A Companion to Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations", and: Remarks on Colour (review)

240 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY There is an extensive and useful tlibliography, although it is not as complete on Mead's published writings as the one by John Albin Broyer in The Philosophy of George Herbert Mead. 2 DARNELL RUCKER Skidmore College Garth Hallett. A Companion to Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations." Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977. Pp. 801. $27.50. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Remarks on Colour. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe. Translated by L. L. McAlister and M. Schuttle. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1976. Pp. 126. $8.95: "I do remember," said Christopher Robin, "and then when I try to remember I forget." Rather like reading Wittgenstein, and then trying to say what it is about. But why? The style is lucid, jargon-free~ and innocent of typical philosophical distinctionmongering and argument-spinning. But that is the problem. Wittgenstein does not write like a philosopher. We miss conventional organization, the announcement of a thesis; we are at sea without references to the views of other philosophers. In this work of awesome scholarship Hallett brings us to shore by enveloping the seemingly random remark in a cluster of similar passages. He helps also with stylistic difficulties that do not meet the eye and so are more apt to confuse or mislead. It is important to know, for example, that in many places Wittgenstein is carrying on a dialogue with a mistaken self. Some of the clearest passages in the next turn out to be the crass pronouncements of that philosophically tempted self, stating views to be overcome rather than adopted. We have been warned of this before, but Hallet cites chapter and verse. On the whole Hallett is not concerned to pigeonhole Wittgenstein's philosophy in any conventional taxonomy. He does have something to say about the relation of the Investigations to the Tractatus, though here readers of Kenny's Wittgenstein will find little that is new: 1That view sees Wittgenstein as a Fregeian, preoccupied all his life with the question of what gives a proposition sense. Wittgenstein changes his mind only about the answer, substituting language games for real objects. But can language games play the theoretical role assigned to them? If not, they fail to provide an alternative to the Tractarian theory of meaning. 2 Recently, some self-styled heretics have argued that this Fregeian view of the Tractatus is simply ahistorical. Wittgenstein, we are 2Walter Robert Corti, ed., The Philosophyof GeorgeHerbertMead (Winterthur, Switzerland: Archiv fOr genetische Philosophie, 1973). Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). 2James Bogen (Wittgenstein'sPhilosophyof Language:SomeAspects of Its Development[London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Humanities Press, 1972]), for example, assuming that Wittgenstein's aim was to solve Frege's problem about false judgment, finds that the Investigations does not provide a viable alternative to the theory of simple objects in the Tractatus. Bogen disavows the intention (and the possibility) of offering a general intellectual portrait. Still, he offers a rather general reading of Wittgenstein's aims on the basis of an interpretation of passages than in Hallett's mosaic may well take on a rather different sense. Particularly important, to Bogen, is the example from the BlueBook, "Kings College is on fire," which Bogen sees as a symptom of the continued concern to account for meaning in such a way as to allow for false judgment. But the context suggests, as Hallen would affirm, that Wittgenstein wishes to focus attention on psychological verbs---the weak point in the Tractatus--by asking his questions in a form that would be familiar to his audience. Again in the Investigations (secs. 94-95), Wittgenstein talks about false judgment, but apparently as one among many instances of problems created for us by the assumption that language must have a certain form. Theories like Bogen's seem to be based, rather, on the assumption that if Wittgenstein was doing philosophy, he must have been offering a certain kind of theory of language, that is, like those of Frege and Russell. BOOK REVIEWS 24 t reminded, came to Frege with views already nurtured in the fin de siecle environment of the Vienna of Krauss, Loos, Sch6nberg, and Hofmannsthal, for whom...