***************************************************************** * * Titel: TRACTARIAN FOOTSTEPS Wittgenstein Tries a New Ladder Autor: R. E. Tully, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto Dateiname: 08-2-96.TXT Dateilänge: 45 KB Erschienen in: Wittgenstein Studies 2/96, Datei: 08-2-96.TXT; hrsg. von K.-O. Apel, N. Garver, B. McGuinness, P. Hacker, R. Haller, W. Lütterfelds, G. Meggle, C. Nyíri, K. Puhl, R. Raatzsch, T. Rentsch, J.G.F. Rothhaupt, J. Schulte, U. Steinvorth, P. Stekeler-Weithofer, W. 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Those articles and excerpts from * * articles which the subscriber wishes to use for his own * * private academic purposes are excluded from this * * restrictions. * * * ***************************************************************** By the time Wittgenstein started to dictate the BLUE BOOK to his students at Cambridge, the course of his new method of philosophical analysis was firmly set. He applied this method so relentlessly in his critique of private experience and solipsism that it might easily seem that Wittgenstein had abandoned the somewhat favorable position on solipsism he had taken in the TRACTATUS. The argument of this paper is that the BLUE BOOK's criticism was directed at attempts to expound and defend solipsism rather than to the overall viewpoint of solipsism itself, thus reinforcing Wittgenstein's claim in the TRACTATUS that what the solipsist means cannot be said but makes itself manifest. ------------------------------------------------------------ Wittgenstein's short work of 1933-34, the so-called BLUE BOOK, is interesting for two very different reasons. Its doctrine is a recognizably early version of the later Wittgenstein, rather than the product of an intermediary period, with even its rhetorical style resembling that of the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. The BLUE BOOK's thematic and conceptual territory is familiar at once to the many readers who came upon his later writing first: the association of a word's meaning with use -- its grammar -- instead of with an object; language games instead of an ideal language modeled on logic; common properties explained by appeal to family resemblances rather than to logical forms; the public dimension of rules displacing the picture of inner thoughts projected by propositional signs; the tilting away from Formal Logic towards philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind; the counterpoint of criticism directed at his older conception of meaning. A new Wittgenstein is clearly at work in the BLUE BOOK. The TRACTATUS belongs to a different world and gets hardly a mention. There are almost no interlocutors in the BLUE BOOK -- unidentified voices like those in the INVESTIGATIONS which burst in on his thought at intervals to challenge and remonstrate. (The few challenging questions he does put to himself are quickly put down.) This difference is partly to be explained by the fact that Wittgenstein dictated the material to his students at Cambridge so that, as he told Russell in a letter, "they might have something to carry home with them, in their hands if not in their brains".*1* Interlocutors are marginal in this process, not because the students themselves could supply the objections and thereby free Wittgenstein from the task of conjuring them up, but because having to deal with objections would only have interfered with Wittgenstein's purpose. The BLUE BOOK is a record of his teaching, a sincere and more or less organized statement of new views which Wittgenstein was now confident of imparting to a chosen group of his students in a private setting. Not that the prose ripples with humor and relaxed informality; as in the INVESTIGATIONS, Wittgenstein bears down quickly on his audience and does not release the pressure. It is easy to imagine him delivering his BLUE BOOK lectures with eyes closed, deep in self- absorption. That was his fashion. But the result is a text that rewards with its immediacy. The philosopher has just reached a new plateau. Challenges and misunderstandings, obliging him to clarify the new views, would come later; second thoughts would not come at all; self-reproachful reminiscences like those in the INVESTIGATIONS (§89-133) are absent. Nevertheless, looking back on the lower plateau of the TRACTATUS, Wittgenstein must have appreciated the transformation which had taken place in his philosophical doctrine, not to mention the abandonment of many of his earlier views. Nevertheless, some important views survived from the TRACTATUS. This is the second reason why the BLUE BOOK is so interesting. It is obvious that the BLUE BOOK retains central METHODOLOGICAL convictions -- for instance, that philosophy differs greatly from natural science in both its nature and activity and that it must endeavor to expose ambiguities in ordinary language which might lead philosophers astray. My concern here, however, is with substantive convictions, in particular his views on solipsism. Wittgenstein's approach to this topic is so radically different in the BLUE BOOK that it might seem he had simply abandoned the earlier view. I will try to make the case against abandonment. This will require a little stage setting first. I As the TRACTATUS drew near its final words, Wittgenstein issued a famous paradox: ". . . anyone who understands me eventually recognizes [that the preceding propositions of this work are] nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb up beyond them." Having climbed the ladder, the reader must throw it away. "He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright."*2* It seems Wittgenstein meant, then, that there is life beyond the ladder, though of course an indescribable one. "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words," he had earlier declared, things which "MAKE THEMSELVES MANIFEST." [TLP, 6.522]. To have mentioned even the categories or areas into which these 'things' fall, however, would seem minimally descriptive and thus to be in conflict with this pronouncement. Fortunately, Wittgenstein made a concession. He identified two particular areas as being transcendental: Ethics and Logic.*3* The TRACTATUS treats the former area in a cursory manner -- Wittgenstein displaces values from the world of everything that is the case -- while the latter is well known to be its preoccupation. The transcendental aspect of Logic is quite different from its overt signs and the propositions constructed according to its rules. What cannot be said lies in the USE of that symbolism. Propositions show their sense; a proposition and its sense have something in common, logical form, which cannot be said but only shown; groups of propositions are themselves bound by internal relations that, similarly, can only be shown. Getting us to see the transcendental aspect of Logic is what constitutes many rungs of the ladder that Wittgenstein wants us to throw away, once we understand where we are. He never meant, I am sure, that we should stop doing Logic. The BLUE BOOK is silent about values and Ethics -- literally silent, not practicing a knowing silence. More surprisingly, Wittgenstein has virtually nothing to say about Logic, apart from a few remarks about the mistake of regarding ordinary language as a calculus or system of strict rules that we consciously follow when we speak, but even then the contrasting system he has in mind is not so much Formal Logic itself as the symbolic apparatus of Mathematics and Physics. Again, rather than examining the Tractarian model of a logically purified language, the BLUE BOOK gives the phrase "ideal language" an ironic sense meant to apply to language games.*4* The book says nothing about the general form of a proposition (a gap filled in the INVESTIGATIONS) *5*, truth tables, the deductive system of PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, or the interpretation of quantifiers. Perhaps this is not surprising. It is worth recalling that much of Wittgenstein's discussion of formal topics in the TRACTATUS comes within the scope of philosophical logic. He wanted to expose mistaken assumptions in Russell's own system of logic, improve the rules for using the symbolism inherited from both Frege and Russell, and to offer an interpretation of that symbolism that would show how Logic, properly understood, could fulfill the injunction to "look after itself". [TLP, 5.473] Perhaps Wittgenstein considered this as territory permanently liberated and not requiring further attention. As far as elementary propositions were concerned, the view of the TRACTATUS was that we have much to learn from Logic. Applying its standards of exactness, we could cast out ambiguous and misleading forms of language, codify the use of names, explain how elementary propositions have meaning and, generally, give precision to our descriptions of facts. In one form or another, "a proposition is a picture of reality" [TLP, 4.01] but it falls to Logic to improve that picture through analysis. "Philosophy", he asserted, "aims at the logical clarification of thoughts". [TLP, 4.112] Had Wittgenstein reviewed this sentence for inclusion in the BLUE BOOK, he would have stricken the word "logical" and allowed "thoughts" to remain only on condition of taking this word as shorthand for "sentences expressing thoughts", but in the TRACTATUS these words -- like all his others -- were deliberate. He considered the analytical tools of Logic to be Philosophy's best defense against its own mistakes. Looking upon Philosophy as a kind of banner to be wrested away from the unworthy, Wittgenstein declared it to stand for an activity rather than a body of doctrine. [4.112]*6* Philosophy has no special content. It defers to natural science as the repository of all "true propositions". [4.11] (The logical positivists of the 1930's would applaud this view.) Nevertheless, as Wittgenstein saw it, "Philosophy sets limits to the much disputed sphere of natural science". [4.113] This particular claim is not so arrogantly a priori as might appear. Inevitably, the activity of logically analyzing any true proposition "must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought." It reaches those limits "by working outwards through what can be thought." [4.114] In short, the transcendental character of Logic shows itself well before we have thrown the ladder away. II Wittgenstein makes a direct connection between Logic and solipsism, which may seem to turn the well-ordered, objective world of the TRACTATUS upside down. I suggest that "inside out" is the more accurate metaphor. "Logic pervades the world", he declares, "the limits of the world are also its limits" - adding shortly after: "We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot SAY either". [5.61] Then the connection is made: "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". [5.62] Wittgenstein's endorsement of solipsism, even allowing for the price of imposed silence, makes its stock rise sharply. Some have been scandalized by his action, perhaps reacting to associations of solipsism with doctrines of radical, willful self-assertion in the tradition of 19th century German idealism, and it is indeed true that Wittgenstein knew something of this tradition through the writings of Schopenhauer. But I think that at this point in the TRACTATUS, Wittgenstein was not alluding to older solipsistic doctrines at all -- and rightly so, since whatever the solipsist meant cannot be said, and the reason solipsistic doctrines cannot be said is that, strictly, they cannot be thought (which leaves "they" without any substantive reference). Wittgenstein was characterizing solipsism as another transcendental pointer on the ladder and only to the extent of its connection with Logic -- more exactly, with the logic of our thoughts. This connection is not contingent. Wittgenstein's remark merely highlights what the TRACTATUS had already presented regarding the closely related nature of thought, propositions and propositional signs: A logical picture of facts is a thought. [3] In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses.[3.1] We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written, etc.) as a projection of a possible situation. The method of projection is to think of the sense of the proposition."[3.11] A thought is a proposition with a sense. [4] If logic pervades the world, therefore, thought is a dimension of the same world, bound to it by logical form. Every true proposition is at the same time a true thought. The world does not contain thoughts as objects any more than it contains metaphysical subjects.*7* And Wittgenstein is clearly not interested in the psychology of thinking, for that would be the concern of natural science.*8* Nevertheless, thinking is a functional part of Wittgenstein's doctrine of propositions. It is the method of projection. This is why, in the TRACTATUS, "thoughts" was not a mere shorthand expression. By the time of the BLUE BOOK, however, Wittgenstein had redefined the activity over which he wanted Philosophy's banner to fly. Although it remains an activity of clarification, Philosophy no longer takes Logic as its model. The syntax and structure of propositions (concatenations of names, as the TRACTATUS described them) are ignored in favor of what we DO with sentences in ordinary language -- their use. Names themselves are scorned as "one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it." [BB, 1] He no longer accuses ordinary language of disguising thought with clothing which conceals its form but now declares it to be "all right".*9* Not least, the role of thought itself has undergone a systematic transformation: Wittgenstein no longer characterizes thinking as the projecting of propositional signs, without which they would have no sense. "Thinking" in the BLUE BOOK has become a generic word for a variety of activities, performed by people, which have perhaps nothing more in common than our using the same word for them. Some of these are psychological activities, like remembering or having visual images and sensations, though certainly not all of them are, as he now wishes to emphasize: It is misleading then to talk of thinking as of a "mental activity". We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs. This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks. If then you say that in such cases the mind thinks, I would only draw your attention to the fact that you are using a metaphor, that here the mind is an agent in a different sense from that in which the hand can be said to be the agent in writing. [BB, 6-7] What is striking about this change is not that Wittgenstein rejects the notion of a subject of experience, an agent, for that was virtually the position taken in the TRACTATUS when he demoted the metaphysical subject to the status of a limit and consigned the soul to psychology.*10* What impresses me is that he has now adopted the method of behavioristic psychology to talk of thinking in ANY of its forms. In this respect Wittgenstein was conforming to an established trend in Psychology as well as in Philosophy. Although the approach taken in his Cambridge teaching was scientifically informal -- no concrete data were gathered and recorded, the favored experiments being thought experiments -- he clearly wanted to set new limits to what can be described, particularly with regard to matters of experience. The behavioristic stance -- common to its different forms -- was to avoid reliance on a subject's testimony about inner states and feelings but to direct our attention instead to what can be observed, possibly even measured, of the subject's physical condition at the time of those events. Unlike strict behaviorists and materialists, however, Wittgenstein did not dispute the existence of images and feelings: he was not covertly favoring a metaphysical thesis of re-categorizing these events as essentially material phenomena. The issue was rather what constitutes a public and objective description of them. The stance of behaviorism fundamentally clashed with the traditional empiricist view which had elevated the subject to the favored and exclusive position of directly experiencing the sorts of things which other persons could only infer: MY states, MY feelings, MY images, as the subject alone was entitled to call them. This is the view which the BLUE BOOK expresses in a question which Wittgenstein immediately counters with a challenging reply: 'But meaning, thinking, etc., are private experiences. They are not activities like writing, speaking, etc.' - But why shouldn't they be the specific private experiences of writing - the muscular, visual, tactile sensations of writing or speaking? [BB, 42] In other words, he suggests, why not treat so-called private experiences as already part of the public domain? However, Wittgenstein was not teaching the history of Philosophy to his Cambridge students. Nor was he not doing battle with fading ghosts. In England, the empiricist tradition lived on most prominently in the work of Bertrand Russell. Well more than a decade before the BLUE BOOK was dictated, Russell had sought to absorb what he could of behaviorism's outlook on mental states while yet defending one of empiricism's cardinal beliefs, that our knowledge of the external world, including scientific knowledge, begins with the data of private experience. Confronting the stark and seemingly permanent division between the private world of experience and the public world of science, Russell and other philosophers had argued that there was only one type of data (neutral stuff, they called it), data which are neither mental nor physical in themselves but which become so within different frameworks of description. The culmination of Russell's approach was his ANALYSIS OF MATTER, published a half-dozen years before Wittgenstein's lectures, a grand synthesis of modern Physics and Psychology set within a philosophical framework known as neutral monism. Although Russell himself no longer taught at Cambridge, his views no doubt flowed through there. Reinforcing Wittgenstein's new behavioristic orientation was an acquired disdain for the kind of Philosophy which models itself on scientific method. Although the BLUE BOOK mentions no targets, Wittgenstein probably meant his criticism, again for Russell, but also for younger contemporaries such as Carnap, who had reworked some of Russell's earlier views on the roots of scientific knowledge in immediate experience. He declares: "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is 'purely descriptive'."[BB, 18] Evidently, however, the method of science was not totally unacceptable to Wittgenstein. After all, according to the BLUE BOOK, we learn what thinking is by considering various individual cases. The concept of thinking is fashioned by studying these cases, despite their failure to exhibit a single set of features that would support a comprehensive definition of "thinking", and even though a complete definition is probably impossible to obtain, he reassures us that partial definitions based on limited ranges of data can be quite useful.*11* The only demand not satisfied by proceeding in this fact-gathering way is the "craving for generality", which philosophers like Russell and Carnap, and of course the early Wittgenstein himself, were determined to satisfy. Thus, the new Wittgenstein strikes a balance between the opposite tendencies of system-building and mere data collection. In contrast to the former tendency with its heavy reliance on imposed definitions and strict rules of use, ordinary language certainly stands out as "all right" in his eyes. But the particular data which Wittgenstein was interested in gathering to examine were far from innocuous. He pointed out that many of the ordinary expressions in which we describe thinking, imagining and other mental acts are misleading - they tempt us to make false assumptions and hold false beliefs about what these expressions mean. There are misleading parallels of syntax, as for example "I can't see his tooth" and "I can't feel his toothache", which suggests that the pain he feels is just beyond the surface of what I can see when I look into his mouth, or that it is an entity -- a something -- located somewhere inside his jaw or his brain, but even then remaining just beyond the reach of anyone's observation except that of the person who feels the pain. By unraveling such twisted threads of detail, Wittgenstein maintained, we can detect a vast conceptual structure, more in the nature of a picture, a metaphor of the mind as an "occult sphere" inside the body (or the brain), which influences how we think of ourselves and other persons and, more importantly, what we say. [BB, 5] But, we might ask, aren't these data of ordinary usage really quite innocent in themselves? So we might suppose, but from Wittgenstein's moralistic viewpoint, which tended towards severity, such forms of expression must bear some blame. These ways of speaking "tempt" us to commit errors of judgment (the word is one of his favorites). "Philosophy, as we use the word," he says, "is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us." [BB, 27] Not surprisingly, philosophers are noteworthy victims of this fascination -- not all of them, of course. The metaphor of the private mind is convenient in the dentist's office but deadly in the philosopher's den. It is articulated in the metaphysical claim that experience is essentially private and that there is an unbridgeable gap between 'inner' and 'outer'. Combined with the belief that substantive words stand for substantive objects, it leads to ambitious theories about the ultimate data of reality. Mere metaphors are transmuted into dogmas. The particular activity on which Wittgenstein now wants to plant the banner of true Philosophy is the twofold corrective process of exposing the metaphor and of curing these philosophers (whether already fallen or only tempted) of the inclination to believe that because the picture is authentic they can discover a bedrock of private experience and purely mental facts. III The situation looks bad for solipsism. Unable to emulate science, fooled by ordinary language, the kind of Philosophy which Wittgenstein derides in the BLUE BOOK cannot contribute much to our knowledge of the external world, much less of our mental selves. Wittgenstein's behavioristic outlook disconnects thinking from the use of propositional signs, in fact removes the dimension of thought as part of meaning. A sentence, he writes, "gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language." [BB, 5] Training in the use of language is what produces such understanding. The rules of language inhere in our customs and practices rather than in logical form. Above all, to see the world aright is not to see it as MY world. Against such strong currents, solipsism can be so easily swept away that to find the large amount of space devoted to it in the BLUE BOOK comes as a surprise. The topic is nested in a broader discussion of statements about perceptual experience which occupies the last 30 pages (about 40% of the text), and Wittgenstein, as mentor to his students, sought to impress them with its importance. "The reason I postponed talking about personal experience," he tells them, "was that thinking about this topic raises a host of philosophical difficulties which threaten to break up all our common sense notions about what we should commonly call the objects of our experience." [BB, 44] (For the record, Wittgenstein had already been talking to them about personal experience off and on since page 3, but that detail is not so significant as his evident determination to prepare them to withstand temptation.) Wittgenstein's comment helps explain why his discussion would be lengthy and might even suggest why he would wish to include solipsism. Exposing and destroying the claims of the solipsist, especially Wittgenstein's earlier views on this topic, would have some instructional value for his students: it would give them a nice demonstration of the new philosophical method's power. But I do not think this was his purpose, for two reasons. First, the fact that solipsism and personal experience are closely linked in these 30 pages suggests that Wittgenstein saw a greater issue at hand than either a traditional "straw-man" version of solipsism or his own older doctrine. Second, given that solipsism in the TRACTATUS was a byproduct of Wittgenstein's theory of meaning (as I suggested above) rather than a separate metaphysical doctrine, it would follow that his abandonment of the Tractarian theory would make any further discussion of solipsism itself unnecessary. Yet, extended discussion there is in the BLUE BOOK, and it does not mention the TRACTATUS at all. Uncovering Wittgenstein's real purpose leads in two different directions. I think that he wanted to discuss the topics of solipsism and personal experience together because Russell (among others) had combined them in his own writings. It was Russell who promoted the view that experience has a fundamentally private character, the same Russell who once spoke of his "desire to render solipsism scientifically satisfactory".*12* I think that Wittgenstein wanted to use his new method to cut to the roots of an established epistemology which, so far as he was concerned, perpetuated Philosophy's mistaken view of itself as discoverer of facts and as super-science. Tractarian views about solipsism, by comparison, offered a much less significant target, partly because the TRACTATUS itself had banished epistemology to the sidelines as "the philosophy of psychology". [TLP, 4.1121] That is the first direction to explore, but I turn away from it in order to follow the other route, the more interesting of the two but also, I admit, more difficult. I think that Wittgenstein was using his new method in the BLUE BOOK to restate his old claim that what the solipsist means is "quite correct" though it cannot be said but makes itself manifest. Before proceeding, I will try to clarify this suggestion. First, Wittgenstein does not try to rehabilitate the doctrine that mental processes of some kind are involved in the use of propositional signs. The BLUE BOOK clearly avoids characterizing thinking as a mental activity and moreover contends that no systematic account of meaning can be given. Its focus is on attempts in ordinary language to express the uniqueness of one's own experiences. The discussion brings a cluster of overlapping cases into the fact- gatherer's net which form a partial account of what an "experiential proposition" means. [BB, 55] Again, my suggestion is not that Wittgenstein wanted to champion solipsism but rather that neither book condemns it as nonsense. The TRACTATUS leaves the whole topic of solipsism mysterious, as Wittgenstein no doubt wanted, whereas the BLUE BOOK's approach to it is informal and in tone somewhat ironic and mocking, even to the extent of suggesting that the solipsist needs to be cured of an obsession. But I think the obsession meant is the URGE to explain and defend solipsism, as opposed to coherently BEING a solipsist. Nothing in Wittgenstein's account in either book precludes the existence of more than one solipsist. The viewpoint of solipsism might be reached by more than one philosopher who reflects on the character of personal experience, though it would have the distinct disadvantage of being inexpressible. Now to consider whether these accounts have something in common. What the solipsist means is quite correct, we were told in the TRACTATUS, only it cannot be said. Hence, whatever the solipsist tries to say remains essentially unclear, owing to the further dictum that whatever "can be put into words can be put clearly." [4.116] One does not look to the solipsist for information, therefore, still less for a doctrine. Predictably, that fact does not prevent other people, including Wittgenstein, from suggesting what the solipsist really wants to say. "I am my world" is a nice summary of this in the TRACTATUS [5.63]. A less memorable formulation from the BLUE BOOK (one of several) reads: "When anything is seen (really seen), it is always I who see it". [61] The problem which Wittgenstein quickly brings out is that the solipsist cannot explain what the main words of this claim mean without betraying solipsism: the "I" cannot be the bodily person whom others perceive, since that belongs to our common (physical) space, so it must be something they cannot see, in which case there is no point in trying to call attention to it. The same holds for the particular items the solipsist means to refer to, the sense-data. Are these "really seen" only by a single person? Whatever the solipsist means by that phrase, it differs fundamentally from its use in ordinary language, where it is possible for everyone to see the very same thing. Consequently, the solipsist speaks only of some private visual space which lacks physical dimensions and which contains private objects, but trying to direct anyone's attention to them would be a senseless gesture. The whole point of pointing has been "robbed . . . by inseparably connecting that which points and that to which it points", Wittgenstein argues. [BB, 71] Without using the resources of our ordinary language, the solipsist is powerless to make others understand; on the other hand, if the solipsist creates a new set of words altogether the same consequence ensues as for creating new rules for using the familiar words of ordinary language. The way through the horns of this dilemma is the refuge of silence. Granted that the solipsist cannot win an argument which cannot even be formulated, how honorable is that refuge? Most philosophers would be convinced by the result that the case is closed, the whole issue dissolved. Curiously, Wittgenstein is not so abrupt with the solipsist in the BLUE BOOK. Is the reason for this the method or the person? As far as Wittgenstein's method is concerned, the end is not reached until a cure has been effected. This point was impressed on his students in a way that makes his new method resemble therapy: One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense; not by restating the views of common sense. A philosopher is not a man out of his senses, a man who doesn't see what everybody sees; nor on the other hand is his disagreement with common sense that of the scientist disagreeing with the coarse views of the man in the street. That is, his disagreement is not founded on a more subtle knowledge of fact. We therefore have to look round for the source of his puzzlement. [BB, 58-9] Wittgenstein's new method traces puzzlement to its source. Since the language of experience is a public one, the defender of private experience lacks the means to attack common sense and even the means of self-defense. If experience has a private dimension at all, therefore, it cannot be put into those words. However, this is a fragile result, and more likely to frustrate than cure the defender. Wittgenstein seems well aware of the temptation. "Our ordinary language," he writes, ". . . holds our mind rigidly in one position, as it were, and in this position sometimes it feels cramped, having a desire for other positions as well. Thus we sometimes wish for a notation which stresses a difference more strongly, makes it more obvious, than ordinary language does. . .". [BB, 59] This remark seems almost to give an opening to the solipsist. Although private notations about visual space and sense-data could never convey information to others, that fact would not prevent them from having a function totally different from that of describing experience. The solipsist's claims might belong to the category of what Wittgenstein call a "grammatical statement".*13* These are sentences of ordinary language like "I can't feel his toothache", "I know what I wish" and "The room has length" which closely resemble many other sentences, such as "I can't see his tooth", "I know the Greek alphabet" and "The room has furniture". Grammatical statements are not burdened by subtlety. They strike everyone at once as making sense and being uncontroversial. They seem to make incontestable claims. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein treats them as a prime source of the defender's puzzlement. Despite their syntactical similarity to these other sentences, he contends that grammatical statements do not make factual claims. Wittgenstein was disturbed by the way some (unnamed) philosophers convert grammatical statements into what he called "metaphysical propositions". Some of these assert matters of logical possibility or impossibility, such as "I can think about what no longer exists" and "No one else can feel the very pain which I feel". Although they seem to state facts about personal experience ("experiential propositions"), Wittgenstein identified a very different role for them in ordinary language.*14* Metaphysical propositions embed rules about the use of the words they contain; they amount to informal contextual definitions of their meaning. Their obviousness arises not from portraying any facts of experience but from reminding users of familiar rules underlying our ordinary descriptions of experience. At most, they concern linguistic facts. The solipsist's claim, "Only this is really seen" (referring to a sense-datum), provides a further example of what is really a metaphysical proposition. Because the language of perception ranges over public objects, this sentence clearly fails to convey information about a private object, but when taken as a metaphysical proposition, Wittgenstein writes, the sentence "reminds us of a tautology". [BB, 71] Indeed, the analogy is a suggestive. The association might appear to compensate the solipsist for being unable to state any facts about experience. Tautologies give no information. In the TRACTATUS, a tautology "says nothing" about what is the case. While therefore it lacks THAT kind of sense, a tautology is not nonsense: it is "part of the symbolism". [TLP, 5.142, 4.461] Comparably, a sentence like "Only this is really seen" says nothing about whatever "this" refers to, yet it might still have a sense if it conveyed a new rule of use for that word or for the phrase "really seen". However, the BLUE BOOK's argument about the public nature of language stands ready to block this move. Its challenge would be: Whom would the new rule serve, what would be its use, and how could a rule even be set down? If the solipsist cannot convey information about private objects and their being 'really seen', then neither is it possible to convey rules for describing them. Solipsists who describe their own experiences according to self-invented rules would not be speaking a common language, since the applicability of such rules would be determined individually rather than collectively. The metaphysical proposition of the solipsist would thus fail to qualify as a rule of ordinary language, even at its periphery.*15* It would especially merit Wittgenstein's pejorative use of the word "metaphysical". Although liable to misinterpretation, other grammatical statements at least can perform a virtuous service by reminding us of rules which are proper to ordinary language in the first place. But the solipsist's metaphysical proposition makes a fraudulent attempt to add to those rules. The apparent opening for solipsism has narrowed, if not fully closed. Does a sentence like "Only this is really seen", which neither conveys information nor states a rule, serve any purpose at all? From the viewpoint of the BLUE BOOK, perhaps it does. Wittgenstein describes the sentence as a wish "for a notation which stresses a difference more strongly, makes it more obvious, than ordinary language does." [59] But what exactly is that difference? The solipsist lacks a notation to say. The sentence can only reveal a wish, can only serve as a pointer to what stands in a direction opposite to what is public. Possibly the sentence intends to refer to no private object at all but rather to a public object which is also experienced in a private way. In ways such as these, what the solipsist means is made manifest. Wittgenstein's argument may have cured the solipsist of the urge to articulate and defend this difference but not of the awareness that, in the end, there remains some difference our language seems unable to capture. And Wittgenstein may never have wanted to eliminate that awareness. The BLUE BOOK has clarified the radical situation confronting the solipsist: no arguments to present, no factual claims, no rules for the use of private notations -- and also, if the new method has effected a cure, no lingering temptation to attack common sense. In such circumstances, perhaps the solipsist can do no more than accept silence with a clear conscience, as the author of the TRACTATUS had intended. In that realm, from which both the world and even ordinary language itself are finally seen aright, no cures are needed. ENDNOTES *1*. Quoted in the Preface written by Rush Rhees in Ludwig Wittgenstein, THE BLUE AND BROWN BOOKS (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 2nd ed., 1964), p. v. Where appropriate, references to the BLUE BOOK itself will be abbreviated as "BB". *2*. Ludwig Wittgenstein, TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 6.54. (Quotations from the TRACTATUS throughout this paper are from this translation. All italics are Wittgenstein's. To save space, I have omitted the indentations separating successive sentences within a quotation. Where appropriate, the title will be abbreviated as "TLP".) *3*. See TLP, 6.13 and 6.421. *4*. See BB, pp. 25, 41 for uses of "calculus", and p. 28 for "ideal language". *5*. See PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, I:§ 134-7. *6*. Wittgenstein was thinking of the latter when wrote that the "whole of philosophy" is full of "fundamental confusions". [3.324] *7*. See 5.631-5.641. *8*. See 4.1121. *9*. BB, p. 28. See TLP, 4.002 for the reference to clothing. He went on to declare at 5.5563 that "all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order." It would not follow, however, that this order is perfectly clear. Given the possibility of deception, the task of analysis in the TRACTATUS remains: to bring that order to the surface (without rearranging it) and to show its form. *10*. See TLP, 5.641. *11*. See BB, pp. 19-20. *12*. In writings such as THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY (Chapter 3), OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD (Lecture III) and THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOGICAL ATOMISM (Lecture II). The remark about solipsism comes from his essay, "The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics", MYSTICISM AND LOGIC (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, paperback edition, 1963), 117. *13*. See, for instance, p. 30. In a closely related use, the BLUE BOOK speaks of grammatical distinctions and explanations as well as of grammatical statements. *14*. Wittgenstein makes no effort to distinguish "statement" from "proposition" in the BLUE BOOK. Nor does he sharply separate the words "grammatical" and "metaphysical", except in the sense of making the latter carry a pejorative sense, especially when discussing what he considers to be philosophical misuses of grammatical sentences. For the contrast between metaphysical and experiential propositions, see BLUE BOOK, pp. 49 and 55. *15*. In the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, Wittgenstein would challenge the very idea of a private rule.