squares

is intended to model a language entirely made up of names, one that, Wittgenstein explicitly

notes, is found in Plato’s Theatetus and in his own TLP (§46).7

The first stage of Wittgenstein’s analysis shows why, however, even in the case of names

themselves, no independent meanings or references may be assigned to them. When standing

apart from use, neither names (nor, then, presumably words) Wittgenstein indicates, genuinely

have a meaning (or a reference) and thus they do not seem readily able to be conceived

independently.

Wittgenstein here specifically distinguishes words or names in use from words or names

as such. He divides, that is, names or “naming words” appearing in actual sentences describing

7
After concluding his summary of Plato’s Theatetus, by declaring that in it “the essence of speech is the
composition of names,” Wittgenstein goes on to associate his work in TLP and Russell’s individuals with this same
line of thinking: “both Russell's 'individuals' and my 'objects' (Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus) were such primary
elements” answering to “bare” names, as in Theatetus. Because Wittgenstein in PI criticizes some of his TLP
positions in this fashion, I found it to difficult to sign on to some of the more sweepingly resolute readings offered of
the latter text.
 18

some given arrangement of his colored square grid from the names, “naming words,” conceived

as prior to and as entering into such uses. In this latter instance, Wittgenstein insists, “R,” “B”

and so on, or “slab” in his initial example, do not name anything at all; they designate no object

nor do they have a sense. Nothing “has” a name, Wittgenstein insists, “except in a game.”

Lacking actual employment, apart from some use, “names” indeed have neither reference nor “a

meaning,” Wittgenstein concludes, referring to Frege’s context principle: “a word has a meaning

only in the context of a sentence.”

Names before entering use must, if there are such, indeed take an unusual form. To flesh

out Wittgenstein’s present suggestion further, he seems to have in mind something like the

following: take “R” or better still our old friend “slab.” In “bring me a slab,” or “there are eight

red slabs” (perhaps in that pile over there), the name “slab” says something and it refers to

something: those slabs. “Slab,” “slabs,” are here parts of a description, as Wittgenstein indicates.

When we talk about “slab” as a name, however, if we are told it is used for these things, or “R”

for these (red squares), “slab” or “R” does not yet name some thing nor does it say any thing.

Not being a part of a sentence or speech-act, it indeed neither means nor refers. To talk of the

name “slab” is not to use “slab,” not to speak of slabs themselves, but solely, it would appear, a

preparatory moment of some kind, while saying and speaking about something by way of “slab”

can occur only in use.

§49, then, exhibits why names on their own neither refer nor mean. Nevertheless, at this

moment, an alternative construal of the name seems to beckon, some other working and

workable view of names. Consequently, by dint of identifying this option’s shortcomings, in fact

two different, yet symmetrical ones, the insolubilty of the problem of nominal and thus verbal

identity, ultimately of that of any name, type, token, or word, appears. The impasse about to be
 19

sketched shows why verbal contextualism alone is viable once use is conceived as radically as it

is in PI.

After all, the foregoing account of why words and names on their own neither can mean

nor refer seemingly opens the door to a different way of conceiving of names (and words) in

their own right, namely, by tying them to the roles they anticipatorily play in use, by connecting

them to what Wittgenstein had begun calling language-games in §7. Though names would refer

and mean only in such uses, nevertheless conceived as paired with certain games and not others,

as preparatory and then participating generally or customarily in these uses and not those, names

and words perhaps could again be established in their own right. Names and words, to be sure,

would still only mean in sentences; such sentences, in turn, would only mean and refer in the still

greater contexts supplied by uses themselves. As James Conant once put it, speaking of the

Fregean context principle just invoked by Wittgenstein, “Frege’s context-principle” in PI would

be expanded, “so that it applies not only to words (and their role within the context of a

significant proposition) but to sentences (and their role within the context of circumstances of

significant use, or…language-games)” (Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use” [233].) Words or

names, twice contextualized, then, for Conant do go by the board as possessing independent

meanings or references; yet they may still be able to be identified, as tethered to the language

games, to “the context of circumstances of significant use,” as Conant nicely phrases it. On such

a supposition, Wittgenstein could avoid that radical verbal contextualism here assigned to him.

The problem this account faces, which branches off into two equally vexed subsets, is

that names and words as commonly understood function in many different contexts and uses, in

various different games, not just one game or even any one identifiable set or series of games.

They appear, if they appear as at all, in an inherently open-ended and diverse array of
 20

employments. Names or words indeed participate in uses not anticipated, established, or learned

with them, ones not belonging to them (or they to it) unlike “slab,” or “R,” in Wittgenstein’s own

examples.

To be a name indeed entails that once instructed in what, for example, “slab” names, we

then know what “slab” designates and are able to use that name in other contexts—ones by no

means necessarily the same (as in “slabs” of beef, for example). Just this feature of the name

Wittgenstein’s insistence on use appears to check, however, as Conant’s double application of

Frege’s context principle indicates. Twice contextualized, names and words must be geared to

these uses; if able to be conceived as “preparatory,” they are preparatory to them and undergo no

other tethering. If names can be identified, it can only be in respect to and finally within some

“game.” Otherwise, on pain of once again referring or meaning, names indeed have no

independent standing.

Verbal contextualism at this moment, accordingly, appears to return. Only in contexts, or

contexts referring to these contexts, for Wittgenstein, would it seem meaningful to speak of

names and words at all. Consequently, neither names nor words maintain their own distinct

identities across multiple, different occasions in Wittgenstein’s own account.

To be sure, some readers may feel even to pose this question is to demand too much, to

go down a wrong path. Might not Wittgenstein be taken to be saying that though no general such

identity can be envisioned, in different ways across different uses names and words are

repurposed as both at once the same and different, as Wittgenstein himself seems to do in §65

and again in §69? To unpack this possibility, while plumbing the actual depth of this problem,

and thus the depth of the possible divergence between names or words and use, Wittgenstein’s

own reference in PI to his treatment of names in TLP needs to be followed up. In §50
 21

Wittgenstein begins to explicitly address the view, advanced in TLP, that elements (or simples)

and their corresponding names exist. Why Wittgenstein once thought he required simple names

and his rethinking of this apparent necessity in PI eventually reveals the tenuous, ultimately

occasional status of names and words in the latter work.

In TLP, to be clear, Wittgenstein also refers to Frege’s context principle (TLP 3.3);

similarly, names and words there are deemed meaningful and referential only in the context of

use—use, however, being defined differently, as employment in sentences that describe states of

affairs that may be true or false (aka propositions). Hence, in TLP, Wittgenstein also lacks any

account of the word as word or the linguistic sign as such. Linguistic units are of interest only

insofar as they contribute to what he eventually calls the symbol, for the work they do in the

basic logically significant unit (the proposition) (TLP 3.32 ff). Propositions, logically relevant

statements, are owed to the symbol’s operation, not that of the sign. Hence, though everything is

already in order in our speech as used, according to Wittgenstein, and thus there is no need for its

replacement by a formalism, as Frege and Russell had once envisioned, for Wittgenstein at this

epoch, like the former, the signs or words of some actual natural language play no direct role in

his account.

Because TLP, within these very narrow bounds, is attuned to sentential contexts and

already use driven, Wittgenstein, however, there faces a version of the problem just encountered:

how names and what they designate, in TLP’s version of use, remain the same across these

expressions (propositions), such that inferential relations may be sustained between them. In

TLP, to address this issue, Wittgenstein postulates that all discourse, every proposition is

implicitly constructed from a stock of simple names that name ultimate elements. Since complex

names, as well as sentences, which Wittgenstein construes as a combination of names, are

 22

composed of simple names (and ultimately refer to what these simple names name), truth-

bearing sentences, with their references and meanings, ultimately prove invariant across use. Put

more simply, for Wittgenstein logical, propositional discourse necessarily disposes of a basic set

of building blocks (slabs!) at once onomastic and ontological—building blocks, elements, that

cannot themselves be spoken about, it should be underscored, since by definition sentences,

propositions arise from their always contingent combination.8

In TLP, consequently, Wittgenstein did not have to worry about the problem just

encountered. For him whatever variability there is is rinsed out in discourse’s, or use’s, wash,

thanks to the latter instantiating simples and simple names which otherwise remain unknown.

In PI, then, Wittgenstein returns to the issue of simples and his treatment begins to show

how deeply the gulf between the optics of names and words over against use, now more radically

conceived, runs. For Wittgenstein indeed suggests that the impression that there are simples and

simple names is a function of the language games in which a given name functions; he uses the

game discussed above to illustrate this fact. On some occasion, one may point to a given colored

square, say a red one, to show how the name “R” is to be used when forming sentences in this

game. Taken as such a sample, the square, like “R” itself, can never be spoken about in the game

8
As noted above, Juliet Floyd, as well as many other resolute readers have questioned whether Wittgenstein’s
opening remarks, and his eventual embrace of simples, which coordinate with them, are actually affirmed by
Wittgenstein. To be sure, they conflict, as does much else in TLP, with Wittgenstein’s contrastive or anti-
metaphysical view of truth, a topic discussed in the present essays last section. Nevertheless, besides the fact that
Wittgenstein in PI seems to claim he did hold such a view, on my construal of simples, there would be no question
of our knowing what they are or the names that designate them. Nothing just said entails that in TLP Wittgenstein is
offering a semantic theory, one that might, for example, prevent some terms combining and others not, thereby
allowing for nonsense and sense to be identified or distinguished on this basis. Instead, owing to the difference
between what logic captures and what actually transpires in a given language, because the one does not map the
other, numerous ways for meaning to occur, different paths for arriving at these logically mapped outcomes remain
possible, ones which indeed may function differently in different contexts. Simples would fall out as a formal
necessity, otherwise unidentified and unidentifiable and there would be no question of “the meaningfulness of
names” being dependent on mind-forged connections with objects,” as Diamond puts it, nor would their connection
to simples be devoid of all relation to the use of language (Cora Diamond, “Peter Winch on the Tractatus and the
unity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy” in (A. Pichler, S. Säätelä (eds.), Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and his Works
[De Gruyter, 2006]; 141–171, p.166).
 23

in which it is to be used, Wittgenstein insists. Some (reduced) formation of the 9x9 grid indeed

might consist of the square in question, such that the “same element,” the same color block,

would appear there and the name “R” would be used for it. Being a description of some state of

affairs, appearing in a sentence pertaining to some actual collocation of the grid, the square could

no longer function or count as the sample/simple, however, nor would the name “R” be (but) a

name. (This is, effectively, the flip side, a further consequence, of the name lacking meaning and

use except in some game, as discussed above.) It would no longer be a preparatory name, i.e. a a

name qua name, but lacking meaning and reference, but a term in use. Neither the simples nor

their names, accordingly, can be spoken about within the game, just as in TLP. But this fact now,

is wholly a function of their being immanent to the game. Rather than simples recurring to some

strictly unstateable and unidentifiable ultimate feature of the world and of discourse, they are a

consequence of our use, of the a instance of language is situated in respect to a specific language

game.

Simples and what they name are indeed features of the “grammar” of a given game or

use, as Wittgenstein also puts it. Yet this feature, the unique functioning of a name in respect to

use necessarily renders all the more mysterious how a name or word appearing in multiple uses

and types of uses can be said to be the same name. The very generality that is associated with the

name, along with its status as preparatory, is specific to the game or use, according to

Wittgenstein, as in “R,” or the name “meter” that presumably is not the same simple/sample,

now that the meter stick in Paris actually can be called one. (The official “meter” stick, once

housed in Paris, Wittgenstein tells us, when it functioned as such, is the one thing that is neither a

meter nor not one, just as the simple/sample “R could not appear in its use.) Wittgenstein’s

invocation of grammar, then, only heightens the present problem, since it makes the presumed
 24

generality of a word or name relative to its use, dependent on some game—regardless of whether

“game” here bespeaks a rule-bound activity or is understood in some other way. Hence how

names can be the same across multiple and not necessarily related games—how slab in the

builders game and and slab in the butcher’s game can be understood as one and the same name—

remains unclear.

Of course, Wittgenstein may well say and indeed does say, as we have seen, that it does

not matter whether in these cases the name is said to be the same or not; that this question itself

is significant only on occasions and within contexts. But that is only to recur, then, to what is

linguistic contextualism and to give up on tracing the contribution of the name or word as such

across uses. Wittgenstein may, of course, still think we can retain names or words somehow,

come what may, but on what grounds and in what fashion would be a lot less worked through

and lot more loosely conceived and than most other themes Wittgenstein treats, as is attested by

commentators’ wanting to fill out Part I’s account by turning to discussions in part II.

Indeed, that the question of the possible immanence of names to use, at the price of their

own identity and operation across uses (and with names, so goes words), is indeed a genuine, not

a factitious one, is perhaps finally buttressed most of all by the fact that, apart from or in addition

to PI, two very different responses to this problem have been pursued in its wake, ones that are

themselves, however, ultimately incompatible. If names in PI’s context are to have any character

of their own, any workable status at all, one may start, it appears either from the names (and

other words) and cobble together some account of their workings beyond their actual uses, as

explicitly constant across the various appurtenances to various so-called games and actual uses,

thereby shoring up the name’s and the word’s ability to designate and speak of these sorts of

things and not others, apart from the games and contexts in which they function and appear.
 25

Alternatively, focus can fall on uses, on these games themselves, including those that would not

simply be recognized as the same; this wider array of uses may be resituated in, or otherwise

understood in aggregate, in relation to the name or word or as such and its identity. In this

instance, that is to say, use can remain the starting point and function as a sort of halfway house,

such that the identity of the word or the token or the sign can be modeled as implicitly bundling

and otherwise containing the different uses in which it standardly may appear. The tie with use

would not be severed but instead explicitly extended beyond the identity of some one use or

group of use with its grammar and accompanying criteria.9

Very roughly speaking, these are the very different approaches, taken by Hilary Putnam,

on the one hand, and by Stanley Cavell, on the other, to the identity of names and words once

use’s force as has been registered.10 In the face of this potential difference between the name and

the occasions and work of use and what transpires in it, Putnam’s externalism, as it came to be

called, sought to preserve words’ and names’ significance thanks to a set of social and natural

circumstances that transcended any given individual occasion of use, any given speech act, as

well as any single so-called “game.” What water was (by nature under molecular theory) or what

9
Before turning to these last suggestions, One may suggest, as Cavell also seems to, that an important middle
ground has been overlooked here, roughly that of the concept, as in Wittgenstein’s own discussion of the word
“game,” which stands in for that of the word “language” in §65. Not precisely words nor even names as such,
slab/slab, but these as used—as in “poker is a game”—form a family of overlapping resemblances, like a rope,
according to Wittgenstein, or, as Cavell puts it, going still further, they furnish instances for which grammar
amounts to “essence,” thus allowing for their identity (Claim 188). (Cavell suggests in the case of the name
“Karamazov” that its various contingent associations are renaturalized as it were to fashion an essence for the name
used as a concept.) However, this may be, this account assumes use; it never gets s far as the word as word or the
name as names it remains with the concept as concept and thus with cases that in use already count as the same.
Already irrelevant in this optics would be, for example, how in English “game” can be used to designate not only
something one plays and the such like, but also the sort of meat that comes from wild animals, such as quail or
venison. Wittgenstein’s assuming use, which continues to withhold any sort of univocal meaning even from the
word “language”—recall Wittgenstein counts color samples and similar helpmeets as a part of tit —presumably is
why Cavell felt a need to pen his “Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language” and offer his own take on these
topics, one here about to be further discussed.
10
In Putnam at this epoch this registration may more proximally come about by way of Quine; nevertheless the
template Quine lays out in “Two Dogmas” and “Indeterminacy of Translation,” effectively poses a version of this
same problem of the name’s or word’s identity, while of course envisioning use quite differently from Wittgenstein
himself.
 26

the word “birch” names, according to some expert, lets these terms be identified and established

in their own right, prior to and across their various employments. By contrast, Cavell, in an

analysis foundational for later OLP, envisions different uses being collected and referred back to

a given name or word (his example is “feed”) on the basis of what so-called masters of the

language would deem relevant. For masters, for persons who know their way about a language,

Cavell insists, words take on an inner constancy and outward variation in which the word is

kenned as the same across all, or almost all, the various uses and games in which it appears, an

identity ultimately housed in the understanding of those who speak a given language.

Cavell, accordingly, ties the multiplicity of uses to the relevant word or name by way of

appropriate persons, in an openended fashion. Putnam instead forges (perhaps inherently

various) links to natural and social circumstances, letting names stand apart from (and in his

lingo “mean”) and supervene upon use. These strategies, however, remain fundamentally

incompatible between themselves. No amount of speaker’s intuition can render Twater water for

Putnam (or the two names identical); while all use for Cavell recurs to persons and the constancy

they sense across applications. The fact that the two solutions, perhaps both with a certain

Wittgensteinian flavor, are not mutually sustainable clearly attests that the problem identified

here is real and that it is finally insoluble on the present terms. Viewing names and words in such

utterly distinct fashions, these approaches exhibit the abyss between the matrix of use and

language’s usual optics. Use so volatilizes our pre-existing conceptions of what speech and

language are, that the latter’s parameters, including what it takes to be its own building blocks,

cease to hold fast.

To be clear, no one doubts that speakers themselves may feel a link between “slab” and

“slab,” nor that a name in use makes a claim to reach all the way to what is, regardless of the
 27

speaker’s knowledge of same—with the result that what exists is not wholly a function of the

language’s grammar or a particular game. Nevertheless, in light of this impasse and in the face of

this gulf, names and words cannot themselves be deemed entities that remain the same across

occasions of use—as if returning us to the Tractatus’ scenario without bounds, neither logical

structure nor anything else being regulative. Discourse touches the world, but not by means of

words or names as such, but as an event, one that indeed engages persons, worldly

circumstances, and prior usages, at once, as Wittgenstein himself at his most radical moments

suggests. In turn, when names appear as names, words as words, they do so thanks to this same

circumstances and operations: through contexts and their own contextualized uses, just as is true

for all other matters of concern. Thus it’s use all the way down: contextualism indeed must

extend to words and names themselves.

d) Tokens in use

When meaning is interrogated and displaced by use in PI’s radical fashion, then, the usual

optics pertaining to language do not nor can remain intact. Words, signs, language, names are so

bound up with our pictures and beliefs about meaning that the perturbation of the latter

inevitably loosens the grasp of the former. Nevertheless, though language’s and its purported

elements’ contribution to use come into doubt, it remains the case that some sort of learning of

language (not necessarily through instruction) precedes all use. I cannot “use” French, if I have

never learned any French, though even a little may still let me say a lot, making way for an array

of uses.

Similarly, even granting discourse’s event-like character, it nevertheless remains true that

one professional talk lasts forty minutes, another some seventy or more; similarly, this article

occupies roughly thirty printed pages rather than fifty or ten. Hence, though the token or signifier
 28

may finally live only in uses and their contexts, as Wittgenstein suggests, its participation in

them as underlying material, ultimately as quantifiable information, must somehow also register

there. The necessity for language learning and for such a substrate, ultimately one and the some,

to some degree preserve the specificity of the linguistic in use, even if, as has just been shown,

no direct or one-to-one contribution of tokens, no less types to use can be charted. Accordingly,

the standing of the token, as an otherwise undifferentiated, but potentially differentiatable

substratum of discourse, must be investigated. Arriving at a sketch of its disposition, in turn,

provides a jumping off point for the examination of aspect-seeing found in the next and final

section of this essay.

Some one hundred sections after those just discussed, in §156, Wittgenstein investigates

learning to read a language and focuses on a pupil learning to read tokens as tokens. His wider

interest at this moment resides in unpacking the status of all understanding in learning, in

grasping the disposition of something like an “ah ha” moment, when a seemingly regular or

repeatable possibility is mastered. (Wittgenstein has just examined how to continue a

mathematical series expressed in a formula.) After investigating this sort of rule-following

understanding (and its limits when it comes to rules as such), Wittgenstein examines the parallel

instance of knowing how to read tokens. What unites both instances is the impossibility of

grasping in advance all the iterations of the token and of the mathematical series, an

impossibility that pertains to both instructor and learner. Learning the use of a language’s tokens

and understanding the application of a numerical formula are similar to this degree, except that in

the former case no formula of any sort, of course, is available and the token’s uses varies still

more widely than do the formula’s instances. {ftnte: Kripke.}

 29

Wittgenstein includes in reading knowing how to render aloud what is written or printed,

taking dictation, copying, and also following sheet music; he focuses, however, on one case: a

pupil being instructed in reading aloud written characters. Wittgenstein inquires concerning the

moment when the pupil may be said to achieve mastery; in response he insists, perhaps

surprisingly, that it will be impossible for anyone—the learner, the instructor, or those who may

be observing—to specify the first word actually read, the first instance that counts as recognizing

a token as a token. “But what of that first word?...—When did he begin to read?” “This

question,” responds Wittgenstein, “makes no sense here” (§157).

The question makes no sense, according to Wittgenstein, because the ability to use tokens

does not answer to an intuition or a process of any kind, mental or physical, but is instead an

instance of what he here calls behaviour (Verhaltens). “The change when the pupil began to read

was a change in his behaviour, and it makes no sense here to speak of ‘a first word in his new

state’.” To be sure, as Wittgenstein points out, a physical reading machine can be assembled and

those already able to read may apprehend the machine’s first word read, just as they make take

note of their own first word or that of a so-called “living reading machine” on any given

occasion. But the word read, the token as such, is itself an aspect or feature embedded in

behaviour and hence only because it has already been taken possession of in this way can its

production be so registered. What appears to be the reproduction of a token on any other basis

can always be random or fortuitous, Wittgenstein emphasizes—hence not the production of a

token. Only under certain circumstances and in certain contexts will the physical entity and/or its

psychical apprehension count.

Hence, the token’s identity and repeatability recur to the register of behaviour, prior to

any of its single manifestations. Wittgenstein indeed explicitly rejects the hypothesis “that only
 30

because of our too slight acquaintance with what goes on in the brain and the nervous system”

does behaviour play this role. Similarly, he discounts the feeling of deriving the words uttered

from a script as determinative for reading; one could have the feeling and still not be performing

this activity. Behaviour, accordingly, foregrounds both the importance of context and a certain

holism: understanding, learning, and knowing require circumstances and their sequelae; only in

situations, implying various other ones, do reading, speaking, or using a language count as such.

Reading, and by extension all employment of language are, then, behaviour and require

the entire event of expression and its surrounding circumstance for their registration. The status

of what is read, the token or mark, in use, in turn, is a correlate of behaviour and when not so

situated, it lacks any in itself. Words, their tokens, insofar as they are understood and are able to

be repeated remain embedded in a broader capacity of use. They are neither physical nor

psychical entities, nor properties nor attributes of same. Yet when they do so function, owing to

their underlying physical character, they may, then, be quantified.11 That character is a necessary,

not sufficient condition for the token as token; in proper contexts, accordingly, this feature can

be traded on—in the course of discussions of significance and verbal meaning, as noted above,

but also in various sorts of formalizations that answer to discourse’s operation in specific media:

oral presentations, texts, bits and so on.

Hence, tokens being features of behaviour explains how they may serve as the substrate

of discourse, without for all that bearing an ongoing, discrete relation to what is said. They are at

work in this radically contextualized fashion, while also allowing language as a “spatio-

11
Juliet Floyd, commenting on this same section, has tied Wittgenstein’s talk of “human reading machines” to the
course on mathematics Wittgenstein gave that Turing attended. Thereby, she argues that some of Wittgenstein’s
insights underlie Turing’s landmark Entscheidungsproblem paper, specifically the focus on our everyday practice of
calculating, which permits Turing to arrive at a generality that Gödel, for example, by his own admission, was
unable to achieve. Floyd’s paper thus makes explicit the bridge between tokens as set forth here and informatic
conception of information (offered by Claude Shannon) that draws on Turing’s achievement (Floyd, “Chains of
Life,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 5.2 2016, pp. 1-88).
 31

temporal” entity, as Wittgenstein puts it, to play a role.12 To be clear, Wittgenstein is no

behaviourist; and though Gilbert Ryle also perhaps was not, Wittgenstein does not, as Ryle did,

look to general hypotheses based on fixed criteria to fasten behaviour to some set of descriptions.

He does not weave a new net to capture the net of meaning or use through mental conduct

concepts. Instead, perhaps the closest parallel to Wittgenstein’s invocation of behaviour is

arguably offered by Martin Heidegger, when he employs the same German term as Wittgenstein,

Verhalten, in his essay “The Essence of Truth.” Heidegger identifies behaviour, there translated

as “bearing” or “comportment” as what makes possible the agreement (omiōsos) between

statement (logos) and thing (pragma), in the course of his reworking of truth’s traditional

conception. “The relation of the presentative statement to the thing,” Heidegger’s reworking of

the adequatio ad rem, occurs in the bearing (or taking one’s bearing toward that thing)

(Verhaltnis) that has at its possibility in behaviour, comportment (Verhalten) more generally,

states Heidegger (Pathmarks 141).

Heidegger, at this moment, underscores the reliance of truth-speaking on a prior

openness, on an already established, ultimately practical access at once to things and persons.

The practical interweaving of our goals and of things’ existence, which manifests in behaviour

and on which any instance of the latter depends, precedes any single occasion of discourse,

including all attempts to say what is (logos). Thereby, perhaps even more emphatically than

Wittgenstein, Heidegger foregrounds use’s implied global context, in a conception close to what

12
The belonging of tokens and of what is usually called words to behaviour perhaps alone can explain, it should be
noted, the following seeming paradox in PI: circumstances trump utterances or expressions as such, with the
consequence that on a given occasion no single word necessarily definitively matters or even necessarily registers as
such; yet in these circumstances, in context, expressions do a kind of work in their own right that is often overlooked
and assigned to some other source, such as consciousness or rules, according to Wittgenstein. When Wittgenstein
discusses things like “intending,” or “expecting,” it is the use of the suitable expression themselves in context that
bears the burden of reaching out to the future. The expressions ultimately being features of behaviour, then, not
surprisingly, their use can in part serve to organize it (cf. §608).
 32

Wittgenstein at times calls forms of life (though Heidegger’s flatter, less naturalistic rendering

here is ultimately preferred): use, so understood, takes in at once practices, persons, their

concerns, as well as world and those things encountered within it.13 Comportment, or behaviour,

Heidegger more specifically indicates, entails both “standing in an open region,” and, in that

openness, which Heidegger is about to deem a-letheia, adhering “to something opened up as

such.” Accordingly, behaviour functions within situations and contexts and in an already existing

greater whole of established practices, which includes discourse’s various affordances. “All

working and achieving, all action and calculation,” Heidegger thus deems “behaviour.”

For Wittgenstein, similarly, understanding, in the sense of kenning a new use, recurs to

contexts, including those of prior use, as well as acquaintance with the world and judgements

about it, of which speakers and hearers, authors, and readers already dispose. Only within both

those broader contexts and actual narrower ones does understanding function and only there do

tokens themselves operate, eventually having the capacity to register as and what they are, while

being broken out and made explicit in contexts of their own. Heidegger, then, indeed fills out

what Wittgenstein, by invoking behaviour here, insists on as well: the importance of a more

global context that includes practices, judgements, and a world already there, for both

understanding and what is understood, language in use and its constituents.

13
Wittgenstein’s talk of “forms of life,” though fascinating, suggestive, and crucial to coming to grips with his later
thinking, not to mention powerfully laid out in Floyd’s article cited above, nevertheless leaves underdetermined the
character of what might be called the matrix of nature/culture or nature/history it invokes. While forms of life are by
no means supposed to be explanatory—and I myself believe their force is finally holistic and negative—speaking of
them can and has muddied the waters when it comes to status of the innovations to which our practices, including
our linguistic practices, are subject. A form of life is seemingly tied for Wittgenstein to things our species is inclined
to do and finds itself in agreement about, as well as to inventions (such as the calculus) and other developments that
appear to be historically and/or culturally specific. Cavell in his “Declining decline: Wittgenstein as a philosopher of
culture,”, has attempted to distinguish and coordinate both of these strands, to me unconvincingly, but this attempt
and others that build on it, at least acknowledge the difficulty. Heidegger, by contrast, is much more perspicuous
about these reference points; for him they all have a thoroughly time-bound character and participate in historicity;
none any way “natural,” albeit his affirmation doubtless runs the risk of falling into a potentially disastrous epochal-
historical thinking, as it did in Heidegger’s own case.
 33

Part II Words and Aspect Seeing

What, then, to make of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-seeing and words in part II? As

noted, a number of commentators turn there for a more fleshed-out, “natural,” and/or every day

understanding of words. To be sure, that Pt I and II constitute a single continuous work has

recently been doubted. Pt. II’s ruminations, though clearly more raw and more undeveloped than

part I’s, nevertheless, presumably do have some bearing on these issues.

Not only part II’s treatment of words, but aspect-seeing as such, has played a central role

in recent reconsiderations of PI and of Wittgenstein’s own philosophizing. Aspects are features

that usually appear to be taken in through perception, such as a musical key, the emotional

significance of a tune or of a facial feature found in a picture; their apprehension nevertheless

seems not to involve new information or grasping new sets of facts. Wittgenstein uses certain

exemplary patterns, most famously that of the so-called duck-rabbit, to illustrate aspects. The

drawing in question, the duck-rabbit, can be viewed as the profile of a duck or of a rabbit, but not

both simultaneously; the lines on the page, however, what is grasped as either a duck or a rabbit,

obviously themselves do not alter. Despite such constancy, the animal identified is taken to be a

perceived feature. “Now I see the rabbit!” Its recognition thus seems to answer to a perceptual

experience and to pertain to the thing experienced, albeit nothing new, no additional reportable

facts about the item in question have become available.14

Aspect-seeing, accordingly, involves what Wittgenstein at moments calls “perceived

structure,” including the apprehension of “likeness” and seeing something as something. Aspect-

blindness is of course the incapacity for such experiences. A good number of Wittgenstein’s

remarks in PI, including many about aspect itself, function under this description; they are

14
Cf. Baz Avner, “What's the Point of Seeing Aspects?,” Philosophical Investigations 23:2 April 2000, p. 106.
 34

themselves aspectual. “Aspect blindness,” Wittgenstein thus suggests, “will be like lacking a

musical ear” thereby clarifying aspect-blindness through an appeal to an aspectual apprehension

(PI.II §260, my emphasis).

Aspects, accordingly, seem to hold out the promise of clarifying the status of

Wittgenstein’s own remarks in PI. His discussions would consist of aspectual showings: prompts

toward the dawning of aspects, facilitating the appearance of certain likenesses, comparisons,

and modelings. So understood, Wittgenstein could still claim to leave everything intact, to offer

no new theories or findings, while pointing out previously unrecognized features of his subjects,

since his remarks would not claim to answer to some genuine state of things. Aspects potentially

also inform much of what transpires in mathematical discovery (on Wittgenstein’s view of

mathematics), as well as in the arts and humanities. Aesthetic instances and their appreciation

serve as the central examples of aspectual awareness in PI.15

What, then, of the specific issue at present at stake, of words as possibly apprehended

aspectually, thereby perhaps returning us to what seems to be our more traditional or normal

relation to them? Wittgenstein indeed speaks of the “experiencing (Erleben) the meaning of a

word” on the heels of a treatment of the seeing of aspects and then of aspect-blindness (PI.II

§261) . With aspect seeing, meaning, and, with it, individual words, thus potentially returns to

the picture. Words as words indeed may be given aspectually, further complicating and perhaps

even overthrowing the sort of verbal contextualism sketched above.

To introduce verbal meanings, Wittgenstein initially appeals to an aesthetic context,

specifically that of a reading of a poem or a story. (“When I pronounce this word expressively,”

15
On aspects and mathematics, see Juliet Floyd, “On Being Surprised: Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception, Logic
and Mathematics”, in V. Krebs and W. Day, eds., Seeing Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect Seeing
(Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 314-337, esp. 330ff; on the importance of the aesthetic, see Avner 107ff.
 35

when reading a piece of literature, Wittgenstein states, “it is completely filled with meaning.”

[§265]). Soon, he extends his suggestion to words as such. “A word uttered in isolation and

without purpose can seem to carry a particular meaning in itself” (§267). And he asks: “What

would you be missing if you did not experience the meaning of a word?”16

Some commentators, then, indeed take Wittgenstein to be revising his earlier treatment of

words, in order to countenance meanings and thus individual words, thanks to viewing them as

aspectual instances. When Wittgenstein’s remarks are taken in context, however, it seems

relatively clear that any thoroughgoing rapprochement between use and individual verbal

meanings is not in the cards, nor endorsed by Wittgenstein himself. Wittgenstein is not

attempting to correct his prior calibrations concerning words by way of his present ones so that

individual verbal meanings might again play a central role in use. Not only does he note the

tension between the two optics—he asks of a word “filled with its meaning,” “‘how can this be,

if meaning is the use of the word?’” (§265). Moreover, aspect-seeing and blindness in respect to

words, to whatever they may amount, do not alter the word’s status in discourse, Wittgenstein

insists. Talk of meaning and meaning (Bedeutung and meinen) has instead been taken from

elsewhere, according to Wittgenstein. “Meaning and meaning it” in these cases have been

transferred “from a different language game” (§273). “Call it a dream,” adds Wittgenstein, “it

does not change anything” (§273).17

16
To be clear, aspect-blindness, the possibility that an individual could not glean an aspect—could not see the
rabbit-duck as a rabbit or a duck, or hear a tune as mournful and so on—is how Wittgenstein primarily investigates
the experience of verbal meaning. Blindness’s special significance, Wittgenstein tell us in §261, “lies in the
connexion between the concepts of 'seeing an aspect' and 'experiencing the meaning of a word.’” Thus he goes on to
explain: “For we want to ask "What would you be missing if you did not experience the meaning of a word? What
would you be missing, for instance, if you did not understand the request to pronounce the word ‘till’ and to mean it
as a verb—or if you did not feel that a word lost its meaning and became a mere sound if it was repeated ten times
over?”
17
Similarly Wittgenstein has just offered a very strange scenario in which someone wrongly believes they have
returned to a familiar town and mistakenly thinks they know where they are while walking, presumably as an
analogue to those who take these remarks to refurbish the notion of individual verbal meanings (§268).
 36

Nothing PI has previously said about use as the substitute or equivalent of meaning, and

the unique status of words therein, then, can be or is altered by the possibility here exposed of

grasping words aspectually. Wittgenstein, as he did previously, indeed acknowledges that there

are moments when individual words may seem to wear meanings. Not only, however, are these

confined to specific contexts, but talk of meanings in these instances is “forced” upon us (§265).

As so forced, in this new setting, this way of speaking, to whatever it amounts, he also insists

“can’t come into conflict with the original one”(§265).

That said, Wittgenstein may well be expanding the purview of words in a fashion that at

least places his foregoing discussions of use in a new light, not by rejecting it, but by exposing

the scope of his prior analysis as more limited than has previously appeared. Words seen

aspectually may play a role in the same situations in which aspects and aspect-seeing themselves

are in question: in literary instances, as well as philosophical ones, including Wittgenstein’s own,

as well as in mathematical and other contexts. Were this right, and it indeed seems to be, this

would, however, alter the vantage point on words given above, as well as provide a new look to

use itself. Beyond all of the discussions pertaining to use offered in part one, despite their notable

granularity and diversification—such as those concerning the activities of naming, imagining,

expecting, intending, calculating registering pain, and so on—apparently lies another, as yet

unexplored set of possibilities in respect to the employment of language and the undertakings in

the service of which such employments stand. These possibilities relate, moreover, explicitly to

those endeavors finally of primary interest in the present context: to philosophy, aesthetics,

literary studies, and the arts themselves, as well as to ethics or morals. To this degree, aspects,

without reviving words per se, apparently introduce a marked shift of Wittgenstein’s perspective;
 37

perhaps, then, it is no wonder that some commentators ultimately reject part II’s relevance to

part I, given this alteration’s impact.

To understand how this shift of terrain—or, better, this arrival at the same place with a

new and foreign look—is possible, as well as ultimately to see why it may be necessary to push

back against features of it here, Wittgenstein’s broader understanding of truth and of established

uses must be gleaned, along with a topic until now little touched on, the status of criteria.

Broadly speaking, important aspects of Wittgenstein’s view of speech that is capable of being

true (or false) remain stable over the length of Wittgenstein’s corpus, a fact with consequences

for both PI I and II. While so much else changes, Wittgenstein’s attitude toward truth seemingly

stays relatively constant.

His stance toward truth, which Wittgenstein first expresses in TLP, consists in what some

call a contrastive, others an antimetaphysical framing of it.18 The contrastive construal of truth,

upon which alone in TLP statements may deemed meaningful, insists that for a statement to be

true it must also be able to be false. Though anodyne in appearance, this stipulation, it should be

emphasized, disallows claims about the “all,” or the whole of what is (whether as being water, or

at rest, or as composed of monads and so on)—hence its denomination as “antimetaphysical.”

The contrastive view in fact rules out of bound all so-called necessary truths (which claims about

the whole, comprehending the entirety of possible grounds or reasons, would have to be); these,

by definition, cannot possibly be false, and hence under this principle can also never be true. The

findings of logic, for Wittgenstein tautologies, he, accordingly, deems senseless (sinnlos),—

while others, those of traditional philosophy, and all other metaphysical and speculative

18
For contrastive, see Warren Goldfarb, “Metaphysics and Nonsense: On Cora Diamond’s The Realistic Spirit.”
Journal of Philosophical Research 22: 57–73, p.67.” For anti-metaphysical, see Avner 110. Goldfarb speaks
explicitly of a “contrastive view of meaning.” As we are about to see, in the TLP context, these formulations are
equivalent.
 38

statements, Wittgenstein terms nonsense (Unsinn); they say nothing at all in their usual guises on

the contrastive view.

Reference to Wittgenstein’s understanding of what can count as true or false in TLP

requires briefly bringing in that work’s so-called “resolute reading”; the resolute interpretation

alters how nonsense is there to be construed and thus the understanding of Wittgenstein’s notion

of truth. TLP’s resolute reading in fact entails a new view of use in TLP itself, one that bears

directly, as will soon be seen, on the possibilities of aspect seeing and verbal meaning just

encountered in PI.II.

More specifically, on more traditional interpretations of TLP, statements that were to be

excluded as nonsense seemingly had in some fashion also to be understood in order to be

identified as such. On this construal, the semantics of such statements, the terms composing them

purportedly bore meanings, which, when examined, clashed with the logico-syntactical places

they occupied in the sentences in question—“all” does not name a thing, though in some

metaphysical utterances it stands in such a place, for example. “Nonsense” proved such, then,

owing to some syntactically unsayable “sense,” and this possibility, crucially, applied not only

negatively to metaphysics’ talk, but “positively” to Wittgenstein’s own discourse in TLP.

Especially his claims about the world and the self at the work’s beginning and end, though

strictly nonsensical, could be seen as offering an unspoken, ultimately metaphysical or

transcendental teaching about the whole and the subject or I, one that TLP could not say, but

could show.

Such a reading, however, as the resolute approach’s founder, Cora Diamond put it,

arguably amounts to “chickening out”; it grants metaphysical statements a liminal intelligibility

 39

and its characterization of them as nonsense thus stops only halfway.19 Diamond and other

resolute readers, consequently, offered a different way of construing nonsense (and

Wittgenstein’s own claims) in TLP. For resolute reading, what renders utterances nonsense lies

not in their (nonsensical) sense but in their lacking a context and a use in which they operate

meaningfully. No statement as such was nonsense; instead as currently used, or failing to be,

they prove to be such, a consideration that remains resolutely contextual.20

The resolute reading of nonsense, not only newly construes TLP’s closing passages, then,

but it allows for new and different kinds of speaking more generally, ones that strictly speaking

may be neither true nor false, but might harbor the capacity to show or indicate various matters

of concern. Such a novel contextualized, essentially improvisatory sort of speaking, exemplified

by portions of TLP itself, would apply to mathematical problems (the trisection of the angle), as

well as many features of our joint existence and the texture of our lives, operating in aesthetics,

ethics and the arts. The resolute construal of nonsense, as is true in Diamond’s own writings,

thus joins up with aspect-seeing’s specifically non-veridical registerings (though the two are not

entirely coextensive); it allows for the sorts of uses of language and words in question in aspect-

seeing broadly understood (in instances of comparison or perceived structure). The resolute

approach to nonsense indicates how expressions other than veridical ones, those which lack the

capacity to be either false or true, in appropriate contexts nevertheless may exhibit their subject

matters in other ways.

To return to PI II, Wittgenstein himself, still discussing verbal meaning, there draws a

distinction between kinds of uses (and meanings) which further unfold these ways of talking (and

19
For “chickening out,” see Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder,” Philosophy 63.243 (Jan., 1988): 5-27, 7.
20
For the contrast between these two versions of nonsense, see Cora Diamond, “What Nonsense Might Be
Philosophy, 56. 215 (Jan., 1981), pp. 5-22.
 40

apprehending) that do not answer to his view of truth. Diamond herself, as well as others, invoke

these same distinctions when tracking these non-veridical uses.21 One advantage of having

canvased the resolute reading’s lineage, moreover, is that it makes plainer how Wittgenstein’s

distinction is here to be understand, and why even at this moment when words as words appear,

use can and does remain in the picture.

Wittgenstein, having claimed that speaking of the meaning of individual words is taken

from a different language game and is somehow forced upon us, next gives a general account of

such “forced” expressions. These instances and others are cases of “secondary meaning,” he

specifies. “Here one might speak of a primary and a secondary meaning of a word,” he states;

“only someone for whom the word has the former meaning uses it in the latter.” (§276).

Wittgenstein’s idea here seems to be that in some contexts new uses may be tried on with

an eye toward already established ones—such as saying Wednesday is fat and Tuesday is lean,

where we already dispose of standard uses of “fat” and “lean,” or in Anselm’s talk of

“something no greater than which can be conceived”—Diamond’s suggestion—where “greater

than which” in other contexts already has an established use. Such novel constructions, such

secondary uses and meanings, according to Wittgenstein, by rights cannot themselves be true or

false; they are inherently non-veridical, as is their subject matter. To be clear, in PI, this

distinction among subject matters takes a somewhat different shape than in TLP, since, unlike

there, in PI Wittgenstein recognizes many established uses, ones furnished with so-called criteria

and established agreements in judgement, which would not count as secondary employments,

albeit strictly speaking, by Wittgenstein’s lights, truth and falsehood also do not directly apply to

21
See Diamond, “Secondary Sense” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 67 (1966 - 1967), pp.
189-208 and also “Riddles and Anselm's Riddle,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes ,
1977, Vol. 51 (1977), pp. 143-186.
 41

them. Early on in PI I, Wittgenstein lists a panoply of uses to which language is put other than

speaking truth (I §23)—all these, however, under the appropriate conditions would also

presumably be labeled primary.

In instances where secondary meanings and uses are in question (Wittgenstein himself

speaks of both), following Diamond’s lead, it must be emphasized that not the single word as

word but some combination of words, some piece of wording is key; use, accordingly, is never

entirely out of the picture. Similarly, though perhaps unexpectedly, words as such, whether with

primary or secondary meanings and uses, Wittgenstein makes plain appear only in these “forced”

instances, with the exception of the occasions previously canvased, thus further jibing with what

has here been advanced. The entire set out of distinctions, the very matrix of primary and

secondary uses and meanings, after all recurs to a moment in which talk of the meaning of

words as such is said to be “forced,” as was just shown. Hence, word meaning, in every instance,

not just in the secondary case, as indeed might otherwise have been expected, according to

Wittgenstein, is taken from a different language game. The very notion of the meaning a word is

itself secondary, apparently because words as words appear only under the pressure of the

secondary, including those with primary uses and meanings.22 Consequently, even at this

moment, Wittgenstein continues to radically model and privilege use.

Nevertheless, acknowledging these nuances, this very distinction between primary and

secondary, between uses that are established and have criteria and those that do not, in the

present context is problematic, not only because, with it, potentially misleadingly, words as

words return to the fore, but also because this distinction, originating, as should now be clear, in

22
Hence in the midst of this discussion Wittgenstein underscores that “if careful attention shows me that when I am
playing this game I experience the word now this way, now that way [he has been speaking of “March” as a verb
and the name of a month] doesn’t it also show me that in the stream of speech I often don’t experience the word at
all?”(§272).
 42

Wittgenstein’s contrastive view of truth, introduces a seemingly fundamental split between

various regions of discourse and their respective ways of being talked about. Granting the

resolute reading (which seems to me largely convincing), aesthetics, ethics, philosophy, and

art—just those possibilities at the forefront of the humanities, and which today confront the most

urgent questions—remain separated from those areas of inquiry where truth genuinely holds

sway and are said to depend, in some fashion, on a different better established discourse for their

own discursive possibilities.

The stumbling block to this framing, to be clear, is not so much the deprivation of

authority or prestige that humanistic discourses seem to undergo on the resolute account (since if

they lack such, it would be silly to pretend otherwise), but that the distinction in question,

between kinds of speech and their corresponding subject matters, reverses the actual relation

between the two realms, thereby concealing and/or distorting that use that applies to them both.

Wittgenstein himself at the epoch of PI recognizes that the practices and capacities of “primary”

discourses ultimately recur to those areas about which so-called secondary discourse speaks—

our relations to one another, our personhood, our judgements and our various, sometimes

mutually contesting ways of being in the world; for him, as well, all discourse ultimately must

and does share this single background. Wittgenstein’s insistence on this division, his expansion

of his anti-metaphysical postulate to those uses that are established and those not, misleadingly

models, then, discourse’s more general situation. It eclipses that becoming, that being-in-time

that affects all discourse, as sometimes recognized by Wittgenstein himself.23 None of these

achievements deemed “established” appear like Athena full grown—not geometry nor the

calculus, not expectation nor imagination—nor do they ever simply come to rest. All differ

23
For example, see, again, §23, where Wittgenstein, after insisting “there are countless…different kinds of use,”
adds: “and this diversity is not something fixed.”
 43

across times and places, while undergoing numerous alterations; they are all up for grabs to

various degrees and in different ways.

Arguably in PI, then, Wittgenstein never fully overcomes his own starting point in logic,

his debt to Frege’s (and Russell’s) “revolution” and his own relative lack of deep acquaintance

with the history of thought. Had the optics of PI not sprouted from a logicist one, however, but

rather begun from the consideration of that temporality and historicity that all discourses share,

this line between regions and types of discourse could never have been drawn. As it is, the

participation in, and indeed availability to becoming and change of established discourses

remains inaccessible on Wittgenstein’s model; the temporal dimension of discourse’s mode of

being is there lost from sight.

Indeed plain contextualism, not just its verbal variant, would already seem to ensure that

this differentiation among uses should not and does not stand, that it is not fundamental in the

manner that distinguishing them suggests. Being radically contextualized, gearing into the

circumstances and occasions on which it is employed, use is always to some degree singular and

improvised; the background (in Searle’s sense), in every instance must each time be navigated,

improvised anew. A distinction between uses that are novel and unique (“Wednesday is fat”) and

others that are established (“Wednesday is the middle day of the week”) hence really does not

hold from the perspective of a given use; it instead rests on words and sentences having contexts

so familiar that their existence and import is effectively ignored.24

24
After all, in many Muslim countries, Tuesday not Wednesday, is the middle day of the week. To be sure, one may
maintain there remains a decision algorithm in this instance concerning the reckoning of “the middle”—but this is
both context bound and itself part of context, a matter of an always variable groupings of other beliefs. For someone
who works weekends, the middle of the week may fall on Monday. If I am a student with one class I really like, the
middle of the week might be the day on which that class is held; just as Wednesday is perhaps “fat” because most
people work a five-day week; with it, half is now over (“hump day”) and it is jointly understood as such. The beliefs
of the speaker or even some group of speakers informs the context—and, as with head-nodding meaning yes or no—
there is no point at which these groups resolve themselves unequivocally into a single uniform one, despite what
Wittgenstein himself at moments seems to indicate.
 44

Similarly, the same construal of truth that subtends Wittgenstein’s talk of secondary and

primary and of matters seen aspectually in distinction from other sorts, presses PI’s own

observations at moments into being stipulative, into promulgating what seem to be philosophical

doctrines and claims, despite Wittgenstein’s explicit disavowal of such outcomes. Wittgenstein’s

finely-honed parsings of talk about pain, of first person-reports about sensations and

proprioperception, while brilliant and often fascinating, clearly cut against our usual, everyday

understanding of these topics. Consequently, they have spawned volumes of philosophical

argument concerning them, considering both what Wittgenstein intended and whether what he

said about pain-talk, first-person reports of perceptions and so on is true.25 The same problems—

pain, my grasp of my body’s position and so on—are notable instances, however, where TLP’s

stipulation that claims deemed true must also be able to be false trickles down and informs PI’s

treatments.26 Accordingly, if leaving everything as it is and not begetting new philosophical

arguments and controversies actually is the aim, a better strategy, palpably, would be to embrace

use without these stipulations and without differentiations of this sort. Though degrees of

familiarity with uses no doubt exist, and on certain occasions, currently existing agreements in

judgement and something like criteria doubtless may dwell in the background of what is said,

25
One interesting recent example of such is Michael Hymers, Wittgenstein on Sensation and Perception (New York:
Routledge, 2017).
26
Wittgenstein insists that “I am in pain” is not a report or an assertion, pointing out that in the vast majority of
cases it cannot be said falsely; I cannot be mistaken that I am in pain (which is different of course from lying)—the
contrastive view thus holding sway (PI I §246). Not only, however, do such cases exist (phantom limbs and so on),
but apart from the contrastive view, no reason exists that such expressions cannot be both reports and self-avowals
(communications) of my condition, especially since, when said by someone else, “Josh is in pain,” their expression
clearly can be false or true. Similarly, Wittgenstein rejects what, thanks to him, may be called the beetle-in-a-box
view of pain: namely, that I know what pain is in your case owing to my direct awareness and apprehension of it in
my own. Whatever its actual merits, this construction clearly is what most non-philosophers are inclined to say
about pain and our ability to talk about it. And the inadequacy of the beetle-in-a-box vantage point, as Diamond has
shown, directly derives from the contrastive view of truth and Wittgenstein’s treatment of nonsense in TLP,
specifically from his conviction that Russell’s treatment of the reference of statements about an individual’s mental
contents, Bismarck’s about his toothache, yields nonsense, Russell offering a scenario where all of us speak of such
things in one way to ourselves and in a different way to others (“Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box?” in
Alice Crary & Rupert J. Read eds., The New Wittgenstein [Routledge, 2000], 262-92; pp. 272-3”).
 45

every discourse, it can and should be affirmed, is both fundamentally precedented and

unprecedented, with no ultimate dependence of one class or kind of speaking on any other.

Putting otherwise, talk of secondary and primary meanings and uses ultimately distances

the understanding of discourse from contexts that are temporal; from the recognition that all

discourse, all use occurs in time, having its own specific history (or historicity), reinvoked and

reframed on each occasion. Contextualism or occasionalism, of both stripes, requires this

temporal feature, which can never be removed from any event of understanding.

Recognizing such a thoroughgoing temporal register and abandoning such a distinction

between types of uses (or meanings), by no means, however, entail doing away with

considerations of truth—just the opposite. The recognition of discourse as an event in time

indeed requires the expansion of truth’s reach beyond Wittgenstein’s own envisioning of it: the

shucking off of the exclusive and restrictive template of truth that his thought retains at this

moment when it stands closest to positivism. Once no decisive difference between what such

regions and registers allow, insights in respect to these matters would also be possible, as would

amendment, correction, or changing of terms in every case. Those “events of sand,” as A. R.

Ammons puts it, from which seemingly more established practices emerge and to which they

return, would themselves remain open to discussion and insight of as a “primary” sort as any

other.

Truth’s status, the same in all discourse (since none escapes the hold of temporality,

though some, like the sciences, institutionalize and organize it in novel ways) in fact finds an

example in what transpires in many current discussions of Wittgenstein’s own work. In such

commentaries, including this one, an explicitly historical and textual view of certain questions is

adopted that retains a concern with the issues at hand—use, pain, rules, meaning, words, and so
 46

on. Such explorations pursue these questions, while recognizing their embedding and

contextualization in Wittgenstein’s own text, as well his text’s connection to other texts (and

their contextualizations and so on). Texts and their contexts give way to others, while the matter

in question, die Sache selbst, simultaneously comes to the fore. Such commentary, accordingly,

explicitly requires attention to a subject matter; in a single futurally-oriented act or staging it

reaches into the past, while allowing what is at issue to be articulated and explored. Thereby, this

example reveals the parameters, the dimensionality of all use, once it and language and words

have been radically reconceived. All discourses of whatever sort, on this construal, whether

explicitly or implicitly draw on the three vectors identifiable in this movement—of what has

been said, the outcome at which aim is taken, and the subject matter or “thing” thereby

involved—albeit they do not not always result in one final shape or form; the formulaic, indeed

the mechanical, in some spheres being able to take hold. This last possibility nevertheless floats

upon one and the same sea of understanding, where truth and falsity, the past and future, as well

as practices and things, reside. Texts and traditions found in literature and in the arts, as well as

in the history of mathematics, philosophy, and in the sciences themselves, may thus be brought

into play for insights of sometimes various, yet ultimately equivalent types. That in some of

these instances (perhaps all in the long run), tomorrow, such an event, the present walk, may give

way to another, to a new perambulation is no reason not to take today’s walk today.