Conclusion

Summary

This book began by noting that while Wittgenstein is widely regarded as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, there is almost no agreement on even the most basic questions about how to understand the Philosophical Investigations. Rather than simply adding one more interpretation to the already lengthy list of competing interpretations, each condemning – or ignoring – all the others, a principal aim of this introduction to the Philosophical Investigations has been to provide some insight into why such a wide variety of readers have hailed the book as the final solution to the problems of philosophy. We have seen that the Philosophical Investigations' wide-ranging appeal arises out of its unusual combination of an open-ended and conversational way of writing, which invites a multiplicity of interpretations, and its quite specific argumentative structure.

My principal proposal about understanding the relationship between the argument of the book and its style has been that readers are too ready to identify the author's viewpoint with whatever conclusions the reader attributes to Wittgenstein's narrator, and so fail to take account of the overall character of the book. At the very least, a careful reader must be aware that the author's use of certain arguments does not amount to an endorsement of them. However, for this very reason the secondary literature on the Philosophical Investigations has a particularly valuable role to play in helping a reader to come to understand the pitfalls involved in a close reading of that text.