Ludwig Wittgenstein: Language
Ludwig Wittgenstein was Austrian-British philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on language.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Context: This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.”
Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.
§ 109
Source: Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”
Journal entry (14 May 1915), p. 48
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
§ 112
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.
On Certainty (1969)
Preface
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
“We must plow through the whole of language.”
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 15e
“The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.”
Though this has been quoted extensively as if it were a statement of Wittgenstein, it was apparently first published in A Brief History of Time (1988) by Stephen Hawking, p. 175, where it is presented in quotation marks and thus easily interpreted to be a quotation, but could conceivably be Hawking paraphrasing or giving his own particular summation of Wittgenstein's ideas, as there seem to be no published sources of such a statement prior to this one. The full remark by Hawking reads:
: Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!
Disputed
“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”
This actually first appears in Recent Experiments in Psychology (1950) by Leland Whitney Crafts, Théodore Christian Schneirla, and Elsa Elizabeth Robinson, where it is expressed:
: If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
Randy Allen Harris, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), p. 35, and an endnote on p. 138 indicates the misattribution seems to have originated in a misreading of quotes in Patterns Of Discovery: An Inquiry Into The Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958) by Norwood Russell Hanson, where an actual quotation of WIttgenstein on p. 184 is followed by one from the book on psychology.
Misattributed
Source: 1930s-1951, The Blue Book (c. 1931–1935; published 1965), p. 25
§ 118
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
“But ordinary language is all right.”
Source: 1930s-1951, The Blue Book (c. 1931–1935; published 1965), p. 28
“An entire mythology is stored within our language.”
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 133
“The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.”
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 187
§ 124
Philosophical Investigations (1953)