Miscellaneous Quotes

Tractatus

The book is only 75 pages long. He says: "As to the shortness of the book, I am awfully sorry for it ... If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me."  The text consists of seven numbered propositions (1–7), with various sub-levels (1, 1.1, 1.11). Here are the main propositions: 

1. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.   The world is everything that is the case.[190]

2. Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.    What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

3. Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.  The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

4. Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz.  The thought is the significant proposition.

5. Der Satz ist eine Wahrheitsfunktion der Elementarsätze.   Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.

6. Die allgemeine Form der Wahrheitsfunktion ist:    [p,ξ,N(ξ)]  Dies ist die allgemeine Form des Satzes.   The general form of a truth-function is:[p,ξ,N(ξ)] . This is the general form of proposition.

7. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.   Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both were right and both wrong; though the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have an acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.   — Tractatus, 6.371-2

Death is not an event in life: We do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.   — Tractatus, 6.431

Philosophical Investigations:

23. But how many kinds of sentences are there? Say assertion, question, and command?--There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call "symbols," "words," "sentences." And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.)

Here the term "language-game" is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.

Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others:

        Giving orders, and obeying them--

        Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements--

        Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)--

        Reporting an event--

        Speculating about an event--

        Forming and testing a hypothesis--

        Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams--

        Making up a story; and reading it--

        Play-acting--

        Guessing riddles--

        Making a joke; telling it--

        Solving a problem in practical arithmetic--

        Translating from one language into another--

        Asking, thinking, cursing, greeting, praying.

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Imagine a picture representing a boxer in a particular stance. Now, this picture can be used to tell someone how he should stand, should hold himself; or how he should not hold himself; or how a particular man did stand in such-and-such a place; and so on. One might (using the language of chemistry) call this picture a proposition-radical. This will be how Frege thought of the "assumption." [Note added by Wittgenstein] 

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--It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)   

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65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.--For someone might object against me: "You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigations that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."

And this is true--Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,--but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language." I will try to explain this.           

66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games." I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?--Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games'"--but look and see whether there is anything common on all.--For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!--Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here your find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.--Are they all 'amusing'? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we cna go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

        And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.          

 67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.--And I shall say: "games" form a family.

244. How do words refer to sensations? -- There doesn't seem to be any problem here; don't we talk about sensations every day, and give them names? But how is the connection between the name and the thing named set up? This question is the same as: how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations? -- of the word "pain" for example. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain -- behavior. 

"So you are saying that the word 'pain' really means crying?" -- On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it.           

245. For how can I go so far as to try to use language to get between pain and its expression?           

246. In what sense are my sensations private? -- Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. -- In one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word "to know" as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain. -- Yes, but all the same not with the certainty with which I know it myself! -- It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean -- except perhaps that I am in pain? 

Other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behavior -- for I cannot be said to learn of them. I have them. 

The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.

 293. If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means -- must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? 

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. -- Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. -- But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? -- If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. -- No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. 

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.