Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy - John Searle & Bryan Magee (1987)

In philosophy, as in most other fields of human activity, the merits of the living are much more controversial than those of the dead. If you took a worldwide poll today among professors of philosophy on the question, who is the best living philosopher, I'm pretty sure no candidate would get an overall majority. So, any list of the so-called great philosophers can only end with the latest of the generally acknowledged dead. And today, for us, that is Wittgenstein. Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889. His father, from whom he was to inherit a fortune, was the biggest steel magnate in Austria.

Wittgenstein was fascinated by machinery from boyhood, and his education was strongly weighted in the direction of mathematics, physics, and engineering. After studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, he spent 3 years at Manchester University as a postgraduate student in aeronautics. During this period, he became absorbed in fundamental questions about the nature of mathematics. Bertrand Russell's book, Principles of Mathematics, inspired him to give up engineering and go to Cambridge to study the philosophy of mathematics under Russell himself. He soon learned all that Russell had to teach and went on to do the original research that was to produce his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, and usually referred to just as the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein genuinely believed that in this book he had solved the fundamental problems of philosophy. So, he turned away from philosophy and did other things. Meanwhile, the Tractatus acquired enormous influence, stimulating further developments in logic at Cambridge, and on the continent becoming the most admired text among the famous group of logical positivists known as the Vienna Circle. But Wittgenstein himself came to feel that it was fundamentally in error. So, he went back to doing philosophy after all. In 1929, he returned to Cambridge, where in 1939, he became Professor of Philosophy.

During this second period at Cambridge, he developed a completely new approach, quite different from his earlier one. During the rest of his life, its influence spread only through personal contact, since apart from one very brief article, he published nothing more before his death in 1951. However, in 1953, his book Philosophical Investigations came out posthumously and proved to be the most influential work of philosophy that's appeared since the Second World War, at least in the English-speaking world.

So, here we have a most remarkable phenomenon, a philosopher of genius producing two incompatible philosophies at different stages of his life, each of which influenced a whole generation. These two philosophies, although incompatible, do have some basic features in common. Both are focused on the role of language in human thinking and human life, and both are centrally concerned to demarcate between valid and invalid uses of language, or as someone once put it, to draw the lines at which sense ends and nonsense begins.

For me, the earlier of Wittgenstein's two main books, the Tractatus, remains hauntingly readable. But, it has to be said that it's the later one, the Philosophical Investigations, that has made him a cultural figure of international significance during the period since his death. Here to discuss Wittgenstein's work with me is John Searle, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley. Professor Searle, since Wittgenstein himself repudiated his early philosophy, and since in any case it's now the later philosophy that's far and away the more influential, I don't think we ought to spend too much of our discussion on the early work. What is it about that that we really need to know?

Well, I think the key to understanding the Tractatus is the picture theory of meaning. Wittgenstein felt that if language was to represent reality, if sentences were to represent states of affairs, then there had to be something in common between the sentence and the state of affairs. And he saw the way to describe that on the analogy with the way that pictures represent states of affairs. He thought there had to be some structural similarity that just as the sentence was made of a sequence of words that stood for things, names, so the arrangement of words in the sentence pictured or mirrored the arrangements of objects in the fact.

Now, this gave him a a remarkable sort of lever of a metaphysical kind where he could then read off, he thought, the structure of reality from the structure of language because he thought that the structure of reality had to determine the structure of language. Unless language mirrored reality in some way, it would be impossible for sentences to mean. So, the crucial point here is that we are able to talk about reality not just because we use words that stand for things, but because those words have a relationship to each other within the sentence that corresponds to the relationship that things have to each other in the world.

Right. Now, So, that's what he called the the logical structure. Right. And the world and sentences have that structure in common. Right. But it's important to emphasize now that we're not talking about ordinary language of the sort that you and I are discussing, which he thought concealed the logical structure. He thought if we took ordinary sentences and did an analysis of how they mean, we would get down to the ground floor sentences, what he called the elementary sentences. And there there would be this strict picturing relation between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact. Now, he he inherits from Frega the idea that the fundamental unit of meaning isn't the word, but the word only functions, the name only means in the context of the sentence. And as you said, it's the concatenation of the words in the sentence that is itself a fact that enables the sentence to picture the structure of facts in the world.

Now, I think people will see quite easily how that can be the case when a sentence is picturing a true fact. I mean, if I say there's a cat on the mat and there is a cat on the mat, I think the that relationship is easily understandable. But suppose I say there is no cat on the mat. How can that sort of sentence be said to be picturing something? Well, Wittgenstein thought that words like not and and and or and if, the so-called logical constants, that they actually didn't picture. They were not part of the picturing relationship. As he says, "My fundamental idea is that these logical constants don't themselves represent. They're ways we have of stringing pictures together." And it's not so unrealistic if you think about it.

For example, across the street from my house in Berkeley, there's a little park and there's a picture of a dog with a line through it. Now, I take it that's not supposed to pick dogs that have stripes painted on them. The the line is the negation sign and that's a it's a Wittgensteinian sort of picture. That is the the not symbol there is a way of operating on the picture, but it isn't itself part of the picture. So, he thought that what we say about the world can be analyzed down into basic sentence structures, basic sentences, which picture the world and are linked together uh or negated by particular operators.

By the by the so-called logical constants. constants which have this function. Now, in my introduction to this discussion, I said that throughout his career Wittgenstein was concerned to demarcate talk that made sense from talk that didn't make sense. How was that demarcation done in the early philosophy? Right. Well, in the early philosophy, in the in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein that Wittgenstein thought that the only language which strictly speaking made sense was this fact-stating language. Now, unlike the positivists, he didn't relish that. He didn't think that was wonderful. He thought that the really important things were unsayable, were unstatable. He thought that ethics, religion, aesthetics were in the realm of the unsayable. And he once said about the Tractatus that the really important part of the Tractatus is the part that's left out, the part that's not there at all. So, he he made a strict demarcation of meaningful language as fact-stating language. And the other parts of language, those parts of language that

are not used to state facts, he thought were strictly speaking nonsense, and we couldn't really say anything. So, although they might I mean, although ethics, religion, the arts, and so on are of fundamental significance in life, we can't actually ever do them justice in language. As far as the Tractatus is concerned, they are even It isn't that we can't do them justice. Our attempt to do them justice is meaningless. We can't say anything meaningful about them. Now, you've made the point very clearly that the central to the early Wittgenstein is this picture theory of meaning.

How did the later Wittgenstein depart from that? Well, again, though the Wittgenstein's ideas are very complex, there's a rather simple answer to that question. He moved away from the picture metaphor of the nature of meaning to the tool or use metaphor as the correct conception of meaning. He says, "Think of words as tools, and the way to understand language, the way to to get a a correct conception of how language functions is to look at how words are used." He says, "For most cases, not all, but for nearly all cases, the meaning of a word is just its use in the language. Now, this, just as the Tractatus gave him a certain metaphysical conception of the world derived from language, so by changing from the picture metaphor to the tool metaphor, he turns that metaphysics upside down. Now, instead of saying that the structure of reality determines the structure of the language, now what he says is that the structure of the language determines what we think of as reality. We can't think of the world. We

can't discuss the world. We can't have a conception of the world independent of the conceptual apparatus that we use for that purpose. Now, you've raised a lot of very fundamental concepts here, and I think we ought to take them one at a time for the sake of clarity. Let's Let's begin where you began, with the distinction between a picture theory of meaning and a tool theory of meaning. The later Wittgenstein is no longer saying that a that that words or sentences picture what they're about. He's saying that a word or a sentence is like a tool, and what it means is what you can do with it. So that, in fact, the meaning of a term is the sum total of its possible uses. Now, it's in the nature of a picture that it can picture that it does in fact picture only one thing. Pictures an object or a state of affairs. But it's in the nature of a tool that it has many uses, perhaps an indefinite number of uses. Now, that applies to his view of language, doesn't it? It's a tool.

Yes. Yes, let me say a little bit more about that. Lan- Wittgenstein is anxious to insist in the Investigations that language is indefinitely extendable, and that there isn't any single thing that binds all uses of language together, that there isn't any single essence that runs through all of language. And indeed, for particular words, there needn't be any particular essence that marks the definition of that word. That he says words have a family resemblance of their uses. So that I mean he gives the example of game. He says if you ask yourself what is it that all games have in common? And he he keeps insisting don't think what they all have in common, but look and see if you can find anything. And then he says if you consider board games, Olympic games, gambling games, games played with balls on fields and so on.

What you find is that there isn't any single essence. There isn't any single thing that all games have in common. There's Not not even the fact that they're pastimes or diversions because some people play them professionally. If you've been to Las Vegas, say it isn't that those people are are just amusing themselves. It's a pretty grim business to watch them at the gaming as they're called tables. But the idea is is that the strength of the words derives not from some underlying essence, but from the fact that they there's a series of crisscrossing relationships, similarities. And he compares that to the way that the various members of a family resemble each other. And he calls this a family resemblance relation.

Now it might seem like Wittgenstein was just saying sort of obvious points here. But remember he is militating against a very powerful philosophical tradition. He's militating first against the idea of his own that words get their meanings by standing for objects. And then secondly, an even older tradition that says words get their meanings by being associated with ideas in the head. And he's militating against the tradition that says, and this goes back to Plato, that in order for a word to have a meaning there must be some essence.

There must be some essential trait that the word marks. So the interest of his remarks about language derives a lot from their revolutionary or radical attack on a pre-existing tradition. He he uses the term family resemblance so often that I think it's worth saying just a word or two about that. When we talk of a family, the different members of a family having a marked family resemblance to each other, it need not be the case that there's one single feature that they all have in common. It need not be the case that they all have the same nose or all have the same chin, but that there's no single feature that they all have in common, just an overlapping and crisscrossing set of uh features from which they all draw as it were. Now, Wittgenstein is saying that this is true of language and meaning. That if we look at a term or a word, it's a great mistake to look for the one thing that it means, because there is no one thing that it means. The meaning of a word is like family resemblance in

that case. Namely, a word has several different meanings like the several different members of a family. There may be a crisscrossing and overlapping set of relationships between those different meanings, but there's no one thing that the meanings all have in common, which is as it were the essence of that word. That's That's that's That's right. That's what he's saying. Now, he doesn't say that this is true for every word in the language. No doubt there are words that have strict definitions, but he thought that this was crucial for philosophers to see because a lot of the words that trouble us, especially in philosophy, I mean in ethics and aesthetics, words like good and beautiful, uh which he was very suspicious of these words, but he thought that our part of our failure was we were looking for some essence of beauty or essence of goodness, whereas he insists just look at the various resembling crisscrossing similarities in the use of these words.

So, he's saying, for example, that we have all sorts of different kinds of talk. There's scientific talk, religious talk, music talk, everyday talk, philosophical talk such as you and I are now having. And in each of these areas of discourse, language is characteristically used in different ways, and the same words will be used in different ways. So, don't ask yourself, you know, what is the specific meaning of this term? Ask yourself, how is this term being used in that particular area of discourse?

was one of his slogans. Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use. And at this point, he introduces another metaphor. Indeed, I it's one of his few technical terms. He introduces the notion of a language game. And the idea he has is that we should see speaking a language on analogy with playing a game in that it characteristically it's rule governed. We aren't ourselves entitled to lay down the rules. Not everything is determined by the rules, so there is a great deal of slack, room for interpretation. But nonetheless, we're engaged in rule governed forms of activity.

Now, this again is a disconcerting idea for a lot of philosophers because he wants to insist that there isn't any foundation for the language games, any more than there's a foundation for football or baseball. These are just human activities. And so, he wants to get out of the idea that these language games, where the word has its home, where words get their meaning from their role in the language games, he wants to get out of the idea that there must be some transcendental justification or foundation for the language game. No, the language game has to look after itself. We play a language game of ethical discourse, of aesthetic discourse, of fact stating discourse, a language game with the word cause, a language game of identifying spatial and temporal relations. So, he's anxious to insist that there are these sequences and series of human activities where the use of words is tied up with the rest of our lives in a regular, ordered, but not in any way predetermined fashion. And that's really the task of the

philosopher is to describe, not to justify or give a foundation for, but to give just a description of how the language game is played. I must say I think it's something of a disaster that he fastened on this term language game because it sounds as if what he's talking about is something frivolous. And in fact, it even feeds a certain prejudice against philosophers that exists outside philosophy. They're they're all just playing with words or that they're somehow superficially concerned with with language. This isn't so at all.

If you use the word game for serious intellectual reasons. Right. And let me just hammer home the reasons for the analogy. First of all, it's an activity. It isn't something sublime that just goes on in our heads and it isn't an abstract set of relationships. It's an ongoing human activity. And secondly, it's conventional. It's regular. There are rules involved and those are the features that he wanted to to get that we should look at language in action and we should see it as part of regular rule-governed behavior.

But there I mean and that sounds I think pretty uncontroversial, at least to us, but there is a more radical aspect of this that I want to bring out and that is Wittgenstein thought that there isn't any point of view outside of language where we can so to speak stand back and appraise the language game from a non-linguistic point of view. He thought there wasn't any any Archimedean point from which we could get away from operating inside a language game, stand back and appraise the success or failure of language in representing reality. He thought that was impossible. We're always operating within the language game. We're always operating within some language game or other. There's no conception that we have of appraisal or of getting at the world apart from operating within a language game.

Part of what he's saying is that for me to be able to see this as a hand or that as a table, I must be in possession of the concepts hand and a table. And therefore, what I see reality as being is constituted by a whole conceptual structure that I have, which can be articulated in language. That's That is a great deal of it, but I think in a way it goes even deeper than that for Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein really thinks Wittgenstein is part of the movement in the past 100 years. It is part of It's a characteristic feature of the 20th century that we no longer can take language for granted. Language has become immensely problematic to us, and it has moved into the center of philosophy, and Wittgenstein is one of the great leaders in that movement. So, he would certainly agree with what you just said, namely that reality divides up the way we divide it, that because we call we we can only think of this as a hand or that as a table because we've got the relevant concepts, the relevant words. But, the point is deeper than

that. The point he wants to make is there isn't any such thing as thinking. There isn't even any such thing as experience as human beings have adult full full-grown human being experiences, that cannot exist apart from language. Language permeates that at every point. Now, a moment ago you were saying that every language game has to be understood from the inside. One consequence of this is as follows, isn't it? Whereas the old logical positivists who'd been influenced by Wittgenstein's early philosophy were extremely dismissive of all religious talk, for example, and they thought that if I'd said something like God exists, that was just meaningless noise, exhaust. The later Wittgenstein would have not been intolerant in the same way. He would not have dismissed religious talk as being empty of meaning, what he would have said is, "Well, let's first of all examine how words are used in a religious concept context, how they function, and let's look at their use.

Let's as it were get inside the religious language game, as he would have put it, and see how these terms are being used, and then we can judge whether they're being used legitimately, not legitimately, or whatever it might be." Well, you have to be very careful you about that last bit. You see, because what Wittgenstein would say is it's not our task as philosophy to appraise the success or failure of the religious language game. All we can do is describe how it's played, and the important thing is to see that it isn't played like the scientific language game. It's ridiculous, he thinks, that we should take religious utterances as if they were sort of second-rate scientific utterances for which there was inadequate evidence. He was always anxious to insist, "Well, we ought to look at the role that religion and religious utterances play in people's lives." That's the meaning of these utterances, to see how what sort of a role they actually play in people's lives. And he he disliked the idea that

we should over-intellectualize this and make it into some kind of a theoretical enterprise where what we were concerned to was to criticize this and see if the evidence for the existence of God was up to snuff by scientific standards. He didn't like that. He looked W. G. Grace once jumped on a chair in a meeting and said something Wittgenstein really approved of. He thought this was wonderful. He Grace said something like this. He said, "God doesn't want a head. Any old cabbage will do for a head. What God wants is a heart." Now, Wittgenstein liked that cuz he thought that was the language game in action. That was not trying to get outside it and and do some sort of sign pseudo-scientific appraisal.

didn't take a sort of anything goes attitude. I mean, he did think that philosophical puzzlement is characteristically caused by our using the terms from one language game as if they belong to another. By, for example, trying to judge, as you I think you just said, trying to judge, say, moral talk or religious talk as if it was scientific talk. And that we got our we having got ourselves into these puzzles and problems, the way to get ourselves out of them was to pay very strict attention to the way the words that we were using normally functioned in actual human discourse.

and I he does have various ways that he summarizes this. He says, "Philosophical problems characteristically arise when we take the word out of the language game where it's at home and then try to think of it as something sublime. We we don't want to inquire into the nature of the good, the true, or the beautiful instead of just looking at how these words are actually used in the language game where they get their meaning." minutes ago we were talking about this analogy that Wittgenstein makes between games and the use of language.

There was one important aspect of it that we didn't take up cuz you we can't talk about everything at once. Um a game is a rule-governed activity and language is a rule-governed activity and has to be because if I didn't follow certain linguistic rules, what I said would be unintelligible and wouldn't communicate or perform any of the functions I wanted it to perform. So, I have to follow certain rules. Now, Wittgenstein argued that because that was so, there could be no such thing, even in theory, as a private language.

And his argument to this effect has become one of the most controversial aspects of his philosophy. Can you say a word about sure has. Well, I I I would be glad to. In a way I'm reluctant to get into this hassle because there's so much junk written about the private language argument. But just let me say a little bit about it. First of all, you got to say something about rules. We've been talking as if the notion of a rule for Wittgenstein was unproblematic, but it wasn't. His notion of a rule is it is itself one of his important contributions to philosophy.

What he thought was first of all, that rules don't block off all eventualities. That language isn't everywhere bounded by rules. Nothing is everywhere bounded by rules. There are always lots of gaps left open by any system of rules. He uses the example of throwing a tennis ball when you serve. There's no rule how high you have to throw it. But I suppose if somebody could throw the thing 5 mi high and we had to wait all day, they'd make a rule. I mean, there the rules are never final. Now, another thing he said about rules is that rules are always subject to different interpretations. And if you've ever been through the income tax laws, you know this. I mean, the American history of it is a series of different interpretations. So, it looks to Wittgenstein as if there's a kind of skepticism that arises here because if anything can be made to conform to the rule by some fancy interpretation, then anything can be made to conflict with it and you wouldn't get either accord nor conflict. The rule would then seem to

drop out as irrelevant. Now, his solution to that is to say obeying the rule is a social practice. It's something we learn in society. Society just has ways of making people and training people to conform to rules. Now, he applies that to this whole private language problem. The problem of the private language is could there be a language where I just named my own private sensations in a way that no one else could understand it. Now, the reason for all the fuss is that a lot of people in the history of philosophy has have thought that must be the basic use of language in the whole Cartesian must name inner experience.

that we get to the real world, to the external world by starting from our inner experiences, by starting from inside and working outward. Now, Wittgenstein wants to say two things about that. First of all, that isn't how the words for our inner experiences actually function. They don't name private objects, rather they're used in conjunction with public criteria, behavior, situations. So, we're not in fact speaking a private language when we use sensation language. But secondly, and more controversially, he says we couldn't in fact speak a private language. We couldn't give a private ostensive definition where we just sort of point inwardly to some private experience and name that experience.

Because he said, "Unless we can appeal to some larger social gathering, there won't be any difference between my thinking I'm using the word right and I'm actually using it right." So, his discussion of the rules and the and the social character of rules is really what underlies his rejection of the idea of a private language. And it's important for him to reject the idea of a private language, as you say, because he's reacting against a whole tradition of philosophy that goes back to I suppose Descartes, but certainly includes Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the the empiricist philosophers who say that we start by cognition of essentially private states of mind and infer the world or build up a conception of the world from that. Now, the later Wittgenstein seems to me to be saying this, that because the sum total of a word's possible uses constitute its meaning, in the end, what language means and what words mean, depend on forms of life, on the social contexts within which they are used. And in fact, he uses that phrase "forms of

life" a great deal. So, that all the ultimate criteria of meaning are not personal, are not private at all. They are essentially social, are they not? That's right. And the And the It's important to emphasize that the notion of use is itself a social notion. It's something that I do in conjunction with other members of a society, and it's only because I'm trained to respond in certain ways that we avoid this skepticism that says, "Well, anything I do can be made to seem to be in accord with some rule or other, or I could always interpret the rule in such a way that would come out in accord with it."

And he does emphasize the idea that a language is a form of life, that we can't sort of carve off the language and look at it apart from the human activities where it actually has its meaning. When people pick up Wittgenstein's books to read them, I think they're often struck and surprised uh straight away by what they find, because these books are not written in the way that ordinary books are. They're not written in continuous prose. They're written in separate paragraphs, and each paragraph is given a number.

And very often it's not clear what the relationship is between a paragraph and the other two on either side of it. And usually there isn't much in the way of connected argument, either. You get these uh brilliant metaphors, brilliant examples, brilliant similes, so that the writing is wonderful, and yet it's difficult usually to see what it is he's saying. Now, why did he write like that? Well, several reasons. But uh first of all, I do want to say I entirely agree with you about the character of the prose, and it is both entrancing and exasperating. I know I felt that when I was uh preparing for this program. I went and reread acres of Wittgenstein, and there just is a huge amount. And And it is enthralling. You You begin to start thinking that way yourself. You begin to address your wife in Wittgensteinian aphorisms, which can be very exasperating.

Fair enough. Also, you have this feeling that when you take up one of these books and and read it, it's a bit like getting a a a kit for a model airplane with no instructions as to how you're supposed to put all these pieces together. And that can be extremely frustrating. It's a sort of do-it-yourself book. But why did he write like that? Well, first of all, I think it was the only way he found natural. I mean, he's often says what a torture it is for him to try even to put these paragraphs together consecutively, much less to write conventional prose of articles and books.

But secondly, I think there is an element almost of arrogance in this. Wittgenstein wanted it to be different from the standard ways of doing philosophy. He hated uh the sort of standard articles that appear in journals and standard books that are written to be read by undergraduates in philosophy. By the way, he would have hated the kind of thing you and I are now doing, two professional philosophers discussing his views on television. But he he did want to be deliberately different from other people. And then there's a a third aspect of this is that he honestly and sincerely was struggling to say something new and different. And he always had the feeling that he hadn't said what he really meant, that he was struggling to find a mode of expression and that he never really succeeded. And then lastly, I think we need to say for for uh English uh uh speaking viewers that this though it looks strange uh to the English eye to uh see this books written in this way, it's not all that unusual in German. There is a tradition

in German philosophy of writing aphoristically. Uh you see it in Nietzsche, uh it's in Schopenhauer and Lichtenberg, just to mention a few. And the writing is at its best wonderful. I think we do him a justice for It seems a great He's a great stylist, and some of the sentences stay in your mind for the rest of your life after you've read them. Yes. In my introduction to this discussion, I mentioned the fact that in the last I don't know in a how long one ought to say, 10 years, 15 years, probably not much more than that.

Uh he has become uh an international figure of importance quite outside philosophy. When one reads books and articles and journalism that have nothing to do with philosophy, one is beginning now over and over again to come across Wittgenstein's name. Can you say just a little about the fields outside philosophy in which he is important and and indicate at least what kind of an influence he appears to be having? Well, at present I think it's like it's a kind of name dropping. It's an okay name and he's certainly mentioned in a lot of fields, but I think he would feel himself that he has not been adequately understood and indeed has not been adequately understood in philosophy. But some of these fields are uh literary criticism and aesthetics generally.

Wittgenstein is now often referred to and I think will become more influential. Um there is a great deal of mention of Wittgenstein in social sciences, particularly anthropology, because he thought of himself as doing a kind of anthropology. Uh there is a uh uh books written about the importance of Wittgenstein for political theory. So it's what the the French would call the sciences of man that Wittgenstein has been most influential. Paradoxically in a way cuz he wrote so much about the philosophy of mathematics, but most of his influences now are in outside of philosophy, are in the social sciences.

the structuralists who are so fashionable or have been fashionable for so long seem to be claiming Wittgenstein for their own, do they not? Well, it's the post-structuralists I think that probably misunderstood him the worst, but that's another program. Yes, yes. Well, right, well then then we won't get into that, but I think the point is worth making that for example, if you read serious literary criticism now, you are going to come across constant reference to Wittgenstein. What is your personally evaluation of of of of all this, of Wittgenstein as a philosopher?

Well, I actually I feel so strongly about this that I've been restraining myself all along just trying to say what the guy meant and not what I actually think about it. But let me start out negatively and then I get to end on the on the more uh cheerful note. There is a kind of exasperating feature of Wittgenstein that I want to highlight. I want to emphasize and that is the anti-theoretical bent in Wittgenstein. The idea that we mustn't have a theory, that we can't have a theory of language. We can't have a general theory of language or of the mind.

Now, when somebody says to me, when some guy says you can't have a general theory of speech acts or you can't have a general theory of intentionality, of how words or how the thought how thoughts relate to reality, my natural instinct is to go out and write a general theory. We'll just see if we can't have a general theory. And in fact, I have tried to make general statements in both of these fields. I think it's premature of Wittgenstein to say we can't have general theories of language of a philosophical sort or general theories of how the mind functions. We won't know if we don't try. And the the sheer diversity of the phenomena should not by themselves discourage us. I mean, think of physics.

If you think of Niagara Falls and a pot of water boiling and an ice skating rink, it looks like very diverse phenomenon. We could go on and on with the diverse forms that water takes. But in fact, we've now got a pretty good general theory that it can account for all of that. And I don't see why we shouldn't seek general theories in philosophy, in in particular in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. I almost think sometimes that Wittgenstein thought since he had failed to get a general theory, since the Tractatus failed, then any general theory must be impossible.

Roughly speaking, if I can't do it, nobody can. And a lot of people a lot of his Probably what he actually believed. of his disciples have said to me, oh well, since you reject this anti-theoretical this anti-theoretical bent of the investigation, you must believe in the Tractatus, as if those were the only two options. And I I to suggest there are lots of other options. Now, tied in with this uh aversion to theory is a kind of waffling that goes on in certain crucial areas. Let's take religious discourse just as an example of this. We were mentioning this earlier.

See, Wittgenstein himself obviously had a deep religious hunger. I mean, he it wasn't this sort of a middle-class English attitude about religion that it's just something for Sunday mornings. No, he really had a religious hunger. There is constant references to God and getting himself right with God. And yet, I think most people would say that he was an atheist. Now, he in a way you feel almost that he wants to have it both ways, that he wants to be able to say things like, "Well, we just need to know the role that religious discourse plays in people's lives." But of course, you won't understand that role unless you see that religious discourse refers beyond, that the only reason that people pray is because they think there's a God up there listening. And it's And that's not whether or not God is listening is not part of the language game. The language game of religion can only be played the way it is because people think there's something outside the language game that gives it sense. Okay,

now that's for the bad part. Let me say what I think is really terrific in Wittgenstein. Well, first of all, I think most philosophers that what I'm going to say right now is kind of contemporary orthodoxy. Most philosophers would agree with this. He has made terrific contributions in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of mind. His contribution in the philosophy of language is that he really amounted devastating attacks on the idea that words get their meaning by standing for things or by being associated with some introspective process, by standing for some mental thing in the mind. And he does knock those views pretty effectively. And also, he is pretty good one I think of the most powerful, not the only one, but certainly one of the most powerful expressions of the view that speaking a language ought to be seen as a form of human activity, that words are also acts. Words are deeds, and that is an important line of investigations.

Now, in a way, his discussion in the philosophy of mind is just as important as his work in the philosophy of language, and it's a very effective attack on the Cartesian tradition, on the idea that we really live in two worlds, a mental world and a physical world. But, his attack on Cartesianism is so powerful precisely because he doesn't mistake the doesn't make the mistake of most anti-Cartesians of thinking, "Yeah, you just have to reject the mind. Just say there isn't any such thing as mental phenomena."

What he does is a painstaking analysis of a whole lot of psychological concepts, belief and fear and hope and expecting, and he goes through these, and what he shows you is that the deep grammar of these expressions is quite different from what you would think just looking at the surface, where we have nouns like mind and body, and where it looks like there are these two different things, minds and bodies. What he does is, by carefully describing these language games, he gets you to see that things like hope and fear and expectation and belief are grounded in situations, that we actually use these words in such a way where we're not inclined to think there must be some deep Cartesian divide. We say things like, "He's been groaning and in pain for the past 2 hours," and we don't feel there, "Oh my gosh, he's mixed categories, the physical groaning and the mental pain."

It's a perfectly natural way of talking, and he shows us that our natural way of talking does not lead to any kind of Cartesianism. However, the most powerful part of Wittgenstein, from my own personal point of view, is not his work in the philosophy of language and mind, but it's an idea that really begins to acquire momentum in his last work. It's also appears in his earlier work, but in his very last work that he wrote when he was dying, on certainty. And that's it's a rather subtle idea, but it's this.

We have in the Western intellectual tradition, going back to Plato, we have the idea that any meaningful human behavior must somehow be the expression of a theory, an implicit theory that we hold. That if you understand me and I understand you, it can only because we each have a theory of the other. you say, an implicit theory. An implicit theory. Chomsky thinks this, that there's an unconscious theory of language. And artificial intelligence is based on this presupposition that there are these unconscious theories. Now, there's some truth in that, but Wittgenstein is anxious to emphasize that a great deal of what we do both is both socially and biologically primitive. It's a way of responding.

It's a way of acting. We just act. We don't need to appeal to the idea that there's some implicit theoretical structure that enables us to act. And he as usually gives a very good similes. He says, "Look, think of squirrels storing nuts for the winter. Now, do they do that because they think Hume's problem of induction has been solved and we now know that the future resembles the past? No, they just do it. Now, he says, "Think of yourself and putting your hand in the fire. Is the reason you don't put your hand in the fire, is it because you think you've refuted Hume or you think you've got very good inductive evidence?" No, you just don't do it. You you couldn't be dragged into that fire. And he says a great deal of our human activity has to be seen like that. We're just responding in ways that are both biologically and culturally conditioned. But his ground floor statement, he keeps repeating this, he is, "We just act. That's the way we do it." And this goes against a whole tradition where we try to think,

"Well, it we can only do what we do because we've got an implicit theory. Do you think there's still a lot of juice in this, or do you think that Wittgenstein himself has made all of the really important, the creative and constructive use of these ideas that can be made? Oh, no. I think there's a great deal more to be said on this. I I To put it very bluntly, I think Wittgenstein only scratched the surface. Thank you very much, Professor Searle.