Philosophical Investigations is divided into two parts, consisting of what Wittgenstein calls, in the preface, Bemerkungen, translated by Anscombe as "remarks".[1]

A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy.[2]

In its preface, Wittgenstein says that Philosophical Investigations can be understood "only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking". That "old way of thinking" is to be found in the only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Many of the ideas developed in the Tractatus are criticised in the Investigations, while other ideas are further developed.

The Blue and Brown Books, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934, contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language and is widely read as a turning point in his philosophy of language.

Norman Malcolm credits Piero Sraffa with breaking the hold on him of the notion that a proposition must literally be a picture of reality by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part, followed by Sraffa's question, "What is the logical form of that?"[3] In the Introduction to the book written in 1945 Wittgenstein said Sraffa "for many years unceasingly practiced on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas in this book.[4]

Themes

Language-games

Wittgenstein develops this discussion of games into the key notion of a language-game. For Wittgenstein, his use of the term language-game "is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life-form."[5] A central feature of language-games is that language is used in context and cannot be understood outside of that context. Wittgenstein lists the following as examples of language-games: “Giving orders, and obeying them”; “[d]escribing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements”; “[c]onstructing an object from a description (a drawing)”; “[r]eporting an event”; “[s]peculating about an event."[5] The famous example is the meaning of the word "game". We speak of various kinds of games: board games, betting games, sports, and "war games". These are all different uses of the word "games". Wittgenstein also gives the example of "Water!", which can be used as an exclamation, an order, a request, or an answer to a question. The meaning of the word depends on the language-game in which it is used. Another way Wittgenstein makes the point is that the word "water" has no meaning apart from its use within a language-game. One might use the word as an order to have someone else bring you a glass of water. But it can also be used to warn someone that the water has been poisoned. One might even use the word as a code by members of a secret society.

In the Investigations, Wittgenstein does not present his arguments in a succinct and linear fashion; instead, he describes particular uses of language, and prompts the reader to contemplate the implications of those uses. As a result, there is considerable dispute about both the nature of the argument and its implications. Indeed, it has become common to talk of private language arguments.

Historians of philosophy see precursors of the private language argument in a variety of sources, notably in the work of Gottlob Frege and John Locke.[2] Locke is also a prominent exponent of the view targeted by the argument, since he proposed in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the referent of a word is the idea it stands for.

Significance

The private language argument is of central importance to debates about the nature of language. One compelling theory about language is that language maps words to ideas, concepts or representations in each person's mind. On this account, the concepts in one's head are distinct from the concepts in another's head. One can match their concepts to a word in a common language, and then speak the word to another. The listener can then match the word to a concept in their mind. So the shared concepts, in effect, form a private language which one can translate into a common language and so share. This account is found for example in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and more recently in Jerry Fodor's language of thought theory.

Wittgenstein argues, in his later work, that this account of private language is inconsistent. If the idea of a private language is inconsistent, then a logical conclusion would be that all language serves a social function. This would have profound implications for other areas of philosophical and psychological study. For example, if one cannot have a private language, it might not make any sense to talk of private experiences or of private mental states.

Philosophical Investigations

Main article: Philosophical Investigations

The argument is found in part one of the Philosophical investigations. This part consists of a series of "remarks" numbered sequentially. The core of the argument is generally thought to be presented in §256 and onward, though the idea is first introduced in §243.

Mental states are usually contrasted with physical or material aspects. For (non-eliminative) physicalists, they are a kind of high-level property that can be understood in terms of fine-grained neural activity. Property dualists, on the other hand, claim that no such reductive explanation is possible. Eliminativists may reject the existence of mental properties, or at least of those corresponding to folk psychological categories such as thought and memory. Mental states play an important role in various fields, including philosophy of mind, epistemology and cognitive science. In psychology, the term is used not just to refer to the individual mental states listed above but also to a more global assessment of a person's mental health.[1]

Definition

Various competing theories have been proposed about what the essential features of all mental states are, sometimes referred to as the search for the "mark of the mental".[2][3][4] These theories can roughly be divided into epistemic approaches, consciousness-based approaches, intentionality-based approaches and functionalism. These approaches disagree not just on how mentality is to be defined but also on which states count as mental.[5][3][4] Mental states encompass a diverse group of aspects of an entity, like this entity's beliefs, desires, intentions, or pain experiences. The different approaches often result in a satisfactory characterization of only some of them. This has prompted some philosophers to doubt that there is a unifying mark of the mental and instead see the term "mental" as referring to a cluster of loosely related ideas.[4][3][6] Mental states are usually contrasted with physical or material aspects. This contrast is commonly based on the idea that certain features of mental phenomena are not present in the material universe as described by the natural sciences and may even be incompatible with it.[3][4]

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Central to epistemic approaches is the idea that the subject has privileged epistemic access to her mental states. In this view, a state of a subject constitutes a mental state if and only if the subject has privileged access to it.[4][7][8] It has been argued that this access is non-inferential, infallible and private. Non-inferential access is insufficient as a mark of the mind if one accepts that we have non-inferential knowledge of non-mental things, for example, in regular perception or in bodily experience.[4] It is sometimes held that knowledge of one's own mental states is infallible, i.e. that the subject cannot be wrong about having them. But while this may be true for some conscious mental states, there are various counterexamples, like unconscious mental states or conscious emotions that we don't know how to categorize.[4] The most influential characterization of privileged access has been that it is private, i.e. that mental states are known primarily just by the subject and only through their symptoms like speech acts or other expressions by other people.[4][8] An influential but not universally accepted argument against this tradition is the private language argument due to Ludwig Wittgenstein. He argues that mental states cannot be private because if they were, we would not be able to refer to them using public language.[9][10]

The complex and abstract nature of love often reduces discourse of love to a thought-terminating cliché. Several common proverbs regard love, from Virgil's "Love conquers all" to The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love". St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, defines love as "to will the good of another."[17] Bertrand Russell describes love as a condition of "absolute value," as opposed to relative value.[citation needed] Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz said that love is "to be delighted by the happiness of another."[18] Meher Baba stated that in love there is a "feeling of unity" and an "active appreciation of the intrinsic worth of the object of love."[19] Biologist Jeremy Griffith defines love as "unconditional selflessness".[20]

Impersonal

People can be said to love an object, principle, or goal to which they are deeply committed and greatly value. For example, compassionate outreach and volunteer workers' "love" of their cause may sometimes be born not of interpersonal love but impersonal love, altruism, and strong spiritual or political convictions.[21] People can also "love" material objects, animals, or activities if they invest themselves in bonding or otherwise identifying with those things. If sexual passion is also involved, then this feeling is called paraphilia.[22]

Interpersonal

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Interpersonal love refers to love between human beings. It is a much more potent sentiment than a simple liking for a person. Unrequited love refers to those feelings of love that are not reciprocated. Interpersonal love is most closely associated with Interpersonal relationships.[21] Such love might exist between family members, friends, and couples. There are also a number of psychological disorders related to love, such as erotomania. Throughout history, philosophy and religion have done the most speculation on the phenomenon of love. In the 20th century, the science of psychology has written a great deal on the subject. In recent years, the sciences of psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and biology have added to the understanding of the concept of love.

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Love is considered to be both positive and negative, with its virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection, as "the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another" and its vice representing human moral flaw, akin to vanity, selfishness, amour-propre, and egotism, as potentially leading people into a type of mania, obsessiveness or codependency.[6][7] It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one's self, or animals.[8] In its various forms, love acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.[9] Love has been postulated to be a function that keeps human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.[10]

Ancient Greek philosophers identified six forms of love: essentially, familial love (in Greek, Storge), friendly love or platonic love (Philia), romantic love (Eros), self-love (Philautia), guest love (Xenia), and divine or unconditional love (Agape). Modern authors have distinguished further varieties of love: unrequited love, empty love, companionate love, consummate love, infatuated love, self-love, and courtly love. Numerous cultures have also distinguished Ren, Yuanfen, Mamihlapinatapai, Cafuné, Kama, Bhakti, Mettā, Ishq, Chesed, Amore, Charity, Saudade (and other variants or symbioses of these states), as culturally unique words, definitions, or expressions of love in regards to a specified "moments" currently lacking in the English language.[11][12][13]

Scientific research on emotion has increased significantly over the past two decades. The color wheel theory of love defines three primary, three secondary and nine tertiary love styles, describing them in terms of the traditional color wheel. The triangular theory of love suggests "intimacy, passion and commitment" are core components of love. Love has additional religious or spiritual meaning. This diversity of uses and meanings combined with the complexity of the feelings involved makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.

Definitions

The word "love" can have a variety of related but distinct meanings in different contexts. Many other languages use multiple words to express some of the different concepts that in English are denoted as "love"; one example is the plurality of Greek concepts for "love" (agape, eros, philia, storge) .[14] Cultural differences in conceptualizing love thus doubly impede the establishment of a universal definition.[15]

Although the nature or essence of love is a subject of frequent debate, different aspects of the word can be clarified by determining what isn't love (antonyms of "love"). Love as a general expression of positive sentiment (a stronger form of like) is commonly contrasted with hate (or neutral apathy). As a less-sexual and more-emotionally intimate form of romantic attachment, love is commonly contrasted with lust. As an interpersonal relationship with romantic overtones, love is sometimes contrasted with friendship, although the word love is often applied to close friendships or platonic love. (Further possible ambiguities come with usages "girlfriend", "boyfriend", "just good friends").