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Reconsidering Some Passages in Wittgenstein
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 1971
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I want to consider some difficulties which I have on rereading the passages on “common properties” or “common features” and “family resemblances” in The Blue Book (p. 17) and in Philosophical Investigations (§65 - §71 ). These passages are not as easy to read as they once were. Wittgenstein tells us that we think, or have a tendency to think, that all the things to which we apply a general word have some property or feature in common, and he tells us that we believe it is because of this common property or feature that we apply the same word to them. In The Blue Book the phrase is “common property”; in Philosophical Investigations it is “common feature.” Wittgenstein may have changed from the word “property” to the word “feature” because the word “property” is obviously too limited in its application. We speak of the properties of mercury or neoprene but not of the properties of barnowls or slatterns. The word “feature” also seems too limited in a way, but he may have chosen this word mainly because it fits his metaphor of family resemblances. I do not think that Wittgenstein wants to impose any special restriction at this point, so I shall use the word “feature” only where it is appropriate, and I shall use the less limiting word “characteristic” where it seems more appropriate than the word “feature.” Thus I assume that Wittgenstein means to examine our tendency to think that a general word is applied to things because those things have some features or features, characteristic or characteristics in common.
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1 In this essay I discuss two such philosophical pictures, each of which I discuss in two parts. For no very good reason I have numbered them IA, IB, IIA, and IIB. IA is part of the more inclusive IB; IIA and IIB are correlative parts ot lhe same picture. I shall call IA “the picture of words as labels,” IB “the picture of meaning,” IIA “the picture of the world of things,” and IIB “the picture of the features of things.”
2 Russell, B.: “When we ask what constitutes meaning ... we are asking not who is the individual meant, but what is the relation of the word to the individual which makes the one mean the other.” Analysis of Mind, (London, Geo. Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 191Google Scholar.
3 Cf. J. Austin: “. . . words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrarinesses, and can re-look at the world without blinkers.” A Plea for Excuses, reprinted in D. Custafson, Essays in Philosophical Psychology (Doubleday-Anchor), p. 7.
4 Philosophers often write as though the application of the word “red”—taken as a “simple” word—was a very simple matter. They seem to think that any question about it can be answered in a few sentences, although they do not give the same, or even compatible, answers. Of the question, “Why are we able to name [red] things as we do?” D. F. Pears says. “. . . ultimately there must be some exit from the maze of words, and, wherever this exit is made, it will be impossible to give an informative reason except by pointing. . . . Still at the place where the exit is made it is always possible to give a detailed reason like ‘We are able to call red things red because they are red,’ which is too obviously circular even to look informative.” (“Universais,” Phil. Quarterly, Vol. 1, 1951).
Ayer says, A. J. “... very often we have no way of saying what is common to the things to which the same word applies except by using the word itself. How else could we describe the distinctively common feature of red things except by saying that they are all red?” (Problems of Knowledge, Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1956, p. 11)Google Scholar.
5 There is great confusion in this idea. See p. 28.
6 E. Cassirer, “Le Langage et La Construction du Monde des Objets,” Journal de La Psychologie Normale el Pathologique, XXX (1932), p. 23. John Cook provided me with this quotation, after persuading me that I would be wrong in using a quotation from Benjamin Whorf.
7 Incidentally, I am not alone in reading Wittgenstein this way. George Pitcher takes Wittgenstein’s remarks as a discussion of meaning. He says that Wittgenstein’s review of the word “game” shows that “no general word has a unitary meaning.” He explains: “As I use the term ‘unitary,’ a word has a unitary meaning when its meaning constitutes an indissoluble whole. That is, the statement or formulation of its meaning refers to certain definite characteristics and something must have all of them for the word to be properly applicable to it.” Pitcher, George The Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.. Prentice-Hall, 1964) p. 219,Google Scholar