Chapter 1 - ‘If Some People Looked Like Elephants and Others Like Cats’: Wittgenstein on Understanding Others and Forms of Life

Summary

The older I get the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads one is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.

Wittgenstein, Letter to P. Sraffa, 23 August 1949

Here is a tin of ground white pepper and with no such thing as a pepper mill in the house I wonder how we could ever have hoped to understand one another when we even use different kinds of pepper.

Alan Bennett, ‘Cocktail Sticks’, 80

Prologue

Interpreters of different spots and stripes all agree that the later Wittgenstein is an enemy of the idea that the thoughts and feelings of other people – and by extension of animals – are hidden from us in any sense that might raise a serious philosophical problem of other minds. Whatever the precise details of his view, it seems clear that Wittgenstein doesn't think that there is any general epistemic worry to be had about others:

If we are using the word ‘to know’ as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain. (PI, § 246)

On this view, there is no metaphysical barrier to knowledge of others, the overcoming of which would require some kind of argument from analogy à la Russell (PI, § 420 ff. – which forms a bridge to the remarks on seeing-as in PPF, xi). In the Philosophical Investigations, this stance is primarily expressed in relation to knowledge of sensations, inner speech, beliefs and intentions. Following Norman Malcolm (1986), we may see it as part of a much wider attack on the traditional philosophical assumption that all sorts of interesting things are systematically hidden from us (i.e. necessarily ‘private’), be they the essences of things, the functions of words or the minds of people (PI, §§ 92, 133, 155, 293, 301, 307, 323–4, 435, 559).