In the 1933-1934 school year at Cambridge University, Wittgenstein dictated the "Blue Book" to his students (though he did not call it that way at the time) and mimeographed it. In the 1934-1935 school year, he dictated the "Brown Book" to two of his students (Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose).
He only made three typos for the Brown Book, which he only showed to very close friends and students. However, these dictations were borrowed and copied and exchanged with each other. If Wittgenstein had named these dictations, he might have called them "philosophical commentary" or "philosophical study." But the first dictations were wrapped in a blue cover, and the second was in a brown cover, so they are often said to be said.
Later, he sent the Blue Book to Sir Russell with a note:
Dear Russell,
About two years ago, I promised to send you a copy of my manuscript. I'm not sending you that manuscript right now. I'm still grinding on it, and God knows if I'm going to take it or any part of it for publication. But, two years ago, I took some classes at Cambridge and dictated notes to my students so they could take something home in their hands (if not in their head). I made a copy of the notes. I was correcting some of these copies of the print and other errors, and then I thought you might want to have one. So I'll send you a copy. I wouldn't like to suggest you read these lecture notes, but if you don't have anything better to do, if you're going to get some small pleasure out of it, then I'll be very happy. (I think it's hard to understand them because so many of the main points are only touched on a little.) They are only for those who have listened to these lessons. As I said, if you don't read them, it's totally okay.
You forever
Ludwig Wittgenstein
But that's what the Blue Book is all about: a series of notes. The situation was not the same for the Brown Book, and for a while he thought it was the first draft of something he might publish. More than once he set out to revise a German version of it. The last time was in August 1936.
With minor changes and additions, his revision work took place where the discussion of voluntary actions began—roughly on page 154 of our text. He then wrote in thick handwriting: "This whole effort to revise, from the beginning to the present, is worthless. At that time, he began to write the first part of the Philosophical Studies we see now (with minor later revisions).
I suspect he probably wouldn't have published an English version of the Brown Book anyway. Anyone who can read his German version will know why. His English style is often clumsy and imbued with German expression habits.
But we have not changed anything, except in a few places where the habit of expression has destroyed meaning and where it is obvious that it needs to be changed. What we're publishing here is some notes he gave to his students, and a manuscript for his own use, and that's it.
For Wittgenstein, philosophy was a method of study, but his ideas about it were changing. We can see this in the way he uses the concept of, for example, "language games." He had previously introduced this concept in order to get rid of the idea of the inevitable form of language. This was at least one of the usages of the language game in his place, and it was one of the original usages.
It is often beneficial to imagine some different language games. At first he would sometimes write "different forms of language"—as if it were the same thing, although he sometimes corrected this in later editions. In the Blue Book, he sometimes talks about imagining different language games, sometimes talking about imagining different notations—as if that were language games. And it seems that he does not make a clear distinction between being able to speak and understanding a notation.
For example, he talks about understanding what people mean by means of someone's interpretation of the meaning of words. It is as if "understanding" and "explaining" are related to each other in some way. But, in Brown Book, he emphasizes that learning a language game is something that precedes the interpretation of meaning.
What's needed is not explanation, but training — comparable to what you've trained animals. This is consistent with what he emphasized in Philosophical Studies, which is that being able to speak and understand what is said—knowing what it means—does not mean that you can say what it means, and that is not what you have learned.
Here he says (Philosophical Studies, Part I, § 32): "Augustine's description of learning human language is as if the child had come to an unfamiliar country and did not understand the language of that country, that is, as if he already had a language, but not of that kind. ”
You can ask a child what the expression means to find out whether the child understands French. But that's not how you judge whether a child can speak. Nor is it something that children learn when they learn to speak.
When Brown Book speaks of different language games as "systems of human communication," these are not just different notations. This introduces a conception of understanding, and of understanding the relation to language, which does not appear at all in the Blue Book.
In Brown Book, he insists that "understanding" is not a thing, but that it is as diverse as the language game itself. This would be the rationale for the claim that when we imagine different language games, we are not imagining some part or possible part of any universal language system.
At this point, the Blue Book is not so clear. On page 17, he says, "Learning a language game is learning the initial form or initial language of a language. ”
But then he said: "If we want to study the question of truth and falsehood, the question of the consistency or inconsistency of propositions and reality, the question of the nature of assertions, assumptions, and questions, we have to look at the initial forms of language ( and it is useful to do so ) , where these forms of thought do not appear with the confusing background of the highly complex activity of thought."
When we look at the simple forms of these languages, the spiritual fog that seems to obscure the everyday uses of our languages dissipates. We see actions and reactions, and these are clear and unambiguous. On the other hand, the forms of language we recognize in these simpler activities are not separated from our more complex forms of language. We see that we can construct more complex forms from the initial forms by gradually adding new forms. ”
This almost makes the passage seem as if we are trying to give something akin to an analysis of our everyday language. It's as if we want to discover something that's happening when we speak a language but can't be seen until we apply this method of piercing through the fog that obscures language. As if the "nature of assertions, assumptions, and questions" is there, we have just found a way to make it clearly visible.
The Brown Book negates this. That is why he insists in the Brown Book (p. 81) that he "does not see these language games we describe as incomplete parts of a language, but as a language that is complete in itself."
Therefore, a certain grammatical function in one language may not have any counterpart in other languages. "Consistent with reality or inconsistent" would be something different in some other language—so a study of reality in another language might not show you much about what it is in that language.
That's why he asks in the Brown Book whether the "brick" means the same thing in the original language as it does in our language. This is consistent with his view that simpler languages are not an incomplete form of more complex languages.
The discussion there about whether what we're dealing with is an elliptical sentence forms an important part of his explanation of what a game is in different languages. But the Blue Book didn't even anticipate that.
In one of Wittgenstein's notebooks, there is a comment on language games, which he must have written in early 1934. I suspect it predates the passage I quote from page 17 of the Blue Book. In any case, they are not the same.
"When I describe a simple language game, I don't do this to use them to progressively construct perfect linguistic activities—or thought activities—that only lead to injustice (Nind and Russell). I want to put these games there as they are, so that they illuminate specific problems with their clarifying effect. ”
I think that would be the correct description of the approach of the first part of the Brown Book. But it also points to the huge difference between the Brown Book and Philosophical Studies.
In the Brown Book, the description of different language games is not directly a discussion of specific philosophical issues, although its purpose is to illuminate them. It illuminates the different aspects of language, especially those which we cannot see because we are blinded by certain tendencies which are most vividly expressed in philosophical questions. In this way, this discussion does reveal where the difficulties that led to those problems arise from.
For example, in what he said about "can" and the connection between this and "seeing what we have in common," he raised the question of what you learn when you learn language, or what you know when you know what something means. But he also raises the question of what it means to ask how language can develop — "Does that still make sense?" Are you still talking? Or are you making a meaningless sound? ”
This leads to questions like "what can be said" or "how do we know it's a proposition," or "what is a proposition," or "what is language?" The purpose of his description of language games here is to reveal that people don't have to be led to ask these questions, and that if people are led to ask them that way, then it would be a misconception. But the difficulty is that we can only wonder why people are always led to ask this question. In this respect, Philosophical Studies is different.
As in The Brown Book, the language games in Philosophical Studies are not some of the steps in the interpretation of a more complex language, and they may even be even less so than the language games in the Brown Book. But they are some of the steps that lead to the discussion (Philosophical Studies, § 65) of the "big question" of "what is language".
He brought them in—in Philosophical Studies and the Brown Book—to illuminate questions about the relationship between words and what they represent. But in Philosophical Studies he is concerned with the "philosophical idea of meaning" that we find in Augustine, and he shows that this idea expresses a tendency that is most evident in the theory of logical proper names, which holds that the only real name is the indicative "this" and "that.".
He called it "the tendency to idealize the logic of our language" (v. 38)—in part because, in contrast to logical proper names, "anything else we might call a name is only a name in an imprecise, approximate sense." It is this tendency that leads people to talk about the ultimate nature of language or the logically correct grammar.
But why do people get caught up in this? There is no simple answer, but Wittgenstein opens up an answer here by continuing to discuss the concepts of "simple" and "complex" and the idea of logical analysis. (He didn't do that at all in Brown Book, and if all he wanted was to figure out the function of language, then he didn't have to.) ）
The whole idea of a logical analysis of language or a logical analysis of propositions is eccentric and confusing. In giving his language games, Wittgenstein did not attempt to give any analysis at all. If we call them "more primitive" or "simpler" languages, it does not mean that they reveal something similar to the elements that a more complex language must have (cf. Philosophical Studies, § 64).
They are different languages – not some element or some aspect of the "language." But then we may want to ask what is relevant to them that makes us say that they are all languages. Anyway, what makes something a language? And this is the "great question" concerning the nature of language or proposition (Philosophical Studies, v. 65), which lies behind all the discussions that have so far been made.
We could even argue that the discussion in Philosophical Studies up to this point is an attempt to present the implications of using language games to deal with philosophical problems. It's perhaps even better to say this: revealing how the use of language games clarifies what are philosophical questions.
In Brown Book, on the other hand, he transitions from examples of different kinds of naming to discussions of different ways of "comparing with reality." This is undoubtedly still a discussion of the relationship between words and what they represent. But here he does not try to present the tendency behind the way words are viewed in philosophy that brings difficulties.
In Philosophical Studies, he continues to discuss the relationship between logic and language, but he does not do so in the Brown Book, although this discussion is closely related to what he said in the Brown Book.
I specifically refer to what he said there about "can" and how it relates to the idea of "what can be said." ("When will we say this is still language?") When will we say it's a proposition? For the temptation there is to conceive of a calculus and in which what can be said.
But Wittgenstein would call it a misunderstanding of the rules of language and what language use is. When we speak like we normally would, we are not using precisely definable concepts or precise rules. And this comprehensibility is also different from the intelligibility in calculus.
It is precisely because people think of "what can be said" as "what is permissible in a calculus" ("What other meaning would the word 'allow' have there?"). It is for this reason that logic is assumed to govern the unity of language, what governs what belongs to language and what does not, what is understandable and what is not understandable, what is a proposition and what is not a proposition.
In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein insisted that language does not have that unity or intelligibility. But he doesn't discuss why people want to assume that unity and understandability.
You might think he did it earlier, in the Blue Book, but I don't think so. I don't think he saw questions of logic and language there, which were undoubtedly presented by the Brown Book, even if it didn't quite make it clear what type of difficulty it was.
On page 25 of the Blue Book, he says, "Generally speaking we do not use language according to strict rules—and language is not taught to us by strict rules." On the other hand, we, in our discussions, always compare language with calculus according to precise rules. ”
When he asked (at the bottom of the page) why we did this, his answer was simple, "The answer is: the confusion we try to dispel always stems from this attitude toward language." You might wonder if this is not an answer.
His view, as he says on page 27, is that "a person who is philosophically confused sees a law in the way a word is used, tries to use it consistently, and ends up encountering ... contradictory conclusions". This at first glance seems to be what he later said in Philosophical Studies about the tendency to idealize the logic of our language. But here, in the Blue Book, he doesn't show what causes people to think about words in this way is related to the use of language or the understanding of language.
Suppose we say that this is because philosophers look at language in a metaphysical way. That's fine, but when we ask what made them do it, Wittgenstein's answer in the Blue Book is that it's because of a desire for the general, because "philosophers always see the scientific method before their eyes and cannot sustain themselves to be tempted to ask and answer them in a scientific way" (p. 18).
In other words, he did not find metaphysical sources in anything particularly related to language. This is important here, and it means that the nature of his philosophical confusion is not as clear as it was when he wrote Philosophical Studies. But, in any case, it is not the tendency to ask and answer questions in a scientific way—or primarily not, that leads philosophers to conceive of an ideal language or a logically correct grammar when confused by language or understanding. That came in a different way.
In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein is well aware that we do not use language according to strict rules, and we do not use words according to laws like the science talks about.
But he is not very clear about the idea of "knowing the meaning" or "understanding," which means that he is still not very clear about many things in the idea of "following a rule." For this reason, he did not fully recognize the confusion that can arise when people say that knowing a language is knowing what can be spoken.
"What does the possibility of the meaning of our words depend on?" That is what lies behind the concept of meaning that we find in the theory of logical names and the theory of logical analysis. And it comes with questions like what you learn when you learn a language or what it is to learn a language.
Wittgenstein made it clear in the Blue Book that words have meaning that we give them, and that the thought of studying their true meaning is a bewilderment. However, he did not clearly see the difference between learning a language game and learning a notation. For this reason, he could not have been very clear about the nature of the confusion against which he was opposed.
In other words, in the Blue Book, Wittgenstein does not clearly see what the question of the necessities of language or the intelligibility of language is. That's why he was able to say on page 28 that "everyday language is fine." It's like saying "Okay, it's a language".
That seems to mean that it satisfies these necessary conditions. But when he said this, he himself was in the kind of confusion that he later presented. If people think, as Wittgenstein thinks here, "constructing an ideal language" seems to be something he did when he constructed a language game, then to me that seems to obscure the gist of the ideal language —to obscure what those who talk about the ideal language want to do.
It may be this ambiguity, or something similar to it, that leads Wittgenstein to speak more than once in the Blue Book of the "calculus of language" (e.g., the top paragraph on page 42, or the middle paragraph on page 65, and the last line of that page)—even though he also said that we use language as we do in the same way as we do calculus in rare cases.
If you don't distinguish between language and notation, you may hardly see the difference between following a language and following a notation. But then you may also be less aware of the difficulties associated with the relationship between language and logic.
These difficulties become clearer in the Brown Book, even if he does not explicitly point to them there. We can say that they are the subject of Philosophical Studies.
For this theme is the basis for the discussion of "seeing something as something" and the previous part. We find again that Wittgenstein in Philosophical Studies transforms these discussions into exposés of philosophical difficulties in a way that never appears in the Brown Book.
For a while, Wittgenstein was interested in the question of "recognizing that it is a proposition" (even though it may be completely foreign) or "recognizing something as language" (e.g., identifying something written there independently of identifying what it says).
The second part of the Brown Book is relevant to this issue. It shows that when people look at this "recognition" correctly, they do not lead to the questions that philosophers once asked.
For example, he gives the similarities between understanding a sentence and understanding a piece of music, or wanting to say that the sentence means something and wanting to say that the color pattern says something—clearly showing that the situation is not like you recognize any (perhaps "understandable") general features and should be able to tell us what it is, just as you can't meaningfully ask me what the color pattern says.
But why do people really want to mention, for example, "meta-logic" here? The Brown Book explains this and hints at something more.
But something that has to do with the way we use language, something that lies in the connection between language and thinking—the power of an argument, and the power of an expression in general—makes recognizing it a language seem very different from recognizing it as a step in a game. (It is as if understanding is something external to symbols, as if in order to be language it needs something that does not exist in the symbology itself.) In the last paragraphs of Philosophical Studies, he attempts to examine this.
He once said of "the manipulation of symbols". Someone might say, "You make it look like you're operating a mechanical device, just like any other mechanism." If that's all it is—just a mechanism—then it's not language. "Well, there's no short answer to that. But this is an important issue. The same is true of what we mean by "thinking symbolically". What is that? Does it really help to cite the example of writing and drawing on paper with a pencil?
Many of these questions can be answered by emphasizing that speaking and writing are communication with other people. Symbols are there to get their lives, which is why language is more than just a mechanical device.
But the objection here is that someone might be able to do all this, give the symbol correctly in the "game" with others, and do a good job, even if he is "meaning-blind" . Wittgenstein's use of this expression is similar to "color-blind" and "tone-blind".
If I say a polysemantic word to you, like "board," I might ask you what meaning you have in mind when you hear the word, and you might say you're thinking of a committee like a coal committee, or maybe you don't think of that, but of a plank.
Well, can't we imagine someone completely unable to understand such a question? If you just said one such word to him, the word didn't give him any meaning. However, he was able to make a "verbal response" to these sentences and other words he encountered, as well as to the scene, and that response was correct.
Or can't we imagine that? I don't think Wittgenstein is sure. If a person is "meaning-blind", will his use of language make any difference? Or is the perception of meaning not part of language use?
On this last question, there is something wrong here about this kind of question. But it seems to reveal that there is still something unclear in our notion of the "use of language."
Or, if we emphasize only that symbols belong to communication with people, what would we say about the role that "insights" play in mathematics and in the discovery of proofs?
As long as these difficulties exist, people will still think that there must be something akin to an explanation here. They'll still think that if it's language, then it must have something to mean to me, and so on. For this reason—in order to try to understand what kind of difficulties these are—wittgenstein needs to enter into the whole complex topic of "seeing something as something," as he did.
There we have to use a slightly different approach. People can't do so much with language games.
Rush Reese
March 1958
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The Blue Book and the Brown Book – Wittgenstein's Language Game
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