‘The first shall be last and the last shall be first...’: a new reading of On Certainty 501

Abstract:

OC 501 seems a pretty plain indication of the continuity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But is it perhaps an indication that OC is continuous with TLP (construed after the ‘ineffabilist’ interpretation of Anscombe, Hacker, etc.) and not with PI? I suggest that in his last writings Wittgenstein comes to recognise more explicitly the continuities between TLP and PI (and OC). I do this by experimenting with two apparently opposed readings of OC 501, and attempting to place them both in the context of (i.e. in contrast to) the relatively new ‘resolute’ and ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing championed by Conant and Diamond. In short, I aim to show that OC 501, read in context, simply shows that, at the last, Wittgenstein was endeavouring to philosophize in a resolute fashion, as he had more or less throughout -- and very largely succeeding.

The paragraph numbered ‘501’ in the notes that have come down to us under the title of On Certainty raises a puzzle. At least, I think that most readers of Wittgenstein should find it very puzzling. (It has certainly puzzled me quite a bit over the years.) It (OC 501) runs as follows:

Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? You must look at the practice of language, then you will see it.

This paper of mine is about the puzzle(s) I see this remark of Wittgenstein’s as raising.

Part of the puzzle, as will be quite obvious to afficionados of the later Wittgenstein, might be put roughly thus: Isn’t it well-known that according to the later Wittgenstein, philosophy (at least, when done aright) consists of nothing but description(s)? (Compare Philosophical Investigations para.s 124-6, especially.) But that seems to be pretty much directly contradicted by the question and the answer that On Certainty 501 consists in. That remark, as we have just seen, seems to say that we can perhaps see (the logic of) our language, but cannot describe it.

What’s going on here?

It may be that some handle on this puzzle will be available to us, if we look at the similarities as well as the differences between the way in which ‘description’ supposedly features in Wittgenstein’s philosophy or philosophies, prior to the last period of his life (when he wrote On Certainty), according to leading extant interpretations of him. Perhaps especially as, increasingly, many of those interested in Wittgenstein’s philosophy are to be heard urging that the continuities between ‘early’ and ‘later’ Wittgenstein have been underestimated.

A popular way of understanding those continuities, as a means of comparing the ‘theories’ of language that Wittgenstein was allegedly committed to in the two main different phases in his career, runs roughly:

[Table 1]

‘Early’ ‘Later’

One all-encompassing Many fine-grained

description/explanation descriptions of

of language: language-games:

THE PICTURE THEORY USE THEORY (or

OF LANGUAGE. LANGUAGE-GAME THEORY)

OF LANGUAGE.

One could perhaps add on a third column, entitled ‘Third’ or ‘Last’, to refer to the further developments in Wittgenstein’s thinking after about 1945, which are a primary subject of the essays in this book and in its ‘companion volume’, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s edited collection, The Third Wittgenstein.[1] The ‘Third’ (or ‘Last’, or ‘Latest’, or ‘Final’) Wittgenstein could be distinguished from the ‘Later’ (sometimes called ‘Second’) Wittgenstein through his perhaps-greater interest in context, in legitimate occasions for utterance, and otherwise. According roughly to the schema of Table 1, this ‘Final’ Wittgenstein would thereby be telling us (in a fuller fashion than ‘the language-game theory’ manages to do) just how our linguistic practices are, by means of what might be called a ‘context theory’ or ‘framework theory’ of our life with language. We shall shortly return to this (quite problematic but) suggestive thought.

In any case, here [in Table 1, above] are two accounts of the nature of language. Both claim to tell us how language really is.[2] I think it is fair to say that, even if many protagonists of Wittgenstein’s later work might be unhappy using the term ‘theory’ of their own view, the structure of their view is such that they aim -- or see Wittgenstein as aiming -- to represent our practices (and our language) to us perspicuously and systematically, albeit in detail and in their variety and not through one single lens. They are, as I say, offering us a purportedly correct and adequate -- ‘bird’s-eye’ -- account (adequate in ways that the Tractatus’s account was not) of our use of language, of our language-games.

We should proceed to ask what the point is of achieving such a ‘bird’s-eye’ account; what is the point of the descriptions assembled by later Wittgenstein, according to this reading of him? Sometimes, it seems to be just: telling us the truth about (our) language, saying how it is with our language. Austin warned well against the thought that simply ‘telling the truth’ was ever likely to be a good enough motivation for doing something. If this is why Wittgenstein described things, then he surely inherited rather too much from early Wittgenstein, according to this reading of him. The thought that what Wittgenstein is about is simply understanding how our language-games are -- describing them for description’s sake -- is a residue of (a defunct) metaphysical ambition.

If we are to reckon with the most plausible version of the picture offered in (the second column of) Table 1, then we ought to say something like this: that the point of Wittgenstein’s descriptions is to have a method of separating sense from nonsense. It is that -- plausible-seeming -- thought that I will now proceed to question. (Those who are very familiar with the kind of schema indicated in Table 1, and with ‘resolutist’ criticisms of it, may wish to skip the next couple of pages.)

Now, there is clearly something right about such a schema of Wittgenstein’s development as is set out in Table 1, above. One only has to look at (say) Philosophical Investigations para.23, to see this.[3] However, I have already flagged something which may trouble one about this schematic view of Wittgenstein: it suggests that the continuity in Wittgenstein’s philosophy lies in him having something which seems awfully like a theory, and yet in his later work -- and in fact in the Tractatus, too! -- Wittgenstein urges his readers not to take him as theorizing (See e.g. PI para.s 116-132; T L-P 4.112). True, neither the ‘picture theory’ nor the ‘use-theory’ (or, if you prefer, ‘language-game theory’ [4] ) need necessarily be committed to any form of Metaphysical Realism. That need not be the form their theorizing takes. Indeed, both, in sticking to talk of language, are naturally read as licensing ‘Anti-Realism’. This is obvious in the case of the later Wittgenstein (who has often been read in fact even as some kind of Idealist or Relativist); but to see that it can apply also to early Wittgenstein, one need only recall that the first influential interpretation of Wittgenstein was as laying out all the essential groundwork for logical positivism. Positivistic Anti-Realism, such as the ferocious opposition of the Vienna Circle to all metaphysics, is founded on the Tractatus.[5]

Indeed, one might take the risk of characterizing the class of positions enabled by Wittgenstein as understood in Table 1, above, as ‘Carnapian’, remembering that Carnap passed through many incarnations in his philosophical development, and through a number of positions at least superficially resembling the ‘positions’ occupied by Wittgenstein at different times in his career,[6] and that what all of these positions had in common was a committment to giving a (positivistic or post-positivistic) Anti-Realist account of language. Carnap was much more than a logical positivist; his development led him to more sophisticated views, views which in fact quite a number of contemporary philosophers are still arguably catching up with.[7]

But was Wittgenstein, even in his later work, really any more sympathetic to Anti-Realism than to (Metaphysical) Realism? Wasn’t his attitude rather, a plague on all your ‘isms’?![8]

There is, in any case, something else very troubling about the ‘Carnapian’ view of the continuities in Wittgenstein’s thinking. Table 1 is simply inadequate to the text of the Tractatus, at least. Notoriously, Wittgenstein’s masterly early work ends by declaring itself a load of nonsense, and that the reader must throw it away. Notoriously, Carnap and friends failed to read (or any rate to do any justice to) the closing segments (more generally, the ‘frame’) of the book. Notoriously, Wittgenstein despaired of their (or perhaps anyone) understanding it.[9] What Wittgenstein gave with one hand, he apparently took away with the other: the Picture Theory might be true, but it could not be said. Language, strictly speaking, was indescribable. The harmony between language and reality was ineffable, and could at best be ‘shown’. The latter notion became the term of choice for those who, as the positivist interpretation of the Tractatus collapsed in the light of its obvious gaps, sought to explain what Wittgenstein was actually saying in his early work. Wittgenstein was taken to be gesturing at truths not only about logic and language, but about the world as a whole, truths which could not ‘strictly’ be spoken. James Conant has characterized this (class of) interpretations of the Tractatus as ‘ineffabilist’.[10] Ineffabilism naturally tends towards (Metaphysical) Realism (because if one can’t say anything about the world in philosophy, ‘surely’ one can still gesture at it / at ‘deep’ truths about it?).

Now, there is a fair bit to be said for thinking that ineffabilism is onto something that positivism is not. One reason is the famous one: that positivism is self-refuting. The picture theory of language cannot be pictured.[11] The very effort to enunciate it requires moving to a position outside the domain it legitimizes. Thus Wittgenstein was taken by his ineffabilist readers to be drawing the lesson from the body of his own book, at the book’s end.

Many ineffabilist readers of the Tractatus have thought that this in fact is really all that the ‘resolute’ readers of the Tractatus (e.g. Diamond, Conant, Goldfarb, Dreben) are saying, too -- that we have to take seriously that the Tractatus is nonsense, because its own theory of language says it is nonsense. This is a reductive misreading of Conant and Diamond et al which misses a central novel aspect of their interpretation -- that Wittgenstein’s therapeutic ambitions, and non-theoreticistic conception of philosophy, are to be taken seriously in his early work too. The propositions of the Tractatus are to be thrown away not because they fail to meet a theoretic requirement, but because, as we work through the book we simply do come to feel our relation to them as being under increasing strain. We are not sure what they say any more; we have incoherent desires in relation to them.[12]

Nevertheless, despite this significant failing among ineffabilists to comprehend the new resolute alternative mode of reading Wittgenstein and of practising philosophy, Conant (for reasons that we need not dwell on here) argues convincingly that ineffabilism genuinely is a stage further (than positivism) along the philosophical dialectic explored in the Tractatus. [13]

In any case, what the ‘ineffabilist’ and ‘positivist’ doctrines have in common (unless the ‘positivist’ is actually willing to accede to the austerity of ‘resolutism’, which is not a view of any kind) is a ‘‘substantial’ conception of nonsense’: that (according to ineffabilism) there can be profound nonsense, and (according to positivism) there can be nonsense that results from putting together the meanings of words (‘symbols’) wrongly. What they ultimately have in common, then, is a committment to substantialism vis-a-vis nonsense, and a concomitant opposition to taking contextualism (initially, sentential contextualism) seriously. The austere conception of nonsense, which holds that, from a logical point of view, nonsense is ‘all the same’, just (plain) nonsense, just failing to attribute a meaning to (or give a context for) one or other of one’s words, we shall return to shortly.

Overall, we see that ‘ineffabilistic’ readings of the Tractatus, while imperfect, nevertheless have -- arguably, unlike ‘positivistic’ readings -- quite a bit to be said for them, both exegetically and philosophically. Most importantly perhaps, they have something perhaps coherent to say about the ‘frame’ of the Tractatus.

Or rather: they at least possess the superficial appearance of having something coherent to say about the frame (unlike positivistic readings, which don’t even have that). I say ‘superficial’, because actually ‘ineffabilism’ depends upon a quite un-Wittgensteinian and unhelpful extension of the ‘say vs. show’ distinction (ineffabilists take nonsense to be able to show things that cannot be said, but this is no part of Wittgenstein’s account of showing in the body of the Tractatus). Moreover, ineffabilism fails to understand the therapeutic point of Wittgenstein’s work: that one is supposed to enter into philosophical temptations which will result in a pull towards (e.g.) positivism, and (ultimately) ineffabilism, and then to overcome the very sentences which thus urged one, and truly to throw them away.

Ineffabilism’s reliance on a ‘substantial’ take on nonsense leads to a thoroughgoing irresolution. Ineffabilism ‘chickens out’ from taking the frame of the Tractatus seriously; it holds onto the sentences that are supposed to be thrown away, by means of its suggestions that we can still ‘think’ them, or see what they ‘show’, or somehow ‘cognize’ what they ‘gesture at’. It does not take Wittgenstein at his word; it does not resolutely follow through on the austere injunctions which preface and close the book (and indeed are sprinkled not unliberally throughout its ‘body’).[14]

But still, ‘ineffabilism’ is at worst no worse off than positivism, and perhaps a step further along the philosophical dialectic (as in the Tractatus), at least. So now an interesting question arises:

Is there then some reason for an ineffabilistic reading of later Wittgenstein?

If it may turn out that Carnapian renditions of the Investigations, or indeed of On Certainty, are fundamentally flawed, then oughtn’t one at least to ask whether it might just be possible to advance at least one step further along the philosophical dialectic there, too? And it does not in fact take too long to figure out what an ineffabilistic reading of later Wittgenstein would look like. It would urge one to look for the say vs. show distinction as still present and pregnant in Wittgenstein’s later writings. It would ask questions like, ‘How could one possibly say, strictly speaking, what the human form(s) of life is (are)? Isn’t this something that can only be at best gestured at, or perhaps thought, and not said?’ For to say it, would seem to require seeing our form(s) of life from outside, ‘from sideways on’. Ineffabilism about Wittgenstein’s later work would accent those of Wittgenstein’s concepts which appear to take us up to or beyond the limits of language -- concepts such as ‘agreement’, and ‘form(s) of life’.[15]

Why does it take so short a time to figure all this out? Well, one reason is: because it is not as if no such interpretations of Wittgenstein’s (later) thought have been given. ‘Ineffabilist’ readings of later Wittgenstein are not as common as ‘Carnapian’ readings of him, but they crop up reasonably regularly. A distinguished recent example is John Koethe’s book, The continuity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.[16] The ‘continuity’ of the title, the reader will by now perhaps be unsurprised to hear, is not that set out in Table 1, above. It is rather of the fashion indicated below, in

Table 2:

‘Early’ ‘Later’

The crystalline structure of language -- The way language-games work,

the relation of language to world -- is the nature of our forms of life,

shown, not said. are shown, not said.[17]

This table, then, is an ineffabilistic counterpart to Table 1, earlier. Where Table 1 pictures the continuities within Wittgenstein’s philosophy to lie most especially within his espousal of an account -- even, a theory -- of language of a broadly Carnapian nature, and thus tending toward Anti-Realism, here (in Table 2) that theory is taken to be unstatable, and a kind of ‘pictorial’ Realism -- in which the structure of the world, or the foundations of our Lebensformen, should be seen but not heard, as it were -- expresses Wittgenstein’s vision, instead.

Of course, the most common view of Wittgenstein’s development remains one according to which he ‘advances’ from my Table 1 to my Table 2; i.e. a view according to which Wittgenstein goes from an Ineffabilistic Realism (in the Tractatus) to some form of Anti-Realism (in his later work). This view is that which we find in, for example, Norman Malcolm, Peter Hacker, and Marie McGinn.[18] (Ineffabilism is not popular as a reading of later Wittgenstein, but ineffabilism as a reading of early Wittgenstein apparently enables one to keep one’s cake and eat it at the same time: one gets the Picture Theory -- an account of fact-stating language, conducive to positivism and its successors, as central -- ‘for free’, en passant, while seeming to be more sophisticated than the poor clunky positivist in knowing that ‘really’ none of this can actually be said.) One thus combines elements from my two Tables, and appears to land up with a view free of mysticism, scientism or over-generalisation. I have already parenthetically questioned whether the ‘Carnapian’ readings of later Wittgenstein actually do enable one to be free of the charge of holding a theory of language. I hope that my somewhat extended presentation of Carnapian and Ineffabilist options for reading Wittgenstein have now instilled in the reader an uncomfortable worry: If Wittgenstein were truly an ineffabilist in his early work, and a ‘Carnapian’ in his later work, wouldn’t this mean that his later work is actually less developed, less satisfactory, than his earlier work?!?

As already suggested, part of the appeal of ‘Ineffabilism’ as applied to Wittgenstein’s later work, is that it can appear to be less theoreticistic -- less like the stating of controversial theses -- than ‘Carnapianism’.[19] Ineffabilism appears to offer an opportunity of reading Wittgenstein’s ‘reminders’, and his ‘grammatical remarks’, and the moments in his work when something almost Kantian appears to be happening, thus: as hints at the kind of thing which we get in much more detail in certain moments in Heidegger.[20] We can read ‘forms of life’ as part of a gnomic gesture toward the aspects of human life which, strictly speaking, cannot be said, as part of a background which we can foreground only by ‘violating the limits of language’. So: The ineffabilistic version of ‘form of life’ says that what the positivists are trying to capture is something uncapturable, that ‘the stream of life’ is something, but something which always evades philosophical theorizing.

Ineffabilism’s trouble is in how it can say so much -- or indeed anything -- about this ‘something’ about which nothing further, so it says, can be said. In other words, how can it say quite a lot about what it says is unsayable? It is one thing, perhaps, to be loquacious about silence; but about the unsayable?!?[21]

Thus while the way that (later) Wittgenstein is usually taken on the question of “use” might be said, not unilluminatingly, to be Carnapian in nature -- to be an Anti-Realist would-be reduction of meaning to use, where use is understood as place in a substantial and static grammar (even if it is emphasised, as Pragmatist readers of Wittgenstein for example do, that this grammar itself may change, such that different meanings become possible at different times) -- this rarer ‘Ineffabilistic’ alternative to such a conception holds that there is a Truth to what use is, to how our language-games in general and in their specifics are, but a Truth that we can only gesture at, or perhaps think but not say. It is worth going over the implications of all this. For these –

‘(Post-)Positivism’ and ‘Ineffabilism’ -- are precisely the options usually presented to readers of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece -- the Tractatus -- for how to understand that work and its conceptions of ‘sense’ and ‘nonsense’. Most commentators on the Tractatus plausibly take the ‘ineffabilist’ reading of that work to represent in a certain important sense an important advance over the ‘(post-)positivist’ reading of it. (For ineffabilism can at least (seem to) understand in a sense the way T L-P ends, while Positivism and its inheritors -- from Hume to early Carnap and beyond -- is usually just silent on its inability to understand itself, on its ‘self-mate’.) These commentators quite often still (rightly) take ‘ineffabilism’ too to have a troublingly -- indeed, utterly -- paradoxical or contradictory character. And yet, many of those same commentators, who normally present themselves as admirers above all of Wittgenstein’s later work, taking Wittgenstein in it to have advanced upon the conceptions of meaning etc. that they locate in the Tractatus, prefer what I have polemically characterized here as ‘Carnapian’ renditions of his later work. They present Wittgenstein, for example, as having one or another variety of ‘use-theory’ of meaning, or as rooting use in sociologically describable and definable ‘community practices’, both options latent in Carnap’s subtle (but never unproblematic) later philosophical development.

I take this as evidence that something is seriously awry in the reception of Wittgenstein’s work. It is important enough to say it, clearly, once again: If most of the commentators on the Tractatus are not completely wrong, then it follows that what they say about Wittgenstein’s later work has that work be in important respects a backsliding from the insights of his early work![22]

Is there any way out of this mess? A possible partial way out, one step forward at least in the ‘dialectic’, must be obvious: what if we actually tried reading later Wittgenstein, right to the end, as an ‘ineffabilist’? In terms of On Certainty, this would among other things mean the following: taking ‘the framework’, or our ‘weltbild’, not, as most commentators do, as statable, as (re-)presentable, but rather as unstatable, as ineffable. One would look at a remark like OC 455, “Every language-game is based on words ‘and object’ being recognized again”, and, noting that it is not clear that it could mean anything to attempt to portray or imagine the opposite, one would conclude that this remark is actually indexing or gesturing at something profound and unsayable.

A little further on in On Certainty, there is a remark which potently seems to advertise that there is ineffabilism in later (last) Wittgenstein. I am thinking, of course, of OC 501. Here it is again: “Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? You must look at the practice of language, then you will see it.” Here, Wittgenstein is apparently led to ask himself a question which appears to echo what the ineffabilists say of TLP: that its doctrine is that logic cannot be described. And that its apparent doctrine is all in truth unstatable. At the end of all Wittgenstein’s long and involved journeyings, it seemingly came to this. Or does this remark rather even index that Wittgenstein is realizing that this -- this saying that it is all unsayable -- is what he has been saying all along? That all the seemingly precise and concrete descriptions of language-games etc. really come to is a realization that language cannot be said, cannot be described?

OC 501 is crystal-clearly, definitely, an indication of apparent continuity between what is last and what was more or less first [23] in Wittgenstein’s philosophizing. And in this wonderful moment, of our witnessing Wittgenstein wondering and worrying, almost at the end, as to whether he has actually made any progress in his writing from where he apparently started, we have seemingly a great clue to the possibility and potential utility of an ineffabilist reading of Wittgenstein, or at least of key strands in his last writings.[24] For sure, we won’t have, on this account, the kind of simple clear view intimated in the first column of Table 2, above. Rather, the logic of our language etc. will presumably be seen rather in its specifics, in the kinds of concrete cases exemplified by Wittgenstein’s motley of discussions in later-philosophy texts, like OC. But the important point will be that the continuity in Wittgenstein’s thought will remain his emphasis on the unsayability of the important things that, in doing philosophy, we can get to see.

Now, what do mainstream commentators on On Certainty make of 501? I am thinking of those many who (I have suggested) are ‘Carnapian’ readers of the later (or of the last) Wittgenstein,[25] or who Alice Crary (in her paper in this volume)[26] calls ‘inviolability’ interpreters of his work: on the grounds that they think it renders our practices immune to rational criticism; describable, but nevertheless ‘inviolable’ except at the risk of the purveying of nonsense (of ‘violations of logical (or logico-pragmatical) syntax’). These readers tend to think that we can cite -- or state -- ‘framework propositions’ to defuse the importunate questions of a sceptic, for example by saying something like, “You cannot doubt that you have a body (though not because you know it)”.[27] Relativistic readers of OC for example, and readers of it who, ‘after Carnap’, similarly take OC’s teaching to concern what you are (not) allowed to say when, and what violates the bounds of sense through attempting to doubt a ‘hinge proposition’ or such-like: what do they make of this moment in Wittgenstein’s text where he appears to cast doubt on the possibility of so much as actually stating meaningfully what the hinge-propositions are?

The answer is: virtually nothing at all. Remarks like 501 just don’t get a serious gloss, in the writings on On Certainty of McGinn, Hacker, Malcolm, Morawetz, etc. . In 501, Wittgenstein apparently intimates that ineffabilism might be preferable to Carnapianism and the like, that perhaps the structure of our language and our committments, which he appeared to be laying out in OC, is ‘in fact’ ineffable, and can at most be seen, be ‘shown’. But this intimation is in most cases simply ignored, by those who should find it most troubling.

Carnapian etc. readers of OC make the same mistake that the positivist readers of TLP made: they fail to notice the key moments in the text when Wittgenstein pulls the rug from under those who would hope (after the fashion indicated in Table 1, above) to be able to say what logic, or language,[28] is all about. With the Tractatus, Hacker and McGinn have higher standards; they insist on the plain textual inadequacy of positivist renditions of that text. Somehow, their standards seem to fall when it comes to Wittgenstein’s later writings. This is especially troubling, given that they believe that those later writings have got things right. Thus, as Witherspoon argues, they actually commit themselves in propria persona to following forms of Carnapianism, while being under the illusion that they are following later Wittgenstein.

Now, the loose and rough structure of these last jottings of Wittgenstein that we know as OC of course provides McGinn et al with a partial excuse; it is easier to downgrade or avoid OC 501 than it is to avoid (say) TLP 6.54. But rather than pursue the question of just exactly how and why fine scholars and clever philosophers have managed to miss something seemingly very important in Wittgenstein’s last writings, I want to turn directly to the more critical philosophical issue of what there is to be said for ineffabilism, in and around OC 501.

Can logic not be ‘said’? Can it be ‘shown’?[29] Can we, for Wittgenstein, describe language? Do ‘grammatical remarks’,[30] and lists of ‘framework propositions’ -- judgements that ‘constitute the framework’, ‘conditions’ of our practice -- , for instance, do so?

I think the correct answer is: yes and no. Or again: it is as you please (cf. PI para. 16). We would do well, for starters, to remember PI para. 291: “What we call ‘descriptions’ are instruments for particular purposes”. Descriptions are never just descriptions, we might say. Those who pursue a ‘Wittgensteinian’ agenda as if that agenda were purely and simply one of pure description are running a serious risk.[31]

We can of course assemble descriptions of what people say, when they say it, even why and how they say it. In their differing ways, this is part of the accomplishment of the ‘reminding’ enterprises of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Harold Garfinkel.[32] But there is a kind of super-description that is a fantasy. And that is ‘beyond’ us. The fantasy of ‘super-description’ is, I think, what many philosophers, including some ‘Wittgensteinians’ -- plus, incidentally, many sociological theorists and some linguists -- are often after.[33]

Now, it might be objected that my model of “theorizing” (as opposed to ‘reminding’) here tendentiously identifies theorizing with the production of more-or-less metaphysical (though of course not necessarily ‘Realist’) super-descriptions. Must the attempt to be systematic and philosophically relevant lead to metaphysics in any troubling sense of that word?

Possibly not. But I have seen no positive evidence that there is in fact any space available for an alleged non-super-descriptive, systematic/theoretical Wittgensteinianism. Such an alleged option has been tried out in the work of very bright philosophers such as Peter Strawson or (more recently) Meredith Williams. The end products of all such attempts that I have seen, and also of most accounts that claim even to respect and follow Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy, do involve ‘super-description’, do involve (variegated) attempts to set out consequential grammatical limitations to language-use or such-like. Gordon Baker’s recent internal criticisms of the Baker-Hacker allegedly-Wittgensteinian programme are particularly pertinent -- in fact, devastating -- here.[34]

Those who want to get a theory out of Wittgenstein -- e.g. Strawson, Williams, Angus Ross -- are hardly likely to succeed in avoiding metaphysical fantasy if even many of those who do not want a theory of any kind from Wittgenstein -- e.g. Ted Schatzki, ‘Baker and Hacker’ and even Marie McGinn -- end up attributing a metaphysics of meaning (usually, a form of Carnapianism) to him. They are all, I am afraid, after the kind of ‘description’ which does more than (for example) re-orient one towards practices of one’s own which one has somehow lost a grip on.[35]

The super-description which I think tends to be fantasized by Carnapian readers of Wittgenstein sets out exactly, and almost as if from the outside, how (the) language works. It is imagined as utterly cool and pure, and envisages Wittgenstein’s ‘ideal’ of clarity as actually attainable, or already attained.[36] And part of the burden of my argument thus far in this paper, especially in connection with my ‘Table 1’, above, has been that it doesn’t much matter whether one imagines such a super-description as occuring all at once (as in TLP) or gradually, in bits (as in Wittgenstein’s later/last work). The fundamental conception remains the same; and is the same misconception of what Wittgenstein was about, throughout. Indeed, the ‘Carnapian’ vision of Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus work is more dangerous, because it can give the illusion of having made real philosophical progress over the Tractatus, and to some extent at least of having abandoned the allegedly ‘overly high ambitions’ of that work.

The Anti-Realist flavour of standard readings of On Certainty involves, if I am right, an attempt to represent entirely clearly to us how our language really is; or alternatively (if it tends in an Idealist or Relativist direction), an attempt to get us to understand exactly how we are stuck in language / in our practices.[37] And here one should note a deep danger in some of the metaphors which Wittgensein occasionally employs (e.g. “übersichtliche Darstellung”), which standard readings of later Wittgenstein over-emphasize and misrepresent. The danger of terms such as “perspicuous representation [of grammatical rules]”,[38] “surview of the grammar”, and the like, is of a fantasy of Realism creeping into (and thus muddling or obscuring) one’s Carnapianism: the danger is that one will think that, armed with one’s perspicuous representations of language-games etc., one will eventually (or even immediately, if one is especially immodest) be able to map the totality of linguistic practice, or to set ‘the grammar’ in stone, if only for a brief period.

There is no such thing as a bird’s eye-view [39] of our linguistic practices, not even bit by bit. (This, I think, is a therapeutic ‘reminder’ which one ignores at one’s great philosophic

peril.[40] )

Wittgenstein actually offers us something very different from this. One might try the following: his ‘reminders’ ought not to be construed as reminding us of anything in the nature of a philosophical truth or insight. In particular, we are not reminded of facts about how our language is structured (nor even of ineffable truths). We are reminded only, in a very down-to-earth fashion, of particular things like a certain use or uses of words which it may help us to remember, at a particular time, in the grip of a particular kind of delusion. How will it help? By returning us to the actual (or potential) practice of our language. That is all. Wittgenstein’s remarks are, I want to say, through and through occasioned and transitional. Any descriptions of practices offered in those remarks are then subject to the over-arching therapeutic aim, the aim of effecting an intellectual-practical transition. They have no free-standing validity. We might say: descriptions in Wittgenstein’s sense, as they ‘work’ in his work, do not stand, at all.

But one does not have to accept this, to see the appeal and point of something like the ineffabilist reaction against standard (Carnapian) readings of (e.g.) On Certainty. Take OC 494:

“ “I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgment.”

But what sort of proposition is that? (It is reminiscent of what Frege said about the law of identity.) It is certainly no empirical proposition. it does not belong to psychology. It has rather the character of a rule.”

The opening -- ‘quoted’ -- sentence, is, I take it, just the kind of remark that is standardly taken to be the teaching of On Certainty. One is supposed to learn the occasions on which one can refuse to answer the sceptic, by citing a ‘framework-proposition’, or by refusing to doubt at bedrock. One is supposed to know what it is that the sceptic is trying to say, but also to know that that cannot sensically be said, here and now, and/or can be sensically rebutted or refused or ‘dissolved’.

But if we reflect on “I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgment”, we will soon notice that there is no genuine alternative to it. It is not, that is, as though there is any such thing -- anything that we can make any sense of -- as “giving up all judgement”. There is no thing here which one cannot do. If one attempts to describe what it would be to doubt some very ‘basic’ proposition, one simply comes up short; one is flummoxed. This is what an ineffabilist reader would, more or less rightly, say here: that to say that “I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgment” is to say something very strange. It is, in an important sense, not to say anything at all. Because there is nothing it would be to say the opposite.

And this, of course, is just what Wittgenstein himself remarks. The standard interpretation would have us expect him not to worry much about the stating that such-and-such a ‘basic’ proposition is a ‘hinge’, or such like. (Indeed, the making of such statements is, on standard readings, the central point of On Certainty.) But he does worry. He says that the sentence “I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgement” reminds him of what Frege said about the law of identity. What does Frege say about the law of identity? He says that it is a fundamental principle, “a law of being true”.[41] And what does Wittgenstein think about the ‘law of identity’? He thinks it utterly absurd: he thinks there is no more useless ‘proposition’ known to humankind.[42] (An ineffabilist might (I suppose) prefer to put it this way: It cannot be said.[43] )

So, this sentence, that on the standard reading of OC is the very kind of thing that Wittgenstein is trying to get us to understand, and to say on the correct occasion, is, for Wittgenstein himself, awfully close to being a paradigm of unstatability.

A Carnapian reader of 494 might respond by invoking the last sentence of the paragraph. Doesn’t Wittgenstein admit here that “I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgment” is itself a kind of kosher proposition; namely, a rule?

Well, he says roughly that it has the character of a rule.

And rules, for Wittgenstein, are not really rules unless they are followed, or (better?) acted upon.[44] Often, the enunciation alone of a rule is pointless or counter-productive. It is better to stay at a more concrete level of action. This is roughly what Wittgenstein recommends in OC 495: “One might simply say “O, rubbish!” to someone who wanted to make objections to the propositions that are beyond doubt. that is, not reply to him but admonish him.” We see Wittgenstein here recommending not that one attempt to instruct an imagined sceptic with what one is allowed to say when, but simply to admonish him. This brings out something that the ineffabilist reader will be keen on: a profound sense in which logic can’t be explicitly justified. (It can -- I would suggest -- only be ‘returned’ to, and lived.)

The trouble with standard readings of OC can now, perhaps, be put this way: they do not hold fast to a recognition of how very different ‘speaking the framework’ is from (what we might call) ordinary speech. ‘Framework propositions’ are in an important respect not propositions at all. Carnapian, (post-)positivist readings of OC are always running the risk of backsliding into a kind of ersatz foundationalism, whenever they forget that ‘weltbild propositions’ are least misleadingly regarded as ... barely propositions at all, as something perhaps more like rules, which are often best simply followed; and as stateable only at a certain grave risk of vacuity or of philosophical delusion.(McGinn’s more well-known writings on On Certainty are perhaps an especially clear case of this error being fallen into.)

Wittgenstein returns to the same concern, a couple of paragraphs later, at 498:

“The queer thing is that even though I find it quite correct for someone to say “Nonsense!” and so brush aside the attempt to confuse him with doubts at bedrock, -- nevertheless, I hold it to be incorrect if he seeks to defend himself (using, e.g., the words ‘I know”).” [45]

And would it be so very different if he sought to defend himself by saying, “This proposition is a hinge, and so it is invulnerable to doubt”, or something similar? The standard reading of On Certainty fails adequately to distinguish Wittgenstein from Moore. The structure of the standard reading is the same as Moore’s; the only real difference is that the standard reading refrains religiously -- fetishistically, dogmatically -- from employing the word ‘know’, here.

Wittgenstein does not recommend defending oneself against scepticism, even through the description of a form of life or of rules for when it is meaningful or otherwise to say so and so. Rather than seeking to describe even the local logic, by (e.g.) giving/stating a

‘framework(-proposition)’, or (Moore’s particular version) saying that one knows that it is so, one can (and probably should) simply say, “Nonsense!”

Now consider 499-500:

“I might also put it like this: the ‘law of induction’ can no more be grounded than certain particular propositions concerning the material of experience.

But it would also strike me as nonsense to say “I know that the law of induction is true”.”

Would it be any better to say, “The law of induction stands fast for me”? It is hard to see why that would be any better at all, why it would be relevantly different.

An ineffabilist might say that the whole point of OC is to make the kind of certainty in question here nonepistemic, a nonrationcinated standing fast, rather than a knowing. O.K.; but so long as the ineffabilist only asserts something like that, bluntly and with no apparent awareness of the paradoxicality and unsatisfactoriness of stating it, as a thesis, as something we can seem to grasp and know, then they have failed to comprehend Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. They have failed to stick to ‘therapy’, and are slipping irresolutely into limning the knowable and the statable -- into nonsense.

A subtler ineffabilist, perhaps rightly, may then urge us to say that Wittgenstein is pressing, in these remarks, against the very attempt to describe logic that is implicit in pretty much any mention of ‘the law of induction’.[46] Again, the ineffabilist willing to make this move seems to be onto something simply missing in the standard (Carnapian) reading of On Certainty.

And so, to 501:

“Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? You must look at the practice of language, then you will see it.”

First off, we should note that Wittgenstein does not simply state a thesis. He does not say, blankly, “Logic cannot be described”.[47] He asks a question, a question which, especially after my account above, can (I hope) be seen to emerge naturally from the foregoing paragraphs in On Certainty.

If there is a significance in the switch from the word ‘logic’ to the phrase ‘the practice of language’, it is perhaps that there is less danger of one reifying the latter than the former. If you look at the practice of language, you will see (what) logic (‘really’ is, what it can be relatively unmisleadingly characterized as being). To see logic is nothing more than to see the practice of language as it actually is. Or more deflationarily still, given the virtual equivalence frequently in Wittgenstein’s later thought between logic and ((perspicuous presentation of) the practice of) language, one might almost recast Wittgenstein’s thought as follows: If you look aright at the practice of language, you will see it (the practice of language!). (Wittgenstein’s writing is not meant to contain controversial theses. So we should not be too surprised if sometimes it resolves aspectually into tautology.) There is no logic other than (or ‘before’) the logic of our language, which is utterly immanent in (the practice of) language, not anything other than it. All that logic is is language under a certain -- peculiar, transitional -- description. The fundamental phenomenon hereabouts is an enacted grasp of language-in-action that is common to us all, not some alleged formal aspect of our language (e.g. its ‘framework’) that it is the philosopher’s privilege to consider and enunciate (or gesture at).

So there is nothing mysterious here? If we see it all in order as it is... then why can’t it be described? (Why does 501 still seem to end as it begins, in complicity with ineffabilism? Must we concede to the ineffabilist that the practice of language can only be seen, not heard, written, or read?)

Well, it all depends, as I have explained above, what one wants to mean by ‘describe’. Wittgenstein famously rejects explanation of language in favour of description (in PI 124). Such that we could say that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is resolutely and thoroughgoingly descriptive. But we could with equal justice say that the later Wittgenstein resolutely and thoroughgoingly follows through on the indescribability of language proclaimed in the Tractatus.

Don’t take this as a contradiction within Wittgenstein’s theory and practice. Don’t take it even as a clash between ‘positivistic’ and ‘ineffabilistic’ strains in his philosophy. For, as Baker in particular (over the last decade) has beautifully shown, Wittgenstein’s remarks are purpose-relative, and therapeutic. It is a matter of trying to reorient oneself in relation to what one always already understands in practice, just by virtue of being a language-user, a human being. For sure, what we do is (can be described as) to give descriptions -- provided one understands that there is a sense in which descriptions are never just descriptions, and understands that ‘super-description’ is through and through a fantasy, and so on. As with the opening of PI: where there, one’s engagement with the text and one’s learning (about oneself) all depends on and revolves around what one wants out of words like ‘language’, so here, with a word like ‘description’.

What Wittgenstein is after in 501 is that ‘all’ his ‘describings’ can do is to take us back to ourselves, to what we were always doing, and unproblematically so except when confused by theory, by the ideal of science, by superficial analogies between distinct things or forms of words or situations, etc. . One is returned to the practice of language: the ‘law of induction’ drops out of our considerations as an (overly-abstract) irrelevance, and so in effect do weird circumstances which we had not bargained for ... unless and until they are apparently actual, in which case we will bargain with them. Our practice of language does not need and is incapable of bolstering or justification by means of a ‘framework’; and we will cross peculiar bridges only if and when we come to them. Consider in this connection OC 617-8: “[D]oesn’t it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned by certain facts? // In that case it would seem as if the language-game must ‘show’ the facts that make it possible.” Ineffabilism -- the return of the allegedly central concerns of the early philosophy -- with a vengeance, so it would seem! Wittgenstein however immediately rather deflates that bubble: “But that’s not how it is”, he bluntly remarks! (And he goes on to explain what one had better say instead, in the succeeding paragraphs.[48] )

Returning us to ourselves, rather than either laying out for us as if from above the logico-conceptual geography of the situation (as in Carnapianism, say in most ‘Oxford philosophy’ [49] ), or mysterianizing the mundane (as in ineffabilism, say in most Post-Modernism, Post-Structuralism and Critical Social Theory): that is what all the later philosophy -- and, in a way, all of Wittgenstein’s thought from first to last -- has been about. Simply returning us to the rough ground of our actual practice of language -- not saying what it is, nor regretting-that-that-can-apparently-not-be-done-and-yet-‘showing’-it(what?)-to-us-all-the-same.

I have been trying to sketch here the motivation for and the nature of a resolute reading of (in particular) OC 494-501. In the trying, I hope it has become evident that there is a sense, and indeed a reflexive sense, in which, when one tries to describe logic, and especially if one tries to delimit (in advance) when one ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ say certain things, when they make sense and when not, one rapidly and endlessly mires oneself in nonsense. Even when one is aware of this, one should be aware of how one’s own words will almost invariably ‘misfire’, and seem more like statements or attempts at general truths than one intended.

One could say that this situation is a good reason for adopting an ‘ineffabilism’. But: nothing is ‘shown’ by our practice either.[50] And there’s nothing we can’t do. I have tried to follow Wittgenstein’s crucial habit of deflationarily pushing one over and over toward concretion, toward an example. (Say, somebody in a darkened room, trying to avoid bumping into someone else. “I am here!” Whereas, if you say that to me in the noonday Sun, I don’t know what is going on. Maybe you’re mad. (See OC 464-467.)) And then one should look at the example, and see. And describe: but keep alert to the risk that you will want to claim that your description has some epistemic privilege, is from a special vantage point where one is clear of philosophical delusion, or something similarly dubious.

And after all, if Wittgenstein had wanted to go the ineffabilist route, then he could have done it (i.e. Why didn’t he write a book of “Unsayable remarks on the human form of life”?).[51] Leave aside even the fact that Wittgenstein was extremely reticent about these matters, and always very cautious in his phrasing of these rare moments in his text -- for example, he hesitantly writes on p.226 of PI that, “What has to be accepted, the given, is -- so one could say -- forms of life.” (And leave aside that Wittgenstein is at least talking here of accepting something, an important difference of emphasis from proclaiming any kind of philosophical thesis). The fundamental problem with the ineffabilist interpretation of the Wittgenstein -- and this rarely gets brought out, because it is so uncomfortable to acknowledge -- is of course the philosophical problem mentioned earlier. The problem that confronted Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, just as it had confronted, besides many lesser minds, those of Hume and Kant and Schopenhauer before him, and as it would go on to confront Heidegger and Foucault and Derrida after him.[52] The difference being that, manfully though Hume and Kant and Heidegger and Foucault, especially, have wrestled with the problem, Wittgenstein, according to Diamond et al, mastered it -- and, in outline at least, in the Tractatus. For that book is aimed through and through at the reader coming to recognise its Sätze as nonsense. It succeeds, if it succeeds with a reader, by means of its reader coming to overcome its Sätze, coming to recognise them as one and all logically indistinct from gibberish. (This is what Diamond explains in her “Throwing away the ladder”, and Conant follows up in his “Throwing away the top of the ladder” and “Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Wittgenstein.”)

In On Certainty, around 501 for instance, Wittgenstein is not retreating to a doctrine of the Tractatus; he is implying that retreat to such a doctrine (a doctrine that he overcame already in the Tractatus) would be in some ways preferable to failure to see that there is a real difficulty here, a difficulty in the status of one’s own remarks, one’s own activity. Carnapianism -- the standard reading of On Certainty -- fails even to see the difficulty faced head-on in 501. Wittgenstein sees it clearly, and, I believe, very much shows the way towards overcoming it. Most of the text of On Certainty is certainly read with most profit -- it makes Wittgenstein a better philosopher, it is more consistent with what we know of his philosophical intent from 1918 on, and it simply satisfactorily explains more of the text -- if it is read resolutely; that is, in accord with the austere conception of nonsense.

What I have been seeking to show, in short, is the sense in which Wittgenstein wrestled again, in On Certainty, with the same problem as preoccupied him in the Tractatus. It was necessary so to return to this problem in his later work, because the presentation of it in his earlier work had evidently been unsatisfactory (pretty much no-one had understood it), and arguably it had in any case included elements of a covert metaphysics, albeit against his intentions.[53] But would he, in his mature later (last) work, have gone back on the insights of his earlier work? Would he have gone back to ineffabilism, itself a moment in the philosophical dialectic, a rung on the ladder which he had already thrown away?

The real problem with the ineffabilist reading of OC 501 etc. could then be recast as follows: it commits later (latest) Wittgenstein to a view. Worse still, the view in question is one whose internal contradictions are pretty plain to see, as they have been plain to most readers of the Tractatus, but not plain to most readers of PI and OC-- so anxious are most readers of the latter to race to the (not unreasonable) conclusion that OC can hardly involve a backsliding from T L-P -- even if they are not entitled, on their own terms, to that conclusion...

Why, once again, can’t it ultimately be acceptable to take OC 501 (and 618, and 559, and 455, etc.) as a gesture at the ineffable? Because it would leave the later Wittgenstein in the quandary of the Tractatus on the ineffabilist interpretation of that work; gesturing, in words, at something it itself seems to claim is unwordable.

To recap, and close. We must avoid the risk of thinking that the continuity between early and late Wittgenstein is that in early Wittgenstein there was just one big description/theory of language, and in later Wittgenstein, lots of little ones (Table 1). Rather, while it is undoubtedly true that a key change for the better was Wittgenstein’s opening up to different language-games, and different contexts of use, the questioning of description is a crucial continuity throughout.

To question the ideal of giving an account of how language really is is not tantamount to arguing in favour of ineffabilism (as in Table 2, earlier). I am no linguistic mystic. But it is tantamount to questioning the varieties of Carnapianism which have frequently informed influential readers of Wittgenstein as diverse as Ryle, Dummett, Hacker and Marie McGinn.

And OC 501 is simply one of the best places to work all this out. It brings to a head the limitations of the standard verion of OC, with its defective sense of the limits of what it makes sense to say when, and of what ‘violates’ those limits.

Ineffabilism recognises the limitations of the project of describing our ‘conceptual geography’, our linguistic practices, but tends, as I have shown in this paper, to harbour still a latent Carnapianism, and to flip-flop between this and a quietistic mysticism. Ineffabilism stays up in the barren heights of abstraction, and thus fails to deal adequately with the pressing issue of self-defeat / self-refutation that never stops threatening it.

When, rather than coming down in to the green fields of concretion, a reader of On Certainty (or of any of Wittgenstein’s later writings) speaks of (say) “our mutual attunement in concepts” as if this were a discovery, an important thesis unearthed for us -- and not just a fancy way of speaking about utterly mundane facts of child-rearing etc. -- then in the end it doesn’t much matter whether they tend in what I have called a ‘Carnapian’ or an ‘ineffabilistic’ direction. Similarly, “the necessary framework of all our judgements”: this is just a grandiose way of saying (e.g.) that ordering a drink in a pub has nothing to do with philosophers’ dreams of ‘the stability of objects’ or ‘the reliability of induction’. Effecting the para-paradoxical (non-)transition of returning ourselves to ourselves, through seeing that most of the time there just isn’t anything that we would be prepared even to count as ‘doubts at bedrock’ -- that truly we just wouldn’t/don’t understand yet what someone is up to, who comes out with strings like “How do you know that that you have hands?”, or “I know that I have two hands” or “If I were to doubt that I had two hands, I would have to doubt everything” -- ... that is Wittgenstein’s aim, in On Certainty. That explains why his tone has an almost constant air of puzzlement, whereas his readers have typically seemed remarkably unpuzzled by the doctrines that they have ‘extracted’ from his work.[54]

Wittgenstein not only has no theory, he is best described as having no opinion, and no view, either. To be puzzled by the strange things that (e.g.) philosophers say and do, to try to reach an understanding -- an understanding which will satisfy them -- of why they want to say and do those things... this is just what we do. We resolute Wittgensteinians, we ordinary human beings.

I have essayed here [55] a reading of 501 that is consonant with ‘the new Wittgenstein’ interpretation, consonant with the claim that, from at the latest 1918 onward, Wittgenstein consistently made available philosophical work which is nearly all best read ‘resolutely’. On Certainty 501 is so intriguing because of the way it so explicitly suggests a continuity with Wittgenstein’s early work. I have suggested that we can indeed see here some of Wittgenstein’s ‘first’ thinking of necessity returning again, ‘at the last’, though it is considerably better in the end to see that thinking that is returning not as ineffabilistic, but as ‘resolute’ in intent.

So, even insofar as 501 -- written in the last month of his life -- does take one back toward the thinking of 30 or more years earlier, nevertheless Wittgenstein is certainly not quite in 501 equivalentising the ‘first’ and the ‘last’ of his thought. For the question asked in 501 is reminding one not of the position Wittgenstein took in the Tractatus, but of the last rung of the ladder, the rung last codified explicitly in that text by 6.522.[56]

Nor yet does Wittgenstein in On Certainty or in other last writings make any revolutionary departures from the great thinking (as opposed, we might say, to great thoughts...) of the Tractatus or of the Investigations. He simply deepens somewhat an aspect of his thinking already implicit in the early work and clearly present throughout the later work: an emphasis on the contexts/occasions upon which it is appropriate and indeed sensical to make various utterances etc. .

In conclusion, then: The standard reading of On Certainty takes there to be nothing wrong with the sentence “Here is one hand.”. That standard reading suggests two things about such a sentence: that one is not allowed to claim to know that there is one hand here; and that only certain quite specific circumstances license one to say so. Neither point is precisely wrong; but neither really sees the deep point, either, of what Wittgenstein is up to. On Certainty is the location of some of Wittgenstein’s most acute thinking on the topic of nonsense, and on the concomitant necessity of questioning the very distinctions between ‘syntax’, ‘semantics’ and ‘pragmatics’. For the standard reading in effect turns Wittgenstein’s philosophizing into a branch of pragmatics, and in doing so leans on incoherent Carnapian semantical thinking.[57] It fails to stay in touch with a Wittgensteinian understanding of how nonsense occurs.

Nonsense does not arise from putting kosher words together whose meanings ‘clash’. Nor does it arise from putting kosher sentences into contexts with which they ‘clash’.[58] Wittgenstein himself, according to we resolute readers of his corpus, is concerned in these his very last writings to get one to understand that a sentence like “Here is one hand” just is not heard by us as meaning anything at all except (potentially) in some actual context of use.[59] It simply ‘stands there’, like a wall decoration. So, it is not exactly that there is anything wrong with the sentence, “Here is one hand” or “I am here”, before it is actually employed. And it is not that one or other of sentences such as these should be said to clash with their contexts. It is better to remark, rather -- and this is what very few readers of On Certainty have (until recently) understood -- that it is philosophically a matter of indifference whether we regard one of these strings of words, when considered in isolation from practice, as a part of the language, as a sentence, as meaning anything, at all, or not.[60]

We must look at the practice of language.[61]

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---

[1] (2003).

[2] Of course, this is an early indication that the very effort to distinguish between Realism and Anti-Realism is in the end hopeless. Anti-Realism unavoidably remains ‘Realistic’ about something, for example, language, and, more importantly, about whether it itself is true or not. The way I put this on p.202 of my (2002a) is as follows: “ ‘Anti-Realism’ is invariably a form of Realism, just an odd, subtly inconsistent form. Anti-Realism keeps the fundamental metaphysical picture of Realism intact; it does not radically alter but only slightly broadens the structure of options, of categories, that are open to one. ... Anti-Realism still thinks that there is a Reality...settling whether Realism or Anti-Realism is correct! We might say that ‘Anti-Realism’ is never anti-Realist enough.” So my presentation here in terms of ‘Anti-Realism’ and ‘Realism’ should be taken throughout to be ‘provisional’, not to be committing me to understanding these ‘theories’ to be sensical (nor indeed to be genuinely distinct impulses). In the end (see n.37 & n.38 below, and the text supra), the best thing to say about ‘Realism’ and ‘Anti-Realism’ may be that they are nothing at all, nothing more than fantasies, and only marginally different fantasies (from one another), at that. They are fantasies of sense where no sense has (yet) been made out.

[3] Although one must, to be fair to the Tractatus, concede to it that it was already explicitly aware that language had more than just one function (i.e. more than only the function of ‘description’). For detailed exposition, see Conant’s (2002) and Floyd’s (2001).

[4] Crary’s (2000) is a fine critique of ‘use-theories’ of meaning; I mean the term ‘language-game theories’ to have much the same referent. If there is any difference at all between use-theories and language-game theories, it lies in the kind of difference in emphasis we see in formulations such as this (of a ‘language-game theory’), from Crispin Wright: “Quietism may yet win the day: it may prove impossible to give clear content of (sic.) the distinction between genuinely fact-stating and non-fact-stating declarative discourse, and Wittgenstein’s stress in the Philosophical Investigations on the essential multiplicity of language games may prove to be profoundly insightful in just this respect.” ((1986), p.208. Wright accuses Wittgenstein of ‘quietism’. It is certainly true that ‘ineffabilism’ is quietist -- it urges us to pass over something, in silence, and not to try to speak it. (I suspect, as does the later Gordon Baker (see below), that Wittgensteinian ‘Carnapianism’, as in ‘use-theory’ etc., while in a way obviously theoreticistic, is also quietistic, in urging us to stop theorizing (while not giving us a good reason to do so, and covertly continuing, itself, to theorize).) The language-game theory -- including the theory that there is no distinction between fact-stating and non-fact-stating discourse -- which Wright here attributes to Wittgenstein, is clearly a version of a similarly unstable view, one unclear -- un-self-aware -- about whether it is a theory or not. Again, it is decidedly non-obvious why one should obey the injunctions of a language-game theorist to be quiet, when that theorist is so obviously not being quiet thesmelves. A genuinely Wittgensteinian ‘view’, thoroughgoingly therapeutic and resolute, must continue to work until interlocutors of their own accord give up the wish to metaphysics. Wright still pictures Wittgenstein as having an opinion, a view, indeed something very like a theory, of “the essential multiplicity of language-games”. I urge that that (e.g. PI para.s 23-5) should be regarded -- heard -- rather as ‘merely’ a counter-picture, a situation-relative ‘grammatical reminder’, a negatively intended therapeutic intervention.

[5] As I shall shortly explain, it is of some importance however that the positivistic reading of the early Wittgenstein was highly problematic, in particular highly selective.

[6] Indeed, one might add to Table 1 still a further column (or indeed columns) labelled perhaps ‘Middle’ or ‘Transitional’, indexing for instance Wittgenstein’s allegedly ‘Verificationist’ phase, where the closeness to Carnap would perhaps seem indubitable. (I shall however normally use the term ‘later’ in this paper to include all of Wittgenstein’s work from his ‘return to philosophy’ at the end of the 20s, on. See n.23, below, for more detail on ‘middle’, ‘early’, etc.)

[7] For detail, see e.g. Witherspoon’s important (2000), buttressed by the historical scholarship of (e.g.) Thomas Uebel and Michael Friedman. P.177 of Floyd’s (2001) is also worth attending to here, for Floyd makes particularly clear a point that should not be forgotten in the following: namely, that ‘Carnapism’ (and ‘positivism’, an overlapping but not co-extensive category) shares an important feature with ‘resolutism’ in Wittgenstein-interpretation and in philosophy in general; namely, a serious antimetaphysical ambition. Hacker is also keenly aware of this: see e.g. his (Forthcoming).

[8] Here, Investigations para. 402 is particularly salient: “For this is what disputes between Idealists, Solipsists and Realists look like. The one party attack the normal form of expression as if they were attacking a statement; the others defend it, as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being.” (See also n.2, above.)

[9] Wittgenstein wrote to Schlick that he could not “...imagine that Carnap should have so completely and utterly misunderstood the last sentences of my book -- and therefore the fundamental conception of the whole book.” (I take this quote from the epigraph to James Conant’s “Two conceptions of Die Überwindung der Metaphysik: Carnap and early Wittgenstein” (2001).)

[10] See e.g. his “Elucidation and nonsense in Frege and early Wittgenstein” (2000), especially n.11 and n.19.

There are quite a number of places and texts where ineffabilist readers can be seen drawing something richer from Wittgenstein’s early writings than positivism leaves room for. A fine recent example is Louis Sass’s “Deep disquietudes: Reflections on Wittgenstein as antiphilosopher”, in Klagge (2001). Though as Sass notes at the close of his paper (p.139), there is always something dissatisfying about ineffabilism, in that the Tractatus apparently “...manages merely to say the doctrine of showing -- that is, of all things, to state (or to appear to state) the ineffable doctrine of ineffability.” (See also note 2 above, and notes 29, 37 & 48, below, for more on this tendency of forms of ineffabilism (Realism) to morph into positivism (Anti-Realism) and vice versa. My own view is that (post-)positivism and ineffabilism are made for each other, in the sense that they inevitably morph into one another, such that pure followers of one or the other are idealisations or vanishingly rare. This has to do, at base, with the instability of all philosophical ‘positions’. (See also n.8, above.))

[11] And of course, somewhat similarly: ‘Verificationism’ certainly cannot be verified. In fact, Verificationism’s self-refutingness was arguably made really quite clear within the body of the Tractatus, long before the Verificationists -- who took themselves to be Wittgenstien’s heirs -- spent years and years agonizing before finally one and all admitting it!).

[12] This too is of course only a gesture -- but in the direction of further work (mostly now work that has been undertaken), not in the direction of a mystery. For more detail, see for starters the closing footnotes of Conant’s (2000), and also the detailed exploration of ‘resolutism’ offered in my (2002c). (See also Juliet Floyd’s recent work; especially her (2001) and (1998), which pursue the agenda of further radicalising the ‘revolutionary’ criticisms Conant and Diamond have been offering of the ‘ancien regime’ (of positivism and ineffabilism). Floyd plays the ‘Jacobin’ to the ‘Girondin’ sensibilities of Conant and Diamond (This terminology is Warren Goldfarb’s). Floyd’s ‘new and unreproachable’ Wittgenstein goes yet further (back in time) than Conant and Diamond’s; she defends the Tractatus (and even most of its source-materials) against accusations that it harbours a latent metaphysics and holds onto views and dogmas which later Wittgenstein will later overcome. If Floyd’s interpretation (see especially pp.176-181 of her (2001)) is correct, then my conclusions in this essay, concerning the high degree of perfection of the resolution and viewlessness offered us by the later (last) Wittgenstein, can in most respects be applied directly to the Tractatus too...)

[13] This is for two reasons; firstly, that, as Frege had already sometimes seen, there will be times when one is inexorably and rightly drawn to regarding one’s remarks on language as of problematic status, ‘elucidatory’ (and thus, strictly, nonsensical) and not (as they might appear) in any sense truth-stating; and secondly, that “...any attempt to clearly articulate the positivist variant [of the substantial conception of nonsense] will lead to its collapse either into the ineffability variant or into the austere conception [of nonsense]. Either the proponent of the positivist variant holds that a violation of logical syntax involves an impermissible combination of symbols or he holds that it involves an impermissible combination of signs. If he holds the former, then the positivist variant collapses into the ineffability variant; if the latter, then he abandons the substantial conception [of nonsense] altogether.” Conant (2000), p.191. (For a mode of presenting austerity/resolution which does not rely on the perhaps-misleading phrase “an impermissible combination of signs”, see the close of the present paper, below. For background detail on the austere conception of nonsense, see especially Goldfarb’s (1197) and Conant’s (2000) or (2002). For explication of how a therapeutic vision of philosophy must go hand in hand with -- or is ‘extensionally equivalent’ to -- contextualism, see, besides the recent work of Conant, that of Martin Gustafsson, and Lars Hertzberg’s (2001).)

[14] To point the point even more bluntly: in the end, ‘ineffabilism’ is every bit as self-refuting as ‘positivism’. For a concise exposition of ineffabilism’s terminal flaw here, see p.276 of Kremer’s (2002), and also p.280 of same.

[15] It is important to my suggestion here that Wittgenstein is extremely hesitant to use these terms, and does so only very rarely, and then in a quite peculiar sense(s) (See n.51, below). Many of his followers, and possibly Heidegger too (see n.20, below), are far less hesitant. The ineffabilist is -- in my opinion, rightly -- keen, rather, to understand Wittgenstein’s hesitancy.

[16] 1996. Another example is recent Mounce. See for instance p.192 of his (2001). (And of not inconsiderable interest in the context of OC (e.g. of this volume) is the fact that Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s Wittgenstein is something of an ineffabilist, too.)

[17] Again, there could easily be a third column added here, for the ‘Third’ or ‘Last’ Wittgenstein. It would, as we shall see below, highlight the unstatability of ‘the total context’ of (proper) utterance, the unstatability (the ‘ineffable truth’) of the so-called framework-propositions, etc.

[18] Though McGinn’s case is becoming more subtle, as over the last five years or so she has made a number of concessions in the direction of the resolute reading of Wittgenstein, early, later and last. Cf. n.51, below.

[19] It perhaps does not quite go without saying that “Carnapian” is not a label likely to appeal to many Wittgensteinians (e.g. McGinn, Hacker (see especially his (Forthcoming))). My use of the term is polemical -- I hope that those I am labelling in this way will be uncomfortable with the label, and may as a result alter their philosophy in the direction I am urging in this paper. (In this and the next few paragraphs I borrow and adapt material from my “Meaningful Consequences” (1999). The reader may wish to consult that paper, for a more in-depth examination of the possibility of ineffabilism vis-a-vis later Wittgensteinian concepts such as ‘form of life’.)

[20] I am implying that (especially later) Heidegger does have some ineffabilistic tendencies, while Wittgenstein merely appears to. Heidegger risks telling us a great deal about ... what there can perhaps be no such thing as saying. And in his later work, he tends to suggest that there is a deep limit to what we will ever be able to understand of these things, and not just a historically contingent limit. Or at least, something like this is in practice (and certainly not altogether without justification) how Heidegger is sometimes taken: I have no space here to assess whether this interpretation of this great philosopher is in the end a fair one (and I do NOT mean to be endorsing the incoherent Carnapian critique famously made of Heidegger, which Conant deconstructs powerfully in his (2001)).

[21] I mean here to be criticising Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, who appeals to just that idea, in this volume.

[22] Those insights being, furthermore, so they themselves say, beset themselves by a flaw, a paradox! To put the main point rather more bluntly, though I cannot establish this in the compass of the present paper : I suspect that most philosophers have no right to see Wittgenstein’s later work as an advance on his early work, and that actually what one gets as renditions of his later work is typically a type of ‘position’ which he had already largely successfully overcome . . . prior to the close of the Tractatus. (Of course, some philosophers (e.g. Russell) would be happy with the verdict that Wittgenstein’s later work is inferior to his earlier work. But not, I take it, most Wittgensteinians...) I take neither (post-)positivistic nor ineffabilistic accounts of Wittgenstein’s work and methods to be adequate to the Tractatus, nor (a fortiori) to PI, nor to OC. (For some further discussion, including indications of the ultimate importance of the project of reading Wittgenstein ‘resolutely’, i.e. its importance to the deep re-reading of PI etc., see below.)

[23] The reason I keep on hedging on ‘first’ is this: that I believe that there was a very important shift in Wittgenstein’s thinking in the final stages of composition of TLP. Roughly following Kremer (1997), I take the shift from ProtoTractatus to Tractatus to have involved Wittgenstein’s coming to adopt the austere conception of nonsense, and the concomitant understanding of his text as in ambition and conception thoroughgoingly therapeutic and resolute. Excepting only some experimental (and especially self-critical) moments in the ‘middle’ period, I believe that Wittgenstein did not subsequently waver from this ambition. Thus, I think it would not be in principle unreasonable (though I shall not do so in this paper) to use the term ‘early’ philosophy to refer only to Wittgenstein’s thinking up to the composition of the ProtoTractatus, and the term ‘mature’ philosophy to refer to all his thinking from 1918 onward.The differences between TLP and PI (and the smaller further differences in Wittgenstein’s thinking, e.g. between PI and the final phase of his thought) could then be viewed as involving shifts within that body of mature thought, changes of style and method to attempt to achieve his (on one level) constant aim, of philosophical investigation which would not fall into the irresolution which marred Russell, Frege, logical positivism and ‘ineffabilism’, among others.

So, what I will actually want to say, as regards my paper’s title, is perhaps this: that in OC 501, we see Wittgenstein’s very last philosophisizing featuring a worry that he is falling back into the very last of his pre-mature philosophical thinking. Ineffabilism, which is writ large in the Notebooks and still present as a live option in (interpreting the) ProtoTractatus, was the last temptation of the philosopher, prior to the somewhat happier philosophical condition that Wiittgenstein found himself in from 1918 pretty much right through to 1951.

[24] I shall focus in what follows on remarks in OC which can shed light on OC 501. I am persuaded by Michael Williams that some of OC, especially para.s 1-65, works in a somewhat different fashion to the remarks Wittgenstein penned in the last two months of his life. And the latter must of course be understood to be no more than notes. On Certainty is very far from being a book -- it is a collection of four sets of remarks, taken from broader contexts in Wittgenstein’s nachlass. Thus any one remark, while needing to be read at least in its immediate context in a sequence of Wittgenstein’s thinking (as I shall do), cannot have the weight of certain other remarks, with particular placements, in Wittgenstein’s other (that is to say, in his) works, prepared for publication (especially, the Tractatus; I am thinking for instance of 6.53 - 7). But I think nevertheless that it is easy to appreciate the potential significance of a remark such as OC 501, which is explicitly reflective and connective to earlier work of Wittgenstein’s; and, in any case, I shall point out that 501 is not in the relevant sense an isolated remark. There are quite a number of remarks in OC 300-676 which seem to invite an ineffabilist construal. (I am indebted to Richard Hamilton for help with my thinking in this note.)

[25] For detailed argument to the conclusion that Hacker and M. McGinn (at least in her book, Sense and Certainty) give ‘Carnapian’ readings of later and last Wittgenstein, see Witherspoon’s powerful (2000).

[26] See also her paper in Crary and Read (2000), for a sustained examination of inviolability interpretations of PI. Besides those already mentioned, we can include under this heading (of ‘inviolability’ interpreters of Wittgenstein) such diverse figures (foes and fans) as Malcolm, Gellner, Nyiri, and Rorty.

[27] And they thereby often come to sound alarmingly like proponents of an (admittedly non-standard, because the ‘base’-statements of it are so heterogenous, as Wittgenstein continually emphasizes), foundationalism? Moyal-Sharrock, in this volume, and in her (Forthcoming), embraces this alarming reading, speaking of Wittgenstein’s “glaring foundationalism”. This seems to me especially unwise. For sure, Wittgenstein sometimes uses the word “foundation” in a somewhat approving sense. Consider OC 248: “I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions. // And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.” The kind of ‘foundationalism’ Wittgenstein puts forward is indicated clearly in this remark, I believe. Which is as much as to say: to use remarks like this as the basis for a ‘foundationalism’ is either to risk seriously misleading one’s audience or to be taken in by the most superficial grammatical similarities. To think that OC shows that Wittgenstein must have been some (new) kind of foundationalist is rather like thinking that the existence of decoy ducks shows that there must be more kinds of duck than we previously realized...

A good question to ask of such ‘foundationalistic Wittgensteinians’, as Crary makes abundantly clear in her essay in this volume, is if and how their view is relevantly different from that of Moore.

A successor-question can be asked even of those ‘Wittgensteinians’ who, like Moyal-Sharrock (and perhaps Stroll) at times, try to avoid committing themselves to a ‘neo-foundationalism’, by means of claiming to cite or speak the hinges only as a means of analysing them philosophically, not as a constative move directly against a doubter. For the key question then becomes, once again, the question of self-refutation: how can you speak what you have conceded cannot intelligibly be spoken? How are you privileged to talk of things that are forbidden to users of ordinary language, or even (indeed, especially) to those (such as Moore and the sceptic) who you take to ‘violate ordinary language’ (cf. note 26, above)? To distinguish, as Moyal-Sharrock does in this volume, between ‘speaking’ and ‘saying’ cuts no ice here: Moyal-Sharrock’s claim (in the Introduction to this volume) that she and her colleagues can speak what cannot be said (i.e. the hinges, the framework) is nothing more than irresolute special pleading.

[28] I mostly use these two words interchangeably, which, while potentially a dubious practice vis-a-vis TLP, is I think harmless when dealing with Wittgenstein’ s later writings.

[29] In his (Forthcoming), James Conant argues powerfully that ineffabilism is covertly a major player in interpretations of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, when for example people say that to say that ‘a private language is impossible’ is, strictly speaking, unassertible, but yet it is a quasi-truth, that shows or gestures at something true... We see here again (see e.g. n.2, above) how there is a virtually built-in temptation to flip-flop back and forth between ineffabilism and Carnapianism.

[30] The temptation to think that grammatical remarks do succeed in limning language is particularly strong when the very unfortunate term ‘grammatical truth’ is used. This misleading or even oxymoronic turn of phrase is one that I have heard would-be exegetes of Wittgenstein use, I am afraid to say.

[31] In fact, there is of course a sense in which Wittgenstein wishes radically to diminish our sense of the importance of description. ‘All language is description’ is the diammetric opposite of what Wittgenstein (and Austin) want to argue! (For a nice account of this point, see p.111 of Hilary Putnam’s “Floyd, Wittgenstein and loneliness”, in Rouner (ed.), (1998). See also notes 37, 38 & 39, below.))

[32] I mean here Harold Garfinkel, and his philosophically sophisticated sociological followers who have pursued the agenda of ‘Ethnomethodology’, and who can I think certainly do all the things they intend to do and in fact do. (See my (2003), for some discussion of the philosophical relevance of Ethnomethodology.) One might point also, of course, more broadly, to some anthropologists and ethnographers. Though I do not mean to include in my positive evaluation here all who operate with an ‘interpretive’ ‘hermeneutic’ orientation; for such an orientation is often (e.g. in ‘Cognitive Sociology’) just another form of theorizing, just another over-intellectualisatin of our lives of exactly the kind that Wittgensteinians and Garfinkelians must eschew.

[33] Among those who are still in practice after something like legitimating facts -- for instance, Moyal-Sharrock, who believes Wittgenstein to be an ineffabilistic foundationalist, and who takes ‘the framework’ to be unsayable, but yet says quite a lot about it... -- it is I think very clear that only super-descriptions (or even ‘super-facts’) will do that trick. But my target is in any case wider: see below.

[34] See note 39, below, and the Bibliography, for references. A clear counter-example to my thought that Wittgenstein himself avoids systematizing or theorizing (even theorizing of an allegedly non-metaphysical kind) might be thought to be the ‘Plan for the Treatment of Psychological Concepts’, from his final period. For a reading of the ‘Plan’ which is consistent instead with my consistently therapeutic rendering of Wittgenstein, see Finkelstein’s (2001).

[35] Or more than re-orient one towards practices (such as those of a strange tribe, the Azande for instance) which one can come to understand through first seeing as stranger than one had thought, and then through seeing as alike to us in certain fundamentals which had not previously been perspicuous (for instance, perhaps their practices strike us as very odd, until we come to see them as in certain respects relevantly similar, not to science, but to prayer). A much fuller account of this can be found in my (2002b). Quite a number (though not all) of the passages in OC (and also in Zettel, etc.) which can seem to support a kind of ‘neo-foundationalism’, wherein certain (ineffable?) very general facts or (allegedly unfalsifiable) propositions expressing them ‘really are’ the roots of our language-games, of all our enquiries, are best read in my view as Wittgensteinian anticipations of Kuhn, many of whose whose philosophical insights can I believe be accommodated to a genuinely therapeutic philosophical vision. Such ‘super-facts’ or ‘super-descriptions’ (even if they are put forward only as descriptions of fundamental features or rules of our grammar of inquiry) are not I think Wittgenstein’s quarry (or Kuhn’s, at his best). Wittgenstein seeks no theorisation of our activities.

[36] For doubts on this , see my (1995). There, I express doubts as to whether Wittgenstein thought that ‘clarity’ was a clear (!) and attainable goal, even in his early work. (On the Tractatus and (the limits of) ‘clarity’, see Floyd’s radical stance in her (2001); cf. Winch’s (1992) and the end of his (2001).)

[37] Again, this is a symptom of deep instability, I believe, in this conception of Wittgenstein / of philosophy. Hacker and McGinn et al are in effect simply unable to decide whether they are Realists or Anti-Realists, while pretending that they are neither. ‘Carnapianism’ tends uneasily to oscillate toward a kind of Realism, insofar as it finds itself in practice seeking a privileged vantage point from which to view our language etc.; linguistic relativism or idealism tends similarly toward a kind of Realism insofar as it becomes aware of wanting to state that we are stuck, imprisoned (Whereas to be thoroughly or ‘truly’ imprisoned is not to be aware of / not to be able to say that one is imprisoned). Cf. n. 2, above.

[38] Here, an important initial point, first made I think by Stanley Cavell, is that “presentation” is in any case probably a better translation than “representation” -- and is less likely to incline one toward the fantasy of super-description that I am warning against. We would often do best, I would suggest, to tend towards the expression, “perspicuous presentation [of what people do and say]”. For discussion, see Nigel Pleasants’s (1999). (As Pleasants’s book makes clear, there are starker offenders than Hacker against the necessary letter of Wittgenstein’s text, here -- for example, Habermas. The ‘critical social theorists’ still fantasize -- in part by means of hoping for a ‘surview of the grammar’ -- having a formal theory of language, as arguably also, if only implicitly/covertly, does Peter Strawson, in his ‘use-theory of meaning’ which is in many respects very similar to Hacker’s theory...) Others have written intelligently about this important point of translation too -- see for example n.28 of J. Floyd’s essay, “ Wittgenstein, Mathematics and Philosophy” in my and Crary’s (2000).

For a very sophisticated treatment which, while urging that the translation “perspicuous presentation [of grammatical rules]” is actually the less Wittgensteinian and the more philosophically dangerous, remains resolutely anti-Hackerian, see Gordon Baker’s ground-breaking “Philosophical Investigations section 122: neglected aspects”, in R. Arrington and H-J. Glock (1991).

[39] This particularly dubious version of “perspicuous (re-)presentation” or “surview” is, I believe, Paul Johnston’s coinage. Johnston is a talented independent writer on Wittgenstein, a former student of Hacker’s.

The ‘bird’s eye view’ reading of Wittgenstein hereabouts is very powerfully and explicitly contested in Baker’s (1991). See also the series of papers by Baker in Language and Communication over the last few years leading up to his tragic recent death; these papers constitute, I believe, a serious bulwark of support for and expansion of the therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein, and oppose resolutely the Wittgenstein of the mainstream, including here under that heading (e.g.) Hacker, Johnston, Malcolm, Pears, Moyal-Sharrock, and to some extent M.McGinn. See perhaps especially pp.207-8 of Baker’s (1999a), which casts important light on Wittgenstein’s use of the word ‘description’, and thus aspectually helps in resolving the puzzle I drew attention to at the opening of this paper, and in a manner very consonant with my argument. (See also n.38, above. My use of Baker owes much to correspondence with Phil Hutchinson.)

[40] For a detailed argument to this conclusion, see my (2002d).

[41] P. 204 of Beaney (ed.), (1997).

[42] See e.g. the Tractatus discussion, and p.138ff. of Diamond’s (2001): “[Wittgenstein] was convinced early in his life that the law of identity could only by a kind of illusion be taken to be a substantial law, a law with content and metaphysical implications; he was convinced too that the idea of identity as a relation is confused.”

[43] ‘See’, e.g. TLP 6.2322.

[44] See my (1996) for explication. (One major reason why I find it misleading to speak of so-called hinge ‘propositions’ as ‘rules of grammar’, then, is that it is not at all clear what if anything it can mean to act upon (or from) one of them. Whereas there is a perfectly good sense in which rules of grammar in the ordinary sense can be acted upon, in certain circumstances (e.g. of confusion concerning some point of English grammar.))

[45] I have slightly emended the translation.

[46] Of course, the Tractatus would not consider ‘the law of induction’ as constituting part of logic. But on Wittgenstein’s later, broader, conception of logic, it would be so conceived, if it be conceived at all. For some representative passages yielding this broader conception of logic, as nothing other than (the study of, or the perspicuous presentation of) what people intelligibly do and say, see pages 77-8 of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle; PI 38, 108 (especially), 242, 345; OC 56, 82; and also, I believe, much of Rush Rhees’s work (perhaps especially his great essays, “Wittgenstein’s Builders” and “‘The Philosophy of Wittgenstein’”), and similarly much of Harold Garfinkel’s ‘Ethnomethodology’.

[47] My thinking on this point, (and) on Wittgenstein’s self-consciousness concerning the accidental or deliberate possibility (probability (certainty?)) of speaking nonsense hereabouts, owes much to conversations with Rob Deans.

[48] There is no space here to argue for the claim I would actually make for OC 617-620: that this passage of Wittgenstein’s thinking shows both the strength of the ‘ineffabilist’ impulse and the way that it fails, through not being able ultimately to be more than a ‘higher’ form of (post-)positivism, a Carnap dressed up in ‘religious’ language. In a fuller presentation, I would make this out in part through looking in some detail at the brushing up against ‘the limits of language’ that Wittgenstein hazards here, as also in such important passages as PI 240-2, PI p.230, OC 411 and Zettel 352, 363, 387 & 388. (See also n.35, above, for a mode of accounting for most of the other remarks in later and last Wittgenstein which might appear superficially to genuinely support ineffabilism.)

[49] Kremer puts the point thus, in note 18 of his (2002): “The arguments of Conant and Diamond...show that it is a mistake to understand “nonsense” in the Tractatus as “conceptual confusion”, where this suggests that “concepts” can be employed in a “confused” way, yet remain the concepts that they are -- or that signs can be used as the symbols they ordinarily are, yet in a way that conflicts with the rules governing those symbols. There is no category of nonsense in which meaningful signs are combined in such a way as to produce nonsense.” ‘Oxford philosophy’ has typically failed to understand this point, from Ryle on; and Hacker is a major offender, despite his nominal committment to Wittgenstein’s ‘wholism’ and therapeutic conception of philosophy. Hacker’s Carnapianism, apparent in the way he argues that “conceptual confusion” and “violations of logical syntax” are key terms of philosophical (of allegedly Wittgensteinian) criticism, was already the target of the Tractatus (and arguably already of Frege before Wittgenstein); and yet Hacker seeks to prove Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to be superior to his early philosophy. (Cf. n.25 above; and n.22 above and the text, supra.)

[50] Except perhaps in the sense -- unfriendly to ineffabilism -- in which Kremer has argued (see e.g. his (2002)) that there is a sense in which what mathematical equations and tautologies do is precisely to show how to go about certain everyday practices (such as dividing up one’s money, etc.).

[51] In this connection, it is worth noting the one occurence of “form of life” in On Certainty: “Now I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life. (That is very badly expressed and probably badly thought as well).” (Italics added) (Some of this paragraph and the next are borrowed (and adapted) from my (1999).)

[52] Also, Marie McGinn. McGinn’s recent writings -- while still to my mind not always quite on target (a high standard to demand) -- on TLP (her (1999), on PI (her (1997)), and on OC (her (Forthcoming), increasingly bear the mark of thinking about this issue which has engaged seriously with (for example) the kinds of ideas Conant and Diamond and Kremer have promulgated. In short, my primary criticisms of McGinn in the present paper are to be taken as directed against her earlier (still unfortunately) best-known work, especially her book, Sense and Certainty. I feel closer to her recent work (and this sense is magnified by public and private conversations that I and other ‘resolutists’ have had with her over the last few years), than to the comparable work of (say) Hacker, or even Stroll. (But cf. David Finkelstein’s criticisms even of the newer, subtler McGinnian reading of last Wittgenstein, in Conant (ed.) (Forthcoming).)

[53] The ‘resolute’ reading of Wittgenstein does NOT presuppose that Wittgenstein was always successfully resolute, and post-metaphysical. (Though there is room for argument even here: compare n.12, above -- my own sympathies tend toward some version of the ‘Jacobin’ reading of the Tractatus, which (as I understand it) suggests that in the ‘body’ of that work, Wittgenstein was clearer than Conant and Diamond would have it that clarity on the Frege-Russell model was not even his aim, and that the ‘frame’ of the work too is unsinnig. In other words, the ‘frame vs. body’ distinction collapses, and the whole work becomes a potentially successful exercise in resolute and thorough-goingly transitional thinking.)

[54] And as long as others want to say things that mystify one, then either there is time and space only for admonishment, or else the dialogue seeking mutual understanding must continue, and it is no good saying, ‘I can prove that what you have said is nonsense, because it violates......’. As Conant points out, in his (2001, especially in n.52), that kind of talk is found virtually never in Wittgenstein but only in Baker-and-Hacker & co.; and on the very rare occasions when it is found in Wittgenstein, it is typically once more an expression of his puzzlement, not a tool to be wielded to attack one’s ‘opponents’. We might put things this way: Especially (but not only) after about 1935, Wittgenstein thankfully does not actually give us, in this his mature philosophizing, a method for separating sense from nonsense at all. (For some lovely development of roughly this point, see pp.101-2 of Hertzberg’s (2001). See also n.60, below.)

[55] Butwhat I have essayed is nevertheless not I think well-described as a view. I have only responded in the negative to others’ views, and intimated by contrast something that is no view, but only the actual practice of language-use; of conversation, or speaking, as Rhees might have put it.

[56] Though it has seemed to many readers of the Tractatus plainly to be present in the last ‘Satz’ of that book, 7. I am referring to readers of the Pears-McGuinness translation of the text, especially, who have laboured for years under the misapprehension concretized by the words ‘pass over’ in that bad translation of the Tractatus’s closing remark. For a proper rendering of the German, and a sound therapeutic reading of the passage, see e.g. the close of Conant’s (2000), and especially n.102. (See also n.23, above, for more on ‘first’ and ‘last’.)

[57] Both these (in this case, connected) charges are made good in Conant’s (1998). See especially p.226-7 and p.239.

[58] A full and powerful expansion of this point is to be found in Conant’s (1998), which moreover makes its case through a detailed rebuttal of McGinn’s reading of On Certainty. See especially p.223 and p.226 of Conant’s paper.

[59] Alice Crary has argued in her (2002) that the same is true of Austin. I agree with her; and, if she is right, this means that Austin has been just as travestied as Wittgenstein, hereabouts, to date.

And when one looks to see what some words are being used to do, or in the doing of such-and-such, again, one is not relying on an implicit theory, nor even putting forth a view. It is simply the ordinary human life with language that we are returned to. (So, were other philosophers and theorists to cease their strange sayings and self-mirings -- and were we ourselves to do so too -- then there would truly be no need left, no place left, for Wittgenstein’s (or Austin’s) ‘philosophy’.) That is perhaps what is so very fine about Wittgenstein’s last writings. That, though in their comparatively raw state, they lack the dialogical sophistication of PI 1-315 or so, they sometimes have the advantage over PI that they often succeed better in Wittgenstein’s near-lifelong task: of finding a way of calling us back to our ordinary life with language which ceases even to look like a view, still less a theory. In TLP, it is unarguable that insufficient weight is given to the differences between different ‘language-games’; in PI, this is corrected, but there is still sometimes a whiff of insufficient attention being given to the actual contexts in which forms of words are used. In OC and some other final writings, Wittgenstein aims always to attend to ‘the total speech situation’, without claiming any impossible privilege (the absurdity of the idea of seeing this totality from the outside), and without privileging anything within that situation. Do you see? This is what it is, simply to hear (and leave) our life with language as it is. This is what it can really mean, to do philosophy as Wittgenstein has urged he wants to do it, without any reliance on theory, or any purveyance of controversial theses.

[60] Cf. PI para.16. (To be absolutely clear: I hope the reader is by now aware that I have repudiated entirely the readings of Wittgenstein captured in Tables 1 and 2, earlier in my essay. They are at best rungs in a ladder. Wittgenstein needs to be understood as, at least in ambition, through and through a genuinely therapeutic thinker. He was always interested in what, for specific purposes, is liable to cause the least confusion. And so, to say it again: he was not aiming to provide a method, of whatever type, for separating sense from nonsense. That is not the character of his complex philosophical practice of the use of nonsense as a (tentative, important) term of criticism. (For a nice example of what I mean more ‘positively’, see p.232 of the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (1975).) )

[61] This paper was presented (in rudimentary form) at the 9th annual ‘Mind and Society’ Seminar, Manchester, June 6-7 2002. My appreciative thanks to the audience on that occasion, especially to Phil Hutchinson, Wes Sharrock, Richard Hamilton, Meredith Williams, Michael Williams, Rob Deans and Nadine Cipa. I owe significant debts also to James Conant and Alice Crary, for providing me with much of what understanding I have of what latest Wittgenstein was up to; and to Daniele Moyal-Sharrock and Angus Ross, for serious help in written and spoken word with thinking through these difficult matters, from first to last.