Wittgenstein

on the
Augustinian
picture
Mark Christian R. Catapang. MAEd.
ALITAGTAG NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL
Teacher -III
 (1889 - 1951) was an Austrian
philosopher and logician, and has come
to be considered one of the 20th
Century's most important philosopher
have been major influences in the
development of Analytic Philosophy and
Philosophy of Language

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

 “
So, for example, in answering questions such as "

Truth?", we cannot assume that there is some actual

What is

"thing" which the word "truth" represents. Instead,

we must look at the differing ways in which the
word "truth" actually functions in ordinary language. In this
respect, Ordinary Language Philosophers
tends to oppose Essentialism (the idea that all
entities have intrinsic properties that can be
discerned by reason).
-Philosophical Investigations is the
principal text

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

https://www.philosophybasics.com/movements_ordinary_language.html
 15.1 Introduction

– His first work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, adapted

and refined many of their ideas on logic and language. It inspired the
scientifically minded philosophers who made up the Vienna Circle, and
who in turn had a profound influence on analytic philosophy, particularly
in America.

– Vienna Circle
– a group of philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social
sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at
the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick.
 15.2 The Augustinian picture
Augustine outlines a theory about the learning of language:

(A1) Before undertaking the task of learning

language, the learner can:

(i) Recognize as names the names which those around her use;

(ii) Identify objects in the environment as things fit to be named;

(iii) Tell what she herself thinks and feels.

 15.2 The Augustinian picture
Augustine outlines a theory about the learning of language:

(A2) The task of learning language consists in two

stages:

(i) Discovering which objects are signified by which names;

(ii) Learning to make the right noises in order to be able to express

what she thinks and feels.
Wittgenstein himself, however, finds something
slightly different here. What he concentrates on
initially is not a theory about the learning of
language, but a theory of the nature of the
meanings of words. What he says is this:

– (B) These words, it seems to me, give us a

particular picture of the essence of human
language. It is this: the individual words in
language name objects – sentences are
combinations of such names. – In this picture of
language we find the roots of the following idea:
Every word has a meaning. This meaning
is correlated with the word. It is the
object for which the word stands.
 2 KINDS OF
INTERPRETATION

– 15.3 The Anti-Metaphysical interpretation

– (B) These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of
the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words
in language name objects – sentences are combinations of such
names. – In this picture of language we find the roots of the
following idea: Every word has a meaning. This
meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object
for which the word stands.
 According to the Anti-Metaphysical view,
what’s wrong with this is that many words
function in a quite different way.
– Someone is sent shopping with a slip marked ‘five red apples’. The
shopkeeper finds a drawer marked ‘apples’, and a sample on a colour
chart marked ‘red’, and then he counts his way through the positive
whole numbers, putting something from the drawer which matches the
colour sample for each number he calls, until he reaches five. The crucial
word for the example is ‘five’. We might be able to treat ‘apple’ and
‘red’ as names – they appear as labels, of a drawer and a colour
sample, respectively – but it doesn’t seem as if ‘five’ is here functioning
like a name; and yet we can see from the explanation of the example
that it is meaningful
MEANING IS USE
According to the Anti-
Metaphysical view, the mistake
made by the Augustinian is to
try to understand language in
abstraction from real
life. Words have meaning.
 Examples:
FIVE GAME
– "Remember to recórd the show!".
– "I'll keep a récord of that request." permit.
 15.4 The Quasi-Kantian
interpretation

– essence’ of language
– Specifically, it’s wrong in thinking that
all words function like names.
If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of
nouns like ‘table’, ‘chair’, ‘loaf’, and of people’s names, and only secondarily of
the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something
that will take care of itself.
 The rules for using words –
the rules which are produced
in the language-games
involving those words – are
called grammar

– According to the view found by the Quasi-Kantian interpretation,

the
– meanings of words of two languages might be too different from
one
– another for interpretation of one in terms of the other to be
possible