Filling Out the Picture: Wittgenstein on Differences and Alternatives

Abstract

At several points in his later writings Wittgenstein discusses imaginary forms of life and ways of thinking that appear queer or alien from our point of view; concepts so different from ours that those who think from within them seem to be alternatives to us. In this paper I argue that reflection on the notions of difference and possibility in play here shows that imaginary cases of alien conceptual schemes or forms of life such as those considered by Wittgenstein are not all cases of concepts that are entirely unintelligible for us; rather they may represent possible, albeit distant, ways of thinking for us. Such cases serve to aid imaginative reflection on our own case(s). By making us appreciate the possibility of the strange, they help us better to appreciate the arbitrariness of the familiar. I end the paper by considering what the implications of this reading of Wittgenstein’s position might be for Donald Davidson’s rejection of conceptual relativism.

Keywords:

• Wittgenstein
• forms of life
• the woodseller
• conceptual schemes

Notes

1 A very similar remark appears at Wittgenstein, 2001: II, xii, 195, but ‘natural’ is replaced by ‘intelligible’.

2 The distinction between concepts that might be alternatives for us and those such that those who use them would be alternatives to us is due to Bernard Williams. See his 1981: p. 160. Along with that of Jonathan Lear (1982; 1984; 1986) and Barry Stroud (1965), Williams’ work is part of a strand of Wittgenstein scholarship in which it is argued that the unintelligibility of Wittgenstein’s fictional cases is intended to show us that humans are conceptually constrained to a single human form of life – that the concepts that we have are the only ones that we could have. A similar criticism is made from a somewhat different perspective by Marcuse, who alleges that Wittgenstein adheres to a conceptual conservatism (1964: pp. 173ff.).

3 Forster, 2004: pp. 21ff.

4 Hutto (2003: p. 118) remarks that this exercise is ‘only ever an exercise in imagination’ rather than one that would enable us to make ‘genuine sense’ of queer concepts. One of the aims of this paper is to demonstrate that imagination gets us closer to an understanding of what it would be to have concepts different from those that we do have than is conceded by readings such as Hutto’s.

5 See, for example, 2001: §251, where Wittgenstein writes, ‘What does it mean when we say: “I can’t imagine the opposite of this” or “What would it be like if it were otherwise? … Of course, here “I can’t imagine the opposite” doesn’t mean: my powers of imagination are unequal to the task. These words are a defence against something whose form makes it look like an empirical proposition, but which is really a grammatical one.’ Ter Hark has usefully labelled these grammatical rules ‘constitutive’ rules (1990: pp. 62–72).

6 Black has suggested that the vagueness was deliberate on Wittgenstein’s part because he considered it territory not yet fully explored (1978: p. 330).

7 Garver, 1994: pp. 237–40. Cf. Wittgenstein, 2001: §§19, 23, 241; pp. 148, 192.

8 Among others, Baker and Hacker, 1985, Thompkins, 1990, Ter Hark, 1990, Glock, 1996 and Garver, 1994 offer comprehensive, though in some respects competing, accounts of what Wittgenstein did, and did not, mean when he used the term ‘form of life’.

9 Wittgenstein, 1980: §630.

10 Wittgenstein, 2001: §415/1978, §142.

11 See Pettit, 1991.

12 On ‘facts of nature’ see 2001, §§ 45, 415, p. 195.

13 Wittgenstein, 2001: pp. 148, 194.

14 Wittgenstein 1981b: §§ 568–9.

15 These examples are given at Wittgenstein, 1980: §630.

16 Wittgenstein, 2001: §206.

17 Ibid., §§240–1.

18 Lear, 1982: pp. 386–92.

19 Wittgenstein, 1978: VI §21.

20 Wittgenstein considers such a scenario with respect to languages that appear language‐like, but which turn out not to exhibit sufficient regularity to be called languages (2001: §207). Notably, his passage follows on from the passage in which he talks about the necessity of commonality of behaviour for the interpretation of unknown languages (see below).

21 Wittgenstein, 1981b: §383.

22 Ibid., §390.

23 Ibid., §350.

24 Wittgenstein, 1980: §48.

25 The possibility of a lion which could talk is countenanced in the Philosophical Investigations (2001: p. 190).

26 Baker and Hacker’s examples include the pre‐1873 Japanese practice of measuring time and early European, monastic, clocks used to signify the canonical hours: clocks which divided daylight into seven units, the length of which varied according to the seasons (1985: pp. 323–5); Glock cites various cases of anisomorphism between languages – the lack of a one‐to‐one correspondence between colour terms in Russian and English, and indigenous languages that include expressions for complex blood‐relations that cannot be captured in English (2007: p. 394); and Dancy discusses anisomorphic colour vocabulary in the African languages Shona (Zimbabwe) and Bassa (Liberia), which each carve up the colour spectrum differently and in ways that find no direct, term‐for‐term translation with colour terms in English (1983: 295–7).

27 (1974: §133).

28 Wittgenstein considers similar kinds of cases. See, for instance, 1981b:§368.

29 Indeed, the cases of colour vocabularies discussed by Glock and Dancy (above) provide empirical examples of the types of cases in which we can imagine finding a way into alternative concepts. Had our colour concepts emerged against a different natural environment, for example, we may well have found different colour features salient from those that we actually do and our concepts may have formed accordingly.

30 Wittgenstein, 2001: p. 190.

31 Garver takes this remark as evidence that Wittgenstein is committed to there being just one human form of life, the shared form of life which is the background to our actual natural languages: ‘It is only imaginary languages that determine different forms of life; natural languages all determine the same form of life’ (1994: p. 254).

32 It may be helpful to think of likemindedness as a continuum at one end of which we find our kin and at the other, for instance, the (fictional) folk who have no means of expressing their feelings, but upon which there is no place for the lion.

33 Wittgenstein, 1980: §153.

34 Wittgenstein, 1978 I: §§143–50.

35 David Cerbone (2000) suggests that the case of the wood sellers is intended to prompt a reassessment of Frege’s case of the illogical beings (‘But what if beings were even found whose laws of thought flatly contradicted ours and therefore frequently led them to contrary results even in practice?’, 1964: p.13), according to which the impossibility of thinking as an illogical being demonstrates the impossibility of thinking the limit of thought, which requires one to think both sides of that limit, something that could only be done from an external standpoint that Wittgenstein warns we should recognize as illusory. My view is that the wood sellers are not as unintelligible as Cerbone’s reading would require.

36 The empirical cases discussed by Baker and Hacker and others (above) demonstrate our ability to evolve from one (from our actual perspective, alien) practice to another as our purposes and interests change.

37 A reason why fiction may work so effectively in this regard is that the author imagines queer practices as they might be lived. It is part of her craft to create the backdrop of facts of living in the context of which those practices make sense and appear credible to her readers.

38 As Baker and Hacker note (1985: p. 330), the ancient Babylonians counted and calculated in base 60. They still, one imagines, managed to interact effectively with the world and each other – our decimal system is no more correct than theirs was, simply serves the purposes and interests we happen to have.

39 A similar scenario has been made manifest in the 2002 movie Equilibrium (dir. Kurt Wimmer), which involves a society whose members are compulsorily drugged in order to prevent them from experiencing, and therefore expressing, emotion.

40 If the lion is so radically different from humans, then it’s questionable, at best, whether intelligibility is an issue for it, we are not entitled to assume any similarity between its ways of thinking about the world and our own, whatever behavioural similarities might appear to exist.

41 Wittgenstein writes:

 Now I would like to regard this certainty not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life (that is very badly expressed and probably badly thought as well).

 But that means I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal.

  (1969: §§358–59)

42 (1984: p. 184).

43 Ibid., pp. 195–7.

44 Wittgenstein 1981a: §6.522–7.