Dr. Shawver to me

Lois Shawver

Shall we call each other Lois and Mark in these notes? If you like that, just address me as "Lois".

You asked, "Do you think Witt is right in saying that our ordinary language is adequate as it stands, given that he often talks about natural language as ambiguous and misleading? "

Here is how I understand this matter:

In the Philosophical Investigations (PI), which is the book for which you are reading my commentary and which Wittgenstein wrote late in life, Wittgenstein did feel that our language has the potential to grow and in that sense can be improved. (review, for example, aphorisms #18 and 19). In fact, to him, the ability of the language to grow was something that needed to be protected that might be lost if we tried to defined our words too precisely. In the PI, Wittgenstein was specifically arguing against trying to make language less ambiguous. That is the reason he made the the statement you quoted.

But please keep in mind that LW became famous initially for his FIRST book, not the PI. In his first book, The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein tried to make language less ambiguous and misleading. He often talks about his earlier book and is critical of this aspect of his earlier project. In his latter work, such as the PI, he rejected his earlier project, feeling language could not be made less ambiguous without losing its poetic ability to improve itself. Some people who study Wittgenstein and consider themselves a Wittgensteinian, especially in the United States, are students of the earlier work of Wittgenstein. I am a student, primarily, of the later work. So, whenever one is student of this author, one needs to say whether one is a student of his early work or his later work.


"It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a
state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation.
92. This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought."

He warns against searching for a perfect or an essential language, but it does seem that his previous criticisms of natural language as misleading still seem valid.

Wittgenstein believed his previous criticisms of natural language were important in some areas of language, even in the PI. He simply felt that what was lost in universalizing the call for precision was often more important than he initially imagined, and that the lack of precision was not always a negative thing. He began to think that language has different functions, Some language, such as scientific language, needs to be very precise. But other language can function just fine in an imprecise way. For example, if you measure the quantity of flour to put in a cake is it better if you measure it with all the precision of a scientific scale? Or is it more than adequate if you use an ordinary measuring cup? Moreover, if you try to measure everything with scientific accuracy, there are certain areas of language, so the later Wittgenstein felt, where the language will not support that even a much rougher level of "accuracy" because there is no conventional way of measuring things, and no purpose for measuring them precisely.. It would be like measuring the quantity of air in the room with the window open, or measuring the hour on the moon precisely when there was no convention for calculating the time on the moon because there are presently no time zones. Or, think of measuring the "beauty" of a smile precisely, or the humor of a joke.

It was precisely this dawning belief that stimulated that there was something important to learn about the imprecise areas of language, that gave birth to Wittgenstein's later concept of "language games" - and with that concept, gave birth to the whole of his later philosophy. So, Wittgenstein's later a philosophy makes room for both scientific precision (in certain areas of language) and a more romantic or ethical and/or aesthetic way of using language more poetically. And Wittgenstein thought ordinary language, the first language all of us learn, was highly poetic. He does not just make space for the more poetic, religious, romantic, elements of language, but he theorizes about them in a very distinctive way. It is a very distinct contribution, I believe, and important in part because he can think so precisely in areas where language needs this precision.