Abstract

Interrelated interpretations of several aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy are presented, including the following: Wittgenstein believed in "language as the universal medium," i.e., that we cannot dispense with the actual meaning relations between language and the world, vary them, or express them. This position led him to the contrast between saying and showing in Tractatus and later to the primacy of language-games over their rules. Wittgenstein's early views of logic and semantics were an integral part of the tradition of Frege and Russell. For example, Wittgenstein's "picture theory of language" is essentially a Tarski-type truth-definition for atomic sentences. The simple objects of Tractatus include properties and relations. The objects of Tractatus are like Russellian objects of acquaintance, and its basic language is hence phenomenalistic. From this thesis comes an explanation of the ineffability of the existence of an object, the identification of myself and my world, and certain Tractarian views on ethics and aesthetics. The principle change in Wittgenstein's later philosophy consisted in substituting an everyday physicalistic language for the phenomenalistic one. This change did not involve abandoning the picture theory. Rather, the naming relations of Tractatus came to be constituted by language-games. Ostension is not adequate to establish word-object connections; the ostension model is insufficient, lest private experiences "cancel out" of our talk about them. In particular, the meanings of words for private experiences are not given by direct confrontations with an experience, but by such suitable language-games as physiognomic ones. Such primary language-games differ from Secondary ones. The former do not rely on criteria. Only in the latter can one use such concepts as correctness, error, knowledge, and evidence. Language-games involving propositional attitudes differ from physiognomic ones. Only in the former are private experiences irrelevant. Ostension, emphasized during Wittgenstein's middle period, decends from the concept of showing in Tractatus and is later replaced by language-games, which gradually eclipsed also rules and criteria in Wittgenstein's unstated semantics