“Meaning” and “Mental Process”: Some Demurrals to Wittgenstein

"MEANING" AND "MENTAL PROCESS": SOME DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN WITTGENSTEIN'S UNUSUAL STYLE of presenation in the Philosophical In.vestigations is one of he chief charms of his work, but also one of the main sources of the uncertainty about his line of argument and its cogency. His interpreters seem often enough to be put in the position of having to supply the joints and articulations of the very structure whose firmness they are supposedly testing . Under these circumstances, many sympathetic expositors have a tendency to be very generous indeed in their estimate of the soundness of his reasoning, while adverse critics may experience an impatience at the size of the job that faces them. The latter are easily accused of missing the point of his thought, and may be so lacking in assurance about their own perceptiveness in this novel case that they are half-tempted to concur in the accusation. Nevertheless, it is by no means clear that adverse criticism of Wittgenstein constitutes prima facie evidence of misunderstanding . On the contrary, because he was incapable by temperament of providing the kind of sustained exposition that would have rendered his thought prosaically accessible, the prudent suspicion would be that there might well be errors and false starts lurking in the inspired utterances which comprise his work. To increase the difficulty, his friendly commentators , who could have been of most help here, have not by and large subjected him to the severe scrutiny his thought calls for; in spite of the wealth of secondary literature, too much has been allowed to pass relatively uncontested. This has had the effect of allowing his followers to retain some of the air of a coterie while they have been in the process of be249 250 KENNETH T. GALLAGHER coming an army. The net result is that one of the most powerful thinkers of the century has not yet been sufficiently confronted by, nor forced to maintain his theses in the face of, a wider and more traditional philosophical audience. Determined criticism from this quarter cannot fail to be useful, and should figure significantly in the next phase of Wittgensteinian reflections. A critic bent on finding bones to pick with Wittgenstein would find them generously strewn in his path throughout the Investigations. These could be picked up at random, but it would very likely be more profitable to try to locate them in respect to some unitary movement of thought contained in the work. Let us single out the process by which Wittgenstein moves from his initial rejection of the " naming" theory of language (ostensibly found in St. Augustine) to his rejection of any proper role for a " mental act " of " meaning " in the elucidation of thought. The crucial notion tha.t facilitates this process seems to be the conviction, arrived at swiftly, that the " meaning" of a word can be equated with '"its use in the language." (43) The first purpose which the " meaning-is-use " theme serves is to rule out the simple, punctilinear meaning which he takes the " naming" theory of meaning to assume, and to see meanings as contextual. An ostensive theory of how words get their meaning inclines us to believe that ultimately there must be words which point to simple unities of meaning (as Wittgenstein himself had concluded in the Traotatus); language is then seen as a mosaic of such words. Once we are disabused of the belief that this is how words acquire their meanings, many things become clear. We no longer feel the need to see each word as pointing to some rigidly bounded " essence," but can see that a " family resemblance " sufficiently grounds whatever definiteness a concept requires. Usage assigns meaning, and linguistic usage is as varied as the employment of tools. It is ultimately grounded in the form of life which sustains it, and so has a factual basis beyond which there is no appeal. DEMURRALS TO WITTGENSTEIN ~51 (Philosophy, of course, goes wrong precisely by falsely presuming that it has a ground whereon to stand that is somehow outside the language-games which alone can confer their meanings upon words.) One of the upshots of this view is Wittgenstein 's prolonged campaign against the...