Human Understanding as Problem 9783110613384, 9783110611205

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Human Understanding as Problem

Aporia / Ἀπορία

Edited by Jesús Padilla Gálvez Advisory Board: Pavo Barišić, Michel Le Du, Miguel García-Baró, Margit Gaffal, Guillermo Hurtado, António Marques, Lorenzo Peña, Nicanor Ursua Lezaun, Nuno Venturinha, and Pablo Quintanilla

Volume 11

Human Understanding as Problem Edited by Jesús Padilla Gálvez and Margit Gaffal

ISBN 978-3-11-061120-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-061338-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-061279-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952981 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Jesús Padilla Gálvez and Margit Gaffal Human Understanding as Problem: An Introduction   Wolfgang Künne Levels of Understanding 

 1

 5

Jocelyn Benoist Two Ways to Fail to Understand 

 69

Emil Angehrn Understanding, Understanding Oneself, Self-Understanding  Christian Bermes Towards a Performative Hermeneutics 

 95

António Marques Wittgenstein on Understanding and Description  Sandra Laugier Understanding, Meaning, and Expression 

 107

 115

Jesús Padilla Gálvez Understanding Regarded as Comprehension of Content  Margit Gaffal An Analytic View of Understanding 

 147

Michel Le Du Can We (Really) Put Ourselves in Other People’s Shoes?  Severin Schroeder God, Lions, and Englishwomen 

 171

Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Works  Index 

 187

List of Contributors 

 191

 135

 185

 161

 81

Jesús Padilla Gálvez and Margit Gaffal

Human Understanding as Problem: An Introduction Undoubtedly the term “understanding” is one of the basic concepts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The philosophical definition of understanding is based on its meaning within everyday language. In the broad sense of the word, “understanding” means recognizing and comprehending a matter of fact. In the narrow sense it concerns issues of the human sciences. As such, the problem of understanding has been repeatedly addressed by contemporary methodological approaches: hermeneutics, phenomenology, transcendental philosophy, and analytic philosophy. If these questions were to remain unanswered we would never be able to shed light on the mode in which humans process information. A major aim of hermeneutics is to comprehend spoken and written language by applying different methods of interpretation. The first thing we notice is that “understanding” is a term with blurred boundaries, which belongs to the conceptual family of know­ ledge, certainty and reasons for belief. It is one of these holistic concepts that are closely intertwined with other related notions. There are two distinct types of language games regarding understanding: the first involves a direct object, and the second is the language game of knowing-why. With the second type, reasons for “true justified convictions” are required. Despite this close relationship between understanding and knowledge, the concepts are not coextensive. Current methodological questions cannot ignore the theme of understanding. Thus, the following methods have addressed the theme: the hermeneutic and transcendental methods, the eidetic vision, and the analytic approach, each of which aims to elucidate and define the notion of “understanding” from different perspectives. Taking into account all these aspects, we can give a preliminary definition of understanding: a state of affairs (Sachverhalt) p is understood if we can give reasons for well-founded assumptions that explain that state of affairs, and that these assumptions are true because their interconnections in a holistic system are consistent, decidable, and complete for the areas to which they apply. Starting from this definition, the contributions to this book cover a wide range of aspects related to the philosophical perspective of understanding. In his extensive article, Wolfgang Künne provides relevant insights into the possible meanings and interpretations of utterances. A distinction between different levels of understanding proves useful for determining the significance of a statement in a context. More specifically, the author proposes a distinction between six levels on which one can understand, and fail to understand, the utterance https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-001

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 Jesús Padilla Gálvez and Margit Gaffal

of a declarative sentence. On the first level, the understanding of an utterance amounts to grasping its wording, whereas on level two it amounts to knowing what the declarative sentence can mean. Level three indicates what the particular sentence means in the utterance, while level four regards its propositional content. Level five points to the illocutionary force of the statement, and the level six refers to the mediate propositional content. In sum, to understand a statement the listener has to take into account a statement’s actual and possible meaning, its content, and the speaker’s intention. Jocelyn Benoist examines the meaning and implications of words commonly used to express understanding. Apart from understanding, he analyses terms such as comprehension, misunderstanding, and lack of understanding, providing examples of their semantic content. The author analyses the difference between Verstehen and Verständnis in Wittgenstein’s work, and underlines the fact that to understand something always refers to definite circumstances. The article focuses on ‘comprehension’ as opposed to ‘understanding’ and shows that beyond that superficial opposition, as much as there is no comprehension without and beyond understanding, there is no understanding of any kind without ‘comprehension’ in that sense either. Emil Angehrn addresses the topic of understanding regarding oneself. In line with Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutic considerations, the author argues that understanding oneself requires an integral autobiographical reflection on one’s own path of life, involving the interpretation of past events and one’s life ahead. Dilthey defines the nature of understanding with reference to two aspects, understanding as comprehension of connections, especially as the relation between the whole and its parts. We understand an episode in its function for a story, a text from its words and sentences. On the other hand, understanding consists of understanding something as an expression. We understand cultural and historical facts as objectifications of individual and social life. The triad life-expression-understanding forms the structural core and framework of hermeneutics. Eventually, understanding implies self-understanding, and autobiography becomes the paradigm of understanding. Christian Bermes deals with the question of how we can understand the significance of cultural practices. Performative hermeneutics is the approach by which both Wittgenstein and Husserl describe and explain cultural practices. They are viewed as pre-established rules that serve as practical commitments within culture. Following Husserl’s analyses of Lifeworld and Wittgenstein’s discussion of Frazer’s Golden Bough, this paper addresses the understanding of cultural practices. It proceeds on the assumption that the comprehension of cultural practices is grounded on a unique form of understanding which cannot be reduced to other types of understanding. Such a form of understanding

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relativizes the as-structure of classical hermeneutics to describe the pre-giveness and the commitment of cultural practices. A description that accomplishes this is here called ‘performative hermeneutics’. It will be shown that there is an understanding of commitments, a cultural or performative understanding, in which the as-structure does not play a primary role, but which becomes understandable only by canceling this structure. Sandra Laugier considers Wittgenstein’s analytic approach in line with the view of Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP), focusing on the analysis of human expressivity to ascertain its meaning and understanding. OLP is a minority current in the mainstream philosophy of language, and even in the field of pragmatics. Its primary methodological ambition is a conceptual analysis that enables us to recognize the importance of context in the practice of language, thought, and understanding. António Marques explores the relation between the concepts of understanding and description and their function as philosophical tools in Wittgenstein’s writings. Both concepts and their implications are analysed with reference to the first-person perspective, the process of rule-following, and language use. Marques’ analysis of Wittgenstein’s conception of “understanding” focuses on the activity of description. The author claims that in the late Wittgenstein this activity cannot be separated from the perspective of the first-person and often includes expressive language. So “understanding” has special connections, which one can call “describing with expression.” Jesús Padilla Gálvez contrasts understanding with comprehension and argues that understanding is not governed by a cause-effect-relationship, but rather is linked to the notion of perspicuity. He considers the internalistic perspective of understanding as something prone to produce fallacies. The author examines the meaning of “understand” from an analytic point of view and explores the view of understanding as a process comparable to a game that takes place in language. Special emphasis is put on the fact that understanding does not proceed in the same way as a cause-effect relationship. This article deals with the function of words in our lives, and distinguishes meaning from the actual purpose of words. Special attention is given to the notion of perspicuity as a relevant criterion for understanding. Margit Gaffal traces Wittgenstein’s explanations of understanding as described in a transcript dedicated to Moritz Schlick in 1929. Gaffal focuses first on the language games of ‘understanding’ and then deals with the mode in which psychological states are expressed. It is shown that fallacies are produced by arbitrarily combining scientific terms with pre-scientific expressions. The derivation and nature of ambiguous concepts are investigated, taking into account the regulatory function of grammar. As far as artwork is concerned, a comparison between visual and verbal language helps clarify what it means to understand art.

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Michel Le Du explores the function of observation and participation as means to understanding another person’s point of view. Useful dichotomies such as clinical-versus-nomological generalisation or a weak-and-strong concept of context are useful approaches to the analysis of common sense. The paper aims at displaying the various possible interpretations of the phrase “putting oneself in another person’s shoes.” To understand indigenous people, an anthropologist has to adopt the natives’ point of view if he is to grasp their understanding of the world and how it shapes their conduct and decisions. Making reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Clifford Geertz, the paper aims to elucidate in what such an adoption consists. In his investigation on how one comes to understand the other’s point of view, Severin Schroeder regards understanding as a broad concept that involves predictability, rationality, empathy, and mutual agreement among interlocutors. Wittgenstein shows that understanding is a capacity and cannot be accounted for by mental representations of what is understood. The author focuses on Wittgenstein’s saying, ‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it’ and argues that if a person’s understanding cannot be accounted for by occurrences of mental representations, then understanding that person cannot be a matter of knowing what is going on inside of him or her. Our inability to understand a strange creature would not be overcome even if that creature could speak and it were suddenly to be revealed what was going on inside its mind. Finally, the author explains how understanding other people is not an entirely intellectual affair, but has also moral and aesthetic dimensions. What can be said in summary is that understanding is facilitated by the following processes: first, by avoiding a direct comparison of the object in question (Gegenstand) with reality, but considering it as a separate entity, which enhances the clarity and ability to discriminate in perception. Second, that one focuses on the special features and properties of the object and recognizes them as characteristic and determining. And third, it seems helpful to determine the particular relations that prevail between the parts and the object as a whole. It is the combined interaction among these processes that allows the viewer to gain a perspicuous view of the matter, the result of which is what we call ‘understanding, grasping” or ‘comprehending’ an object.

Wolfgang Künne

Levels of Understanding Abstract: There are various respects in which one can understand and misunderstand a linguistic utterance. Sometimes we succeed in understanding an utterance in one respect while failing to understand it in one or several other respects. I shall describe improving one’s understanding of an utterance as climbing a staircase, as moving from lower levels to higher levels. I shall argue that we should distinguish at least six levels on which one can understand, and fail to understand, an utterance U of a declarative sentence S. On level (1) understanding U amounts to grasping the wording of U; on level (2) it amounts to knowing what S can mean in U; on level (3) to knowing what S as used in U does mean; on level (4) to knowing which propositional content (if any) U has; on level (5) to knowing which illocutionary force (if any) U has; and on levels (6a) and (6b) it consists in knowing which mediate propositional content (if any) U has, and in knowing which mediate illocutionary force (if any) U has. Keywords: understanding vs. interpreting, linguistic meaning, propositional content, immediate, propositional content, mediate, illocutionary force, immediate, illocutionary force, mediate, aesthetic understanding

Prologue: One Observation in Two Notebooks In Paul Valéry’s Notebooks of 1929 the entry ‘Clarté’ runs as follows1: ‘Ouvrez cette porte.’ Voici une phrase claire. Mais si on nous l’adresse en rase campagne, nous ne la comprenons plus. (‘Open this door.’ That is a clear sentence. But if somebody says to us in the fields ‘Open this door’, we no longer understand this sentence.)

(In the epilogue I shall quote the remainder of Valéry’s aphorism.) Something in this insightful remark is strange. As all connoisseurs seem to agree, Valéry’s

1 Valéry (1929), Clarté. Note: In this paper I return, after more than a quarter of a century, to one of the topics of my inaugural lecture: Künne (1981), cp. also my (1983a) ch. 5.2, (1985) & (1990). In the meantime, the idea that the title of this paper alludes to has been used by O. Scholz in several of his writings, see esp. (1999) 291–312. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-002

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French is perfect, and it is very unlikely that this master’s mastery of his mother tongue suffered severely whenever he went into the fields. From his early childhood to his old age, whether in Paris or in the Camargue, he knew what ‘Ouvrez cette porte’ meant, – so, in some way he understood utterances of this sentence wheresoever he heard them. Hence there seems to be one kind of understanding that he lacked when his companion in the fields said to him ‘Ouvrez cette porte’ and another kind of understanding that he possessed both in Paris and in the Camargue. Two decades after Valéry, a great master of a different language wrote down notes that contain a very similar, and similarly confusing, remark. Using an example that was pertinent to his reflections on certainty, Wittgenstein wrote2: [Jemand] sagt zu wiederholten Malen: ‘Ich weiß, daß das ein Baum ist’, wobei er auf einen Baum in unserer Nähe zeigt… ([Somebody] says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us.). … Warum kommt es mir so vor, ich verstünde den Satz nicht? obwohl er doch ein höchst einfacher Satz von der gewöhnlichsten Art ist? (Why does it strike me as if I did not understand the sentence? though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary kind?)

Of course, Wittgenstein very well knows what the German sentence ‘Ich weiß, dass das ein Baum ist’ means, hence, in some way he certainly understood what he heard, no matter what the circumstances were under which it was uttered. After all, in the very same notebook he correctly translates this sentence into English. So once again, there seems to be a kind of understanding he lacks when he hears those words uttered in front of a clearly visible, paradigmatic case of a tree, and another kind of understanding that he possessed ever since had learned his mother tongue. Obviously, something needs to be clarified here, and this paper is an attempt to provide the necessary clarification. There are various respects in which one can understand and misunderstand a linguistic utterance. Sometimes we succeed in understanding an utterance in one respect while failing to understand it in one or several other respects. Borrowing a metaphor that was used in late antiquity by Hellenistic Jews and Christians in Alexandria when they tried to make as much sense as possible of what is written in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, I shall describe improving one’s understanding of an utterance as climbing a staircase, as moving from lower levels to higher levels. Quantitatively, I shall outstrip Philo and Origen by distinguishing six levels on which understanding an utterance U of a declarative sentence S can succeed as well as fail.3

2 Wittgenstein (1970) §§ 467, 347. 3 Cp. also Peter Strawson’s threefold distinction between ‘sense-A-’, ‘sense-B-’ and ‘senseC-meaning’ in his (1973) 192–95 and (1997a). One of several differences between Strawson’s

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Understanding an utterance U of a declarative sentence S as (1)  grasping the wording of U (2)  knowing what S can mean in U (3)  knowing what S as used in U means (4)  knowing which propositional content (if any) U has (5)  knowing which illocutionary force (if any) U has (6a) knowing which mediate propositional content (if any) U has (6b) knowing which mediate illocutionary force (if any) U has

1 Understanding an Utterance as Grasping Its Wording Perhaps the speaker is mumbling something into his beard, perhaps he is speaking too softly, and someone in the audience raises an admonitory finger, ‘Could you please speak louder? Back here, one cannot understand you.’ Perhaps nobody could understand what he said a moment ago because it was drowned by the booming noise of an aeroplane, so he is asked to repeat what he said. A hearer who has reason to make such complaints has not even reached the first level of understanding. If she had reached it, if she had perceptually understood the utterance, then she would be able to quote verbatim (word for word) what the speaker had said a moment ago. By giving a so-called ‘direct speech’ or oratio recta report on the basis of her own perception of an utterance, the hearer can show that she has perceptually understood it. (Henceforth I shall call oratio recta reports direct reports.) On this level, misunderstanding is due to mishearing or misreading. Lichtenberg presented a superb example of the latter mishap, together with a charming explanation, when he said about a deceased colleague, ‘Er las immer “Agamemnon” statt “Angenommen”, so sehr hatte er den Homer gelesen.’4 Grasping the wording of an oral utterance involves recognizing phonetic words. Suppose Ann has heard Jane say something, and she now quotes, (phonetic) word for (phonetic) word, what she has heard: Jane said, (*) hi niːdz ə breɪk.

procedure and mine is that I prefer to keep the noun ‘meaning’ univocal and to distinguish different kinds of understanding. For a glimpse at a 7th level of understanding, see section 6a.4 below. 4 Lichtenberg (1779 ff), G 187.

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Since the phonetic word /breɪk/ is ambiguous in its own way, Ann does not know by virtue of her perceptual understanding of what she heard whether Jane said ‘He needs a break’ or ‘He needs a brake’.5 Grasping the wording of a written utterance involves recognizing graphematic words. You will not be able to grasp the wording of an inscription in continuous script and to quote it verbatim if you lack even rudimentary knowledge of the language the writer used. Somebody who does not know a word of Latin is unfit to quote an inscription of (†) iactaaleaest (graphematic) word for (graphematic) word, as ‘iacta alea est’.6 Perceptually understanding an utterance, though to a large degree, or even totally, dependent on knowing the language used by the speaker or writer, does not require knowing the meaning of what is uttered. Nobody knows the meaning(s) of all the words of his or her mother tongue, let alone the meaning(s) of all the words of another language. In order to be able to quote correctly what she heard, Ann need not know what (*) means: she might have no idea what/breɪk/, and hence what either ‘break’ or ‘brake’, means. Similarly, in order to be able to quote correctly what he has read in Suetonius, the successful parser need not know what (†) means: perhaps he has to look up the word ‘alea’ in a dictionary. More than that, an utterance can be perceptually understood even if the string of signs that it is an utterance of does not have any meaning. Meaninglessness does not prevent a string of signs from being quotable, so its utterances can be accurately reported in oratio recta. (In this paper, I use ‘meaning’ always as short for ‘linguistic – or conventional, lexico-grammatical – meaning’: the word denotes something that a type-expressions has or lacks.7) Sometimes lack

5 Henceforth I shall not bother the reader with phonetic script, although sometimes it would be very appropriate. 6 (‘The die is cast.’ According to Suetonius, Caesar said this at a turning point of Roman history.) Gazing at the ambiguous inscription ‘collectamexiliopubem’ (Virgil, Aeneid, II, 798) will not enable somebody who knows no word of Latin to distinguish between ‘collectam ex Ilio pubem (people gathered from Troy)’ and ‘collectam exilio pubem (people gathered for exile).’ (The example is M. B. Parkes’ in his Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West, Berkeley 1993, 10–11.) 7 The corresponding use of the verb is exemplified by questions of the form ‘What (if anything) does the type-expression E mean in language L?’ Correct positive answers specify the meaning, or one of the meanings, that E has in L. If used in this way, ‘mean’ is the English counterpart of ‘bedeuten’ in colloquial German – and not of ‘meinen’. The latter predicate applies to persons: ‘She means well (sie meint es gut)’, ‘Whom did she mean (wen meinte sie) when she said ‘you’?’, ‘What did she mean (was meinte sie) with her last remark?’ The ambiguity of ‘to mean’ sometimes

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of meaning is the result of combining meaningful words in ungrammatical ways. One can correctly report, for example, that somebody said (probably in a lecture on linguistics or formal logic), ‘King but where and seems’. One can grasp, and one can fail to grasp, the wording of an utterance of this string of signs. Strictly speaking, one cannot grasp the wording of an (oral or written) utterance that does not consist of utterances of words, but here too one can show firstlevel understanding. One can give a correct direct report of an utterance even if the speaker or writer used pseudo-words or even no words at all. In nonsense poems meaninglessness is the result of combining (lexically) meaningless items in ways that comply with the grammatical rules of a certain language. You can rightly say of somebody who recited one of Christian Morgenstern’s or Lewis Carroll’s poems that he said, ‘Die rote Fingur plaustert’, or ‘The slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.’8 Half of the building blocks of the reported utterances merely sound like utterances of German or English words, for there are no correct answers to the questions ‘What does “Fingur” (“slithy”) mean in German (English)?’. One can give correct direct reports of such utterances but one cannot quote them word for word. Nevertheless, since direct reports of such utterances contain structural analogues of word-for-word quotations, one can say that the reporter shows that she has perceptually understood what she heard or read. Sound poems consist of verses without words, and printed sound poems are scores. One can report utterances of verses of a sound poem accurately in oratio recta, and one can misreport them: ‘Did she say, “quasti basti bu”?’ ‘No, that’s not quite right. Reciting one of Morgenstern’s sound poems, she said, “quasti basti bo”’9. Since verses in sound poems do not contain any words at all, they cannot

beguiles anglophone philosophers into saying things like this: ‘[That] is what he, and his words, literally meant on that occasion’ (Davidson (2005) 120). This is an unintended zeugma: one word is forced into two conflicting services, as in Alexander Pope’s ‘[It was in Hampton Court that Queen Anne did] sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea’ and the German comedian’s ‘Ich heiße Heinz Ehrhardt und Sie willkommen’. 8 ‘Gruselett’ in: Morgenstern, op. cit. 271; ‘Jabberwocky’ in Carroll, Through the Looking Glass. What goes by the name of ‘translation of a nonsense poem’ is better put in the conceptual vicinity of Na­ chdichtungen (free adaptations), i.e. works like Hölderlin’s Nachdichtungen of Sophocles’ tragedies or Karl Kraus’, Stefan George’s and Paul Celan’s Nachdichtungen of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. George actually preferred to call these poems Umdichtungen. (It seems that in English, French, Italian, and Spanish there is no composite noun that structurally corresponds to ‘Nach-’ or ‘Umdichtung’.) 9 ‘Das große Lalulā’ (1905), in: Morgenstern, Alle Galgenlieder, Zürich 1981, 19. If you only look at the page on which it is printed then only the title of the poem provides you with a reason for claiming that it is a German poem, hence there is nothing one could try to translate – apart from the title. In this case, even the title turns out to be resistant if the target language is English: since we do not know what ‘das Lalulā’ denotes, there is no answer to the question whether ‘groß’

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be quoted verbatim. Nevertheless, the structural similarity of their quotation to a word-for-word quotation is close enough to maintain that by giving a direct report of such utterances the hearer manifests first-level understanding of what she heard.

2 Understanding an Utterance of a Sentence as Knowing What That Sentence Can Mean Here Suppose the hearer perceptually understood the speaker’s utterance, so she knows which sequence of sounds he has uttered. Suppose she recognizes that he said, (1) Old men and women were approaching the bank. She understands the utterance in a further respect if she knows that the sentence the speaker has uttered has four different readings in the language he is currently speaking, depending on whether ‘old’ has wide or narrow scope and whether ‘bank’ is used to mark out a river side or a financial institution, but she does not know which meaning that sentence has as used in the speaker’s utterance. Or suppose the hearer is able to quote the speaker as having said (in pre-Euro-times), (2) Last year UBS made a profit of one billion lira in Italy. She knows that in American English this means a profit of 109 lira, whereas in British English it means a profit of 1012 lira, but she does not know which variety of English the speaker is using. Once again, the hearer knows what the sentence used by the speaker could mean in his utterance but, alas!, she does not know what it does mean in his mouth. If the hearer has second-level understanding of an utterance U of an interlingually ambiguous type-sentence S then she knows what S means in U if the speaker is using language L1 and what S means in U if he is using L2. If she has second-level understanding of an utterance U of an intra-lingually ambiguous means big, grand, great, large or tall. Ansten Klev (whose wide-ranging study of logical theories of types includes an excellent ‘taxonomy of nonsense’) exemplifies this kind of meaninglessness by a stanza of the ‘Ursonate’ that the dadaist Kurt Schwitters composed two decades later: Klev (2014) 121. What is untranslatable can still be interpretable: see, for example, Dutt’s sharpeared interpretation of Hugo Ball’s sound poem ‘Totenklage’ of 1916 (whose title is easy to translate: ‘Lament for the Dead’): Hugo­Ball­Almanach. Studien und Texte zu Dada, NF 7 (2016) 88–93.

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type-sentence S in language L, then she knows what S can mean in U. Knowing this, the hearer knows which meanings S has in L. Each of them is determined by one of the meanings of the comprehension-relevant parts of S and by one of the ways the sentence can be built up from these parts. A part x of S is ‘comprehension-relevant’ if, and only if, understanding x serves understanding S. Thus ‘stable’ is a comprehension-relevant part of the sentence ‘They burnt his stable’ whereas ‘stab’, ‘tab’, ‘table’ and ‘able’ are not: understanding any of these words is no aid in understanding that sentence. The idiom ‘kick the bucket’ is a comprehension-relevant part of ‘One day we all have to kick the bucket’ while the words ‘kick’ and ‘bucket’ are not: understanding that sentence does not profit from understanding either of these words.10

3 Understanding an Utterance of a Sentence as Knowing What It Means as Used in That Utterance 3.1 A Question of Selection (For the Most Part) With all due respect for the linguistic competence of the hearer I described, thus far her understanding of what she heard is rather deficient. Having heard an utterance of a sentence that is (intra-lingually or inter-lingually) ambiguous, and being aware of this ambiguity, she must come to a reasonable decision as to which meaning the sentence actually has in U if she is to reach the third level of understanding. If her decision is reasonable, it will be based on the observation of various clues provided by the linguistic and extra-linguistic context of the utterance and on conjectures as to the intentions of the speaker.11 So if the sentence that is used is ambiguous, third-level understanding of the utterance is no longer purely linguistic understanding; in other words: it is no longer understanding in virtue of lexico-grammatical competence alone. The hearer could show that she

10 Understanding them is required when one wants to explain how the phrase may have come to mean die, but one need not know any hypothesis about the origin of the idiom in order to understand it. 11 In most cases that is not much of an endeavour. When President Kennedy said in the vicinity of the Berlin Wall, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, no German, I dare say, was tempted in the least to hear it in the sense of ‘I am a jelly doughnut’. (Incidentally, there would have been no ambiguity if JFK had said, ‘Ich bin Berliner.’)

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has reached this level by giving a meaning­preserving but non­repetitive direct report. If she happens to speak both English and German, she could manifest her third-level understanding of an utterance of (1) by stating: ‘Er hat sinngemäß gesagt: “Alte Männer und alte Frauen näherten sich dem Ufer des Flusses”’, and similarly in the inter-lingual case (2).12 For obvious reasons, translational direct reports of utterances of foreigners are common coin in newspapers. During the (first) European migrant crisis most anglophone journalists quoted Angela Merkel’s mantra in this manner: ‘The German chancellor said, “We will manage”.’13 Third-level understanding is what translators strive for: they try to preserve the meaning a sentence has in a certain oral or written utterance. Reaching this level of understanding is not always a matter of disambiguating. Under certain extraordinary circumstances you properly understand an utterance of an ambiguous sentence only if you know its meanings but do not decide in favour of one meaning as against the other(s). You will have to accomplish this feat when you read the opera anecdote I am about to tell you. Those of you who do not know any German need to be told that ‘weiche’ can be the imperative of a verb, meaning ‘Give way!’, and ‘weiche’ can also be an adjective, meaning ‘soft-boiled’ if applied to eggs. Here is the anecdote14: Meeting some other male members of the ensemble of Wagner’s Ring cycle in the cafeteria of the opera house, the bass-baritone who sings the Wotan makes a bet with his colleagues that during the Saturday performance of The Rhine Gold he will make the contralto who sings the goddess Erda break out in such a fit of laughter that the curtains will have to be dropped. – Saturday evening in the opera house, the 4th scene of The Rhine Gold, one of the musical highlights, Erda’s Warning, has just begun. Erda, immersed in blue light, slowly ascends from the depths of the earth. The wicked bass-baritone alias Wotan has his back turned to the audience, and he whispers to the contralto, ‘Do you prefer the eggs soft-boiled or hard-boiled?’, ‘Isst Du lieber weiche Eier oder harte?’ The next moment the pitiable contralto has to sing fortissimo, majestically pointing at the chief of the Gods, ‘Weiche, Wotan! Weiche!’. To the utmost surprise of the audience and to the desperation of the musicians in the orchestra pit, she bursts into incessant laughter. The conductor has no choice but to stop the orchestra, and the curtains fall.

12 There seems to be no handy English translation of ‘sinngemäß’. The phrase ‘what could be rendered in compliance with the meaning of his words as’, though not a paragon of conciseness, captures its meaning. 13 For translators of novels it is also a matter of course to translate sentences between quotation marks: just imagine what your copy of ‘War and Peace’ would look like if the translator had left all Russian conversations untranslated. (On the other hand, translators of that novel would presumably do well to refrain from translating the French phrases and sentences used by the members of the Russian haute monde in St. Petersburg and Moscow.) 14 Cp. Werner Hennig, Musikeranekdoten, Berlin, 1973.

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As your uptake of this joke shows, sometimes the third-level understanding of an utterance of an ambiguous sentence is not a matter of recognizing which of its alternative readings is the pertinent one, but rather a matter of recognizing that on this occasion both are equally pertinent. In other words, progressing from the second level to the third is not always a matter of disambiguating. Of course, if the sentence used in an utterance is free of intra- and interlingual ambiguity, the hearer’s lexico-grammatical competence enables her to move in one step from level one to level three. We can be sure that Valéry and Wittgenstein understood utterances of ‘Ouvrez cette porte’ and ‘Ich weiß, dass das ein Baum ist’ on this level of understanding, no matter on which occasion they heard them, because they understood the sentences used in those utterances. Before moving further ‘upstairs’, let us pause and ponder a while on the concept of that of which these levels are levels.

3.2 Two Notes on ‘Understanding’ i. The question ‘What did you do this morning after breakfast?’ cannot sensibly be answered by saying ‘During breakfast I had decided to understand a passage in Hamlet, and most of the time I was occupied with understanding that passage. I began understanding it at 8 a.m. When the telephone rang I had to break off in the middle, but I could resume understanding the passage after half an hour. I finished this work before lunch.’ If one were to give this answer, one would exhibit conceptual confusion in each sentence.15 The reason is obvious: understanding is not an activity. On the other hand, a literary scholar might well reply, ‘During breakfast I had decided to interpret a passage in Hamlet, and most of the time I was occupied with interpreting that passage. I began interpreting it at 8 a.m. When the telephone rang I had to break off in the middle, but I could resume interpret­ ing the passage after half an hour. I finished this work before lunch.’ Interpreting, like translating, is an activity. So, understanding and interpreting are categorically as different as knowing and inquiring. Hans-Georg Gadamer falls victim to conceptual confusion when he maintains, ‘Alles Verstehen ist Auslegen.’16 Donald

15 The 2nd sentence should not be confused with ‘I began to understand it at 8 p.m.’, which is impeccable. See my comments on (NU) below. 16 Gadamer (1965) 366. In 1948 a very similar confusion was epitomized in the title of a paper, ‘The Operation called Verstehen’, anthologized in Feigl-&-Brodbeck’s Readings in the Philoso­ phy of Science (1953). But the author of that paper, the sociologist Theodore Abel, had a very good excuse: he wanted to criticize methodological claims many of his German and American

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Davidson quotes this dictum with apparent assent (and in suboptimal translation): ‘All understanding is interpretation’, (better: ‘… is interpreting’).17 He is speaking in propria persona when he says on the next page: ‘Understanding … is always … a matter of interpretation.’ This is more vague, but hardly more plausible, than Gadamer’s straightforward identity claim. Is an Englishman who is sitting at his breakfast table engaged in the activity of interpreting, or does he reap the harvest of such an endeavor, when he understands the BBC weather forecast and his wife’s remark, ‘I need some more coffee’?18 Now, what is understanding if it is not an activity? Wittgenstein pointed out that there are important ‘grammatical’ affinities between ‘understands’, ‘knows’, ‘can’ and ‘is able to’,19 and his foremost commentator has summarized Wittgenstein’s remarks on the concept of understanding by saying, ‘In its dominant use “understanding” signifies an ability.’20 But doesn’t the triumphant assertion (NU) ‘Now I understand!’ show that there is also a non-marginal use of the verb in which it serves to report on an event?21 It does indeed sometimes serve this purpose, but that doesn’t show that on those occasions ‘understand’ does not signify an ability. Suppose you assert, after having rubbed a glass fibre pole with a woolen cloth, (ND) ‘Now it is disposed to attract paper snippets.’ An utterance of (ND) expresses a truth if, and only if, at the time of the utterance an acquisition of a disposition takes place. Similarly, an utterance of (NU) expresses a truth if, and only if, at the time of the utterance there occurs an acquisition of an ability,

colleagues made on behalf of an operation or method they really called Verstehen. In a footnote Abel explains that he uses the German word because the English verb ‘understand’ does not signify an operation or method. The only thing he failed to notice is that the German verb does not do so either. 17 Davidson (2005) 274. If the identity thesis were true his eminently plausible claim that ‘the aim of interpretation is … understanding’ (Davidson (1984) xvii) would be absurd. 18 ‘What is essential to my argument’, Davidson says in (1984) 157, ‘is the idea of an interpreter, someone who understands the utterance of another’ (cp. 125–127, 141–45, 279 on ‘radical interpretation’). The Englishman at the breakfast table is certainly someone who understands etc., but is he an interpreter? Is any old addressee, hearer or eavesdropper who understands what he hears ein Ausleger? While Davidson came to celebrate his affinities to Gadamer, Dummett (2010) ch. 11 is sharply critical of the ‘ruminations at a high level of generality’ in Pt. III of Gadamer (1965). I have discussed a far more felicitous affinity between Gadamer and Davidson in Künne (1990). 19 Wittgenstein (1953) § 150. 20 Peter Hacker (2005) 383. On pp. 357–385 of this book, widely scattered Wittgensteinian remarks on ‘understanding’ are assembled, clarified and turned against various pervasive mis-allocations of the concept of understanding. 21 Cp. Wittgenstein (1953) § 138 note. Dummett is far from making the Gadamer-Davidson mistake mentioned above, but he thinks that sometimes understanding is not an ability but an act: Dummett (1994a) 58 ff., 101 ff., 109, 133, criticized in Hacker (2005) 381 f.

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a transition from incomprehension to comprehension. In both cases the speaker may be mistaken. An ability is something that can be put to test, and the same holds for dispositions. Even if you had an Aha­Erlebnis, even if there really were a distinctive experience ‘as the penny drops’, you might fail the test: perhaps you give a wrong explanation of what you thought you had understood, perhaps you give a false report of the utterance that you flattered yourself to have comprehended.22 For the enquiry I undertake in this paper, the things that are to be understood are linguistic utterances (mostly, of declarative sentences), and the exercises of the ability called understanding that I shall be concerned with are always acts of reporting an utterance that pay heed to different aspects of that utterance. It hardly needs saying that other things than linguistic utterances can be understood, too, and that there are more manifestations of understanding an utterance than reporting it. As we shall see, the kind of report that is an exercise of understanding differs from level to level. So, either there are different ways of understanding an utterance or ‘understanding an utterance’ is (systematically) ambiguous. (If the second disjunct holds, the equivocation is certainly not of the ‘fair-haired/fair-minded’ type: it is not what Aristotle called an ‘equivocation by chance’.23) For the purposes of this paper, I see no need to take a stance on this issue, though the title of this paper is more appropriate if the first disjunct holds.24 ii. On levels (2) and (3) understanding an utterance is a matter of understanding the sentence that is used in the utterance. What is the logical relation between ‘A knows what the sentence S means’ and ‘A understands the sentence S’? Are they equivalent? If one understands a sentence then one knows what it means: that seems to be undeniable. But what about the converse? Does one understand a sentence if one knows what it means? This is questionable. Suppose you want to check a reference in Plato’s Parmenides 137 b 6 and look for that line in a bilingual edition of Plato’s dialogues. You do not understand a single word of Greek, you do not even know the Greek alphabet, but you know from testimony that the

22 Unlike a process or event, an ability is not something that takes place or happens. So, if understanding is an ability it cannot be right to say: ‘Verstehen ist seinem Wesen nach ein wirkungs­ geschichtlicher Vorgang (Understanding is by its essence an event that is part of the history of what is to be understood)’ (Gadamer (1965) 283). 23 ὁμωνυμία ἀπὸ τύχης (Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachaea I/4, 1096 b 26 ff). 24 A stroll on the beach, a climate, a complexion, a food and a person can all be called healthy (Aristotle’s example for systematic ambiguity in Metaphysics IV/2, 1022 b 32 ff), but they do not all fall under one concept that is expressed by the word ‘healthy’.

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translation in that book is very reliable. After some paging up and down you find on opposite pages, conveniently underlined in red, what you were looking for: [G] τὸ μέρος που ὅλου μέρος ἐστίν.

|

[E] every part is part of a whole.

You know what [E] means in your language, and per hypothesin you also know that the meaning of [G] is the same as that of [E]. So, you also know the meaning of [G]. But do you understand this sentence? – Here is a (maximally unpleasant) auditory case that is entirely parallel. Suppose you watch a BBC documentary about Berlin in 1943, and all German words are Greek to you. You hear a minister of unblessed memory ask the audience in the Sportpalast, ‘Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?’, and simultaneously you read in the subtitles ‘Do you want total war?’ Arguing along the same lines as before, one can conclude that you know the meaning of the German sentence, but again the question obtrudes itself: do you really understand that sentence? Well, in a way you do, but in both cases one hesitates to answer affirmatively without reservation. After all, the assumption was that the reader or hearer does not understand a single word of Greek or German. In both cases his knowledge of the meaning of the foreign sentence is due to his knowledge of what a certain sentence of another language means, in this sense it is second-hand knowledge. So, it seems we must impose a restriction on the questionable conditional: if you know what a sentence means you understand it, provided that knowledge is not second-hand.25 In what follows I shall take this restriction as understood.

4 Understanding an Utterance as Knowing Which Propositional Content (If Any) It Has 4.1 Context-sensitivity and Truth-evaluability A hearer can know what a sentence as used in an utterance means, yet in some sense still be in the dark as to what, if anything, the speaker said. Suppose on Monday when Ann was jogging on a lonely forest path somebody were to run past her and utter

25 Objection: The restriction excludes too much. My knowledge of the meaning of any instance of the schema ‘p and q’ is due to my knowledge of the meanings of the connective and of the sentences flanking it, and yet I understand the conjunction. Reply: There is a decisive dis-analogy: the conjunction belongs to the same language as the conjuncts.

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(3) A moment ago, you dropped something She would know at once what the speaker had said and retrace her last steps. But on Tuesday when she hears the utterance of (3) made behind a closed door which she happens to be passing by, she will not know what is being said. This switch from understanding to lack of understanding certainly does not imply that Ann’s linguistic competence suffered damage overnight. The switch is simply due to the fact that on Monday she knew who the addressee of the utterance of (3) was, whereas she did not know this when she heard it uttered on Tuesday. The hearer does not know what propositional content an utterance of (3) has unless she knows what (3) as used in that utterance means and who is denoted on this occasion by the pronoun in (3). More often than not, the sentences we use contain at least one indexical element, an element, that is, whose denotation shifts in a systematic way with certain features of the context of the utterance (its speaker, addressee(s), time and location) while its meaning remains constant. Such elements are personal pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘you’, temporal and spatial adverbs like ‘now’, ‘today’ and ‘here’ and the tempora verbi. If a sentence contains an indexical element, the meaning of that sentence does not determine the propositional content of its utterances. The denotation of demonstratives like ‘this’ and ‘that’ varies with the referential intentions of the speaker. On such intentions depends also, to a large extent, the shifting denotation of demonstrative phrases like ‘that door’, and of context-sensitive definite descriptions like ‘the door’ (in ‘Close the door, please!’): it is only constrained by the meaning of the descriptive parts of those phrases. The shifting denotation of a proper name ‘N.N.’ in a language is only constrained by the property of being called N.N. in that language.26 Sometimes something that is indispensable for identifying the propositional content of an utterance is not explicitly represented therein. Here are two examples. The propositional content of the utterance (4) It is raining depends not only on the time of the utterance that is represented by the tense of the verb, but also on the place where it is made, which is not represented by any element of the sentence.27 The propositional content of the utterance

26 Relativization to a language is required: neither Socrates, the man who drank the hemlock, nor his younger namesake in the Politicus were called ‘Socrates’ by their compatriots. 27 Cp. Bolzano (1837) vol. I, p. 115, Frege (1892) 45, Perry (1986) §§ I-II.

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(5) My husband has had enough depends not only on who said it when, but also on what the relevant husband has had enough of (whisky? medical advice?). Nevertheless, what a speaker says by uttering (4) or (5) can be evaluated in the dimension of truth and falsity, so both utterances must have a propositional content. We can easily express their contents in such a way that everything their truth-value depends on is represented by an element of the sentences used. What you say by uttering (4) is the same as what you would have said if you had uttered in the very same context (4+) It is raining here, and if X is what the speaker thinks her husband had enough of, what she says by uttering (5) is the same as what she would have said if she had uttered (5+) My husband has had enough of this with reference to X.28 (One could call these ‘plus’ sentences semantical completions of two syntactically complete or non-elliptical sentences.) It is the position of the indexical in (4+) and of the demonstrative in (5+) that is quantified when one concludes from what is said in an utterance of (4) or (5) that it is raining some­ where or that the husband of the speaker had had enough of something. One fully knows the propositional content of an utterance of a declarative sentence if, and only if, one knows what that sentence as used on that occasion means and what its denotatively flexible elements (or those of its ‘semantical completion’) denote on that occasion. Ann fully knows the propositional content of the utterance she heard when she was outpaced. When she recalls the jogging episode she can say, ‘The guy who outpaced me said that I had dropped something.’ The that-clause of this so-called ‘indirect speech’ or oratio obliqua report 28 If what is said by (4) or (5) coincides with what is said by (4+) or (5+) respectively, then utterances of the former sentences are not devoid of a (complete) propositional content, as Kent Bach maintains in (2001) 20, 36 f. I agree with Bach that the propositional content of an utterance should be conceived of as corresponding closely to the linguistic vehicle of the utterance, but I think that our ordinary understanding of ‘what is said’ requires that this correspondence should not be restricted to what is explicit articulated in the utterance. Suppose Ann utters (5) in a bar, moving a half-empty bottle of whisky out of her husband’s reach. Bach observes that we would accept the oblique report ‘Ann said that her husband had had enough’, and he takes this observation to confirm his contention that the semantic content of Ann’s utterance is not a (sc. complete) proposition (op. cit. 21–22). But the reporter could go on and claim ‘…, and what she said was true’. So, what Ann said is truth-evaluable. I shall return to the completeness issue in sect. 4.3.

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serves to identify – from the point of view of the hearer – what the speaker said, and the sentence in this clause (‘I had dropped something’) does obviously not have the same meaning as (3), the sentence used by the speaker.29 As we saw above, giving a word-for-word direct report of an utterance of a declarative sentence on the basis of one’s perception manifests perceptual understanding, and giving a sense-preserving but non-repetitive direct report is a manifestation of linguistic understanding. Now we can add a third observation: giving a correct oratio obliqua report manifests propositional understanding. (Henceforth I shall call oratio obliqua reports simply oblique reports.30 I shun the misnomer ‘indirect quotation’ that has become the common coin, from Quine to Kripke. It owes its existence to a mistranslation of Frege’s phrase ‘ungerade Rede’.31)

29 Nor does Ann’s utterance of the embedded sentence in her report express the same proposition as the utterance she recalls. Admittedly, the propositions they express share their predicative part, and they are both about the same person, but I do not regard that as sufficient for propositional identity. The cognitive perspective that person x has on herself and that only she can express by ‘I’ differs from the cognitive perspective other persons have on x. Similarly, if A says on Monday, ‘Tomorrow it will rain in London’, and B correctly reports on Tuesday, ‘Yesterday A said that today it would rain in London’, then the prognostic utterance and the utterance of the sentence embedded in the report express different propositions, for the day concerned is given to the forecaster in a different way than to the reporter. (The words ‘I’ and ‘you’ differ in meaning, and so do ‘tomorrow’ and ‘today’, and because of these differences they are suited for signifying different cognitive perspectives on one and the same person or day. For some Frege-inspired discussion of this issue, see my (2010) 458–59, 475–81.) 30 Lepore et al. in (1997) sects. III, VI.b and (2014) sect. 0 present a battery of examples that show that ‘A said that p’ can be a correct oblique report of U even if the proposition expressed by ‘p’ is not the content of U. Because of oblique reports of utterances of indexical sentences this is true quite independently of their observations, or so I think: see the last fn. So, let me use utterances of non-indexical sentences and their reports as evidence for the contention of Lepore et al. Consider: (1.) Replying to B’s question whether the German city-state Hamburg is in northern Germany A says, ‘All German city-states are in northern Germany.’ B reports, ‘A said that Hamburg is in northern Germany.’ Even ‘A explicitly said that p’ can be a correct oblique report of U although the proposition that p is only a part of, hence not identical with, the propositional content of U. Consider: (2.) A says to B, ‘Jupiter is a far larger planet than Uranus and Neptune.’ B reports, ‘A said that Jupiter is far larger than Uranus.’ In both cases the oblique report is acceptable. But these observations suggest a thesis that Lepore et al. surprisingly do not even mention, let alone discuss: If ‘A explicitly said that p, and that was all A explicitly said on that occasion’ is a correct report of U (and ‘p’ is free of indexical elements), then the content of U is the proposition that p. 31 Frege (1892) 28. For further references see Künne (2015) 140. If Ann quotes Ben’s utterance U of ‘I am sick’ and you quote Ann’s quotational report (Ann said, ‘Ben said, “I am sick”’) you produce something that could reasonably be called an indirect quotation of U, but what you produce is obviously not an oblique report of U.

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4.2 On Saying That Things Are Thus-and-so Understanding on the fourth level is knowing what a speaker has said. The use of ‘saying that p’ and ‘what is said (by a speaker who utters a declarative sentence)’ in this paper is entirely non-technical, and it is meant to converge with its ordinary use. Let me highlight seven features of (what I take to be) the ordinary use of ‘saying that p’. First, only speakers and, by extension, writers can (literally) say that p. Utterances, visible or audible token sentences, type sentences, and propositions do not (literally) say anything. Secondly, if a speaker succeeds in saying something by uttering a declarative sentence, then her utterance can be reported in the style of ‘A said (that) p’. (The ‘that’ is not obligatory.) Such oblique reports are equivalent to ‘What A said was that p’. (Here the ‘that’ cannot be omitted.) Sometimes the linguistic context of an utterance of a word or phrase allows for an oblique report: if I answer your question ‘Who is your favourite violinist?’ by saying ‘David Oistrakh’, your report ‘Herr K. said that D. Oistrakh is his favourite violinist’ would be correct. Thirdly, if A said that p, then what A said is assessable in the dimension of truth and falsity, and if it is true (false), then it is true (false) tout court, not true (false) in a certain language with respect to certain contextual parameters and/or referential intentions Fourthly, an instance of ‘A said that p’ cannot express a truth if the embedded sentence is meaningless in the language of the report.32 (By contrast, a direct report like ‘Ann said, “the mome raths outgrabe”’ might very well express a truth.) Fifthly: An oblique report can pay heed to nuances of the meaning of the sentence used in the reported utterance that Frege and Grice deemed to be irrelevant for the identity of the Gedanke expressed by the utterance or of What-IsSaid by its speaker (in Grice’s technical sense of the phrase ‘what is said’). If Karl said, for example, ‘Ann ist krank, aber fröhlich’, the report ‘He said that Ann is ill but cheerful’ registers a nuance of meaning that is neglected in ‘He said that Ann is ill and cheerful’. If he said ‘Ann führt ihren Köter regelmäßig Gassi’, the report ‘He said that Ann regularly walks her cur’ takes notice of a nuance that is ignored in ‘He said that Ann regularly walks her dog’. If he said, ‘Ann ist leider noch nicht angekommen’, the report ‘He said that Ann had unfortunately not yet arrived’ takes account of two nuances that are disregarded in ‘He said that Ann had not arrived’. According to Frege, such nuances of meaning bear only on the ‘colouration’ (Färbung)’ or ‘illumination (Beleuchtung)’ under which one and the

32 The fact that the oblique report ‘Schopenhauer said that Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is a mousetrap’ is perfectly in order supports the view that so-called category mistakes are not meaningless.

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same Thought appears when one wording rather than another is used to express it. As per Grice, they determine something that is ‘conventionally implicated’ by the sentence the speaker used but do not contribute anything to What-Is-Said.33 By contrast, I take all nuances of the sentence’s meaning that can be captured in an oblique report to contribute to the propositional content of the reported utterance,34 for a reporter who makes the fully accurate report thereby shows that he has understood the utterance better than a reporter who finds the less accurate report optimal.35 So, propositional contents, thus conceived, are more finegrained than Fregean Gedanken and Gricean What-Is-Saids. Admittedly, not all nuances of meaning can be preserved in the that-clause of an oblique report. If the man who outpaced Ann had been German, he might have said either ‘Sie haben gerade etwas fallen gelassen’ or ‘Du hast gerade etwas fallen gelassen’.36 Ann could not capture this difference in the that-clause of her report even if she were to use German to frame her report: ‘Er hat gesagt, dass ich eben etwas fallen gelassen habe’. Nevertheless, this difference can be captured in an oblique report as well, but only in a different position, namely in the main clause: ‘Addressing me as if we were old acquaintances, he said that I had dropped something.’37

33 Frege (1892) 45 + note & (1918) 63 f, cp. Künne (2010) 444–54; Grice (1961) § III & (1989) 25 f, 41, 46, 361 f. 34 This test for what contributes to the content of an utterance is also used in Bach (1999) § 2. He nicknames it, tongue in cheek, ‘IQ Test’ because he employs the notorious misnomer of oblique reports. 35 One might argue: the less accurate report is false, for it is exposed to an objection of the form ‘She did not say that p, – she said that q’. Consider a case where a report ascribes a ‘colouring’ to a saying that was ‘colourless’: If Ann told us, ‘An unarmed black man was shot by a police officer’, she is likely to protest against the report ‘Ann said that an unarmed nigger had been shot by a police officer’ by asserting, ‘No, I didn’t say that’. But I suspect that this ‘not’ is of the same type as that in ‘This pizza is not large, it is gigantic’: it does not express an outright denial, but declares a formulation to be inappropriate. Ann disavows the use of a word that is a racial slur. Cp. my (2010) 567, 610. 36 Cp. Künne (2010) 450 f. 37 Modern English has no morphosyntactic counterparts to the ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ second person pronouns in German and many other languages, which makes for notorious problems when dialogues are to be translated from and into English. Bach (1999) contains no attempt to cope with this contrast, but in §5 of this paper he gives a very illuminating account of a large group of expressions that also fail the oblique-report test. Locutions like ‘confidentially’, ‘in other words’ or ‘to get back to the point’ do not modify the propositional content of an utterance but serve to comment on the utterance: they are ‘vehicles for the performance of second-order speech acts’. [Clearly, this characterization does not apply, and is not meant to apply, to the use of different 2nd pers. pronouns when addressing one’s conversation partner(s).]

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Sixthly, not every utterance of a declarative sentence ‘p’ is a saying ‘that p.’ If Ann utters (6) The lady burst into tears in order to test a microphone, or when she is dreaming, in a state of trance or under general anaesthesia, she does not say that the lady burst into tears. Nor does she say so if she utters (6) when asked ‘What does “Die Dame brach in Tränen aus” mean?’ Nor when teaching the students in her ‘English for Foreigners’ course to pronounce it properly, nor when reading aloud from a Gothic novel.38 In the first group of cases the meaning of (6) is irrelevant for what Anne does, in the second group of cases its meaning matters. Following Austin, we can say that in situations of the first kind she performs a phonetic act and in those of the second kind she performs a phatic act.39 If ‘p’ contains at least one term that can be used to refer to a particular object, then ‘A says that p’ entails ‘A refers to something or somebody and said something about it, her or him’.40 If Ann’s utterance of (6) is only a phonetic act or only a phatic act, the question ‘Which lady (did Ann refer to)?’ does not arise, for she did not refer to anybody, nor did she say anything about anybody. Seventhly, while the gap in ‘A said, “……”’ can be filled by sentences of any grammatical mood, by pro-sentences (‘Yes’, ‘No’) and by a word (‘Rosebud’), the schema ‘A said that ……’ is hospitable only to declarative sentences that are syntactically complete or completable from the linguistic context. (‘Has he done the washing up?’ ‘Well, he says that he has.’) But one gives only a very general characterization of what the speaker did with words if one reports him as having said

38 G. E. Moore asked himself in his commonplace book: do we ‘so use “She said her name was Nancy” that a necess[ary] condition for its truth is that she should not only have used some words which mean that her name was Nancy but should have understood those words’? (Moore (1962) 307.) If we so use it a parrot who has been trained to utter ‘My name is Nancy’ does not say that its name is Nancy. Unlike Moore I don’t hesitate to affirm the antecedent. A year later he wrote: ‘of course, it is not incorrect for a man who murmurs “The curfew tolls the knell [of parting day]” to protest: I wasn’t saying that the curfew tolls, I was only repeating a line of poetry” (360). His English readers didn’t need to be told that the man murmurs the first line of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. 39 Austin (1962) 92. 40 I take referring like saying to be something that speakers or writers do. As Strawson famously wrote, ‘referring is not something an expression does; it is something one can use an expression to do’ [(1950) 326]. By contrast, I take denoting to be something that type-expression ‘do’ – often only with respect to certain context parameters: ‘the Evening Star’ denotes the planet Venus, and with respect to Cain ‘my brother’ denotes Abel.

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that p. Such a report often is, but it need not be, a report of an act of stating or asserting. If you said, ‘I promise to come back’, you have said that you promised to return, but you have not asserted that you promised. You can correct a misunderstanding by remarking: ‘To be sure, I said that p, but I did not assert this, for I said it on stage, – I only made as if to assert that p.’ If you said, ‘I will come back’, you said that you would return. This excludes your utterance’s being an act of asking whether you will return, to be sure. But much is still left open: was it a prediction (and hence an assertion), or a promise, or a threat? Just as a monochrome painting has got to have one colour or another, so somebody’s saying that p has got to be an act of a more specific kind. More on this when we come to the fifth level of understanding.

4.3 Demonstratives and Propositional Content One has full fourth-level understanding of the utterance (7) Das da ist ein Elektroauto if, and only if, one knows what this sentence means and what the speaker demonstratively refers to. Suppose Karl utters (7), making a demonstrative reference to a car he is looking at. In a setting that is most favourable to comprehension, you also see the car to which he referrs, so (if you know a bit of German) you can report: ‘Karl said that this is an electric car.’ But propositional understanding of his utterance (in the sense just explained) does not require that one be in a position to give an oblique report of this (de dicto) kind. If you are told of Karl’s remark and if you know that the car to which he demonstratively referred is your car, then your oblique de re report ‘Karl said of my car that it is an electric car’ shows that you understood his remark on the fourth level. Of course, the that-clause in your report does not identify the (sc. complete) proposition Karl’s utterance expressed, but only the predicable part of that proposition, sc. that it is an electric car, and this is not what he said (full stop) but only what he said of a certain object. But since you also identified that object (in your own way – Karl might not even know that the car he referred to is your car), you have full fourth-level understanding of his utterance. This account has to face objections from opposite directions. According to the first objection, Karl’s utterance of (7) fails to express any proposition. According to the second objection, the proposition expressed by his utterance can only be grasped by persons who perceive the object to which he demonstratively refers. Obj. 1) Kent Bach maintains that the semantic content of an utterance is determined by the meaning of the sentence uttered and, at most, four contextual

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parameters: speaker, addressee(s), time and place of the utterance. Now the meaning of the English demonstrative and those parameters do not determine which object (if any) Karl referred to. Consequently, the Bachian content of his utterance of (7) is only a fragment of a proposition, – it is not truth-evaluable. Nevertheless, Bach identifies this alleged content with what Karl said.41 This identification is not in tune with the standard use of ‘saying that’. If Karl’s attempt to refer demonstratively to an object was successful, he certainly managed to say something that is true or false. Although Bach denies this he is ready to concede that what Karl claimed is truth-evaluable.42 But if Karl’s utterance had assertoric force, what he said is identical with what he claimed: on the ordinary understanding of ‘saying that’, what a speaker claims in an utterance is a fortiori something he says. Furthermore, if one sees the object Karl is pointing to, one can report and evaluate his utterance by saying, ‘Karl said that this is an electric car, and (but) what he said is true (false).’ Bach would agree that the content of the utterance is fully identified in the first conjunct.43 But there is no reason to think that the occurrence of ‘say’ in the second conjunct differs in meaning from that in the first conjunct. (As Occam almost said, meanings are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.44) Finally, if Karl successfully referred to an object, what he said entails that there is at least one e-car. But a fragment of a proposition does not entail anything. So, for more than one reason, what was said by Karl, the content of his utterance, is a (sc. complete) proposition. Obj. 2) Gareth Evans maintains that ‘the hearer can understand the remark [‘This man is F’] only if he perceives the man concerned.’45 If this holds of the hearer of that remark, it holds a fortiori of all other persons. So, Evans puts Karl’s utterance beyond the reach of your understanding if you do not see what Karl sees. Of course, Evans does not mean to claim that third-level, or linguistic, understanding of Karl’s utterance depends on perceiving the car, for that only requires (first-hand) knowledge of the meaning of the (type-) sentence (7). Evans has fourth-level, or propositional, understanding of an utterance in mind. But his restriction on the reach of this understanding is quite arbitrary, I think. Our ordinary notion of understanding is not as demanding as he claims. When I hear my grandfather’s voice on an old tape, saying ‘This hotel is in a 18th century

41 Bach (2001) 15, 23, 33. 42 op. cit. 28. 43 op. cit. 21–22. 44 Grice’s ‘Modified Occam’s Razor’: (1989) 47–49, 51, 65. 45 Evans (1982) 305. Evans quotes in this context a remark in Moore’s commonplace book of 1941/42: ‘the prop[osition] is not understood unless the thing in question is seen’ (Moore (1962) 158). In Dummett (1994a) 57 the quotation is quoted.

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building. I wish you had accompanied me on my journey’, I grasp what he said if I know who said this when to which addressee with reference to which hotel. Equipped with this knowledge I know perfectly well what my grandfather said some decades ago. If I had seen the hotel that in the meantime has been bombed to smithereens, I would have been in a far better position to judge whether the hotel was really in an 18th century building, but I would not have understood his utterance any better.46

4.4 Propositional Understanding, Broadly Conceived Often, we cannot identify from our own perspective what a speaker who uses a denotatively flexible expression refers to, and yet we acquire (what I am ready to call) propositional understanding of his utterance. In such cases the oblique report that manifests propositional understanding is bound to be de re. Suppose Ben left a message on Ann’s answering machine: (8) Today is the last day I could meet you. She has not listened to her answering machine for a week, and she has no idea when Ben made that phone call. Nevertheless, she manifests propositional understanding of his utterance if she gives the following oblique report that is de die: ‘Unfortunately, I do not know on which day Ben made this call, but he said of that day that it was the last day he could have met me.’47 I am ready to classify this as showing fourth-level understanding because (unlike a quotational report) it identifies the denotata of the speaker’s ‘I’ and ‘you’.48

46 Anticipating our next step on the staircase of understanding, I add: The speaker might utter (7) in an attempt to explain the word ‘e-car’ to you: by saying that that is an e-car he intends to convey to the hearer that that is the sort of thing one calls an e­car. You will not understand (nor profit from) an utterance of (7) as an ostensive definition unless you see the object to which the speaker is pointing. 47 If Ann had known that Ben had made the utterance on the preceding day she would have been in a position to identify the proposition his utterance expressed: ‘Ben said that yesterday he would have liked to see me.’ Identifying a proposition P does not require expressing P. See above n. 28. 48 I should insert here a note of warning: even if an oblique report is not structurally de re (‘He said of __ that …’) the that-clause in the report may not single out a proposition. Suppose the gentlemen Tom, Dick and Harry are ministers in Theresa May’s cabinet, and each of them says (when the others are out of ear-shot), ‘I will become the successor of Prime Minister Theresa May.’ Then the following report reveals propositional understanding of those three utterances: (R) ‘Each of

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Propositional understanding (of the utterance of a declarative sentence), in my acceptation of that phrase, does not even require that the utterance express a proposition. The cases I have in mind are cases in which a speaker’s attempt to refer demonstratively to something ‘existentially’ fails. If an utterance suffers from this defect, its content is not a proposition but only a sub-propositional part of a proposition, hence the hearer’s propositional understanding cannot amount to more than grasping that part. This is the belated explanation of the caveat ‘(if any)’ that I inserted in the title of this section. Suppose a man who is suffering from a visual hallucination (let us call him Macbeth) says (9) This is a bloody dagger, accompanying his utterance with a pointing gesture. Then there is no true positive answer to the question, ‘To what does he refer?’ If the hearer were to give an oblique report of this utterance, she would assume that Macbeth has successfully referred to something. But understanding an utterance (and manifesting one’s understanding in an oblique report) does not require sharing the utterer’s errors.49 A hearer who is in her right senses could give a report of Macbeth’s utterance along the following lines: ‘Macbeth tried to refer demonstratively to something and to say of it that it was a bloody dagger.’ In giving this report, the hearer does not commit herself to the assumption that something truth-evaluable was said by Macbeth, but she identifies something that can be said of something, sc. that it is a bloody dagger, and this is something that cannot be true or false, but only true or false of something. It is a part of all propositions in which something is (rightly or wrongly) said to be a bloody dagger. Furthermore, in giving that report the hearer takes into account that the speaker has attempted to refer

them said that he himself would become the successor of PM May’. But those utterances have different propositional contents, and if one of these contents is true, the other two are false. In contrast to the isomorphic that-clause in ‘Tom said that he himself would become etc.’, the thatclause in (R) does not single out one proposition but a predicable part of many propositions: (R) provides us with the information that each of the speakers subsumed quite explicitly himself under the concept x will be the successor of PM May.) 49 In the case of the ‘handy’/’mobile’ confusion mentioned in fn. 58, the hearer should be able, by applying a bit of charity, to supply the propositions the Germans failed to express. In the Macbeth case, such charity would be out of place.

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to something.50 Hence, we can regard the hearer’s report as manifesting (a borderline case of) propositional understanding.51

4.5 What You Wanted to Say but Unfortunately Didn’t If my semantical characterization of Macbeth’s hallucinatory utterance is correct, then a speaker can fail to say something (his utterance may fail to express a proposition) in spite of his conviction that he is saying something.52 A speaker can also say something that differs from what he wanted to say, – the actual propositional content of his utterance may differ from the proposition his utterance was meant to express. In other words, ‘A said that p’ does not entail ‘A meant that p’.53 For two reasons there is no such entailment. The first reason is that speakers sometimes misspeak. This mishap can have two different forms. It can be a slip of the tongue: the speaker does not utter the words he meant to utter. The new professor wanted to start his inaugural address

50 This would not be registered in a translational direct report: ‘M. hat sinngemäß gesagt: ‘Das ist ein blutiger Dolch.’ This report could be correct if M. had uttered the sentence without referring to anything: he knew that his room was bugged by the German secret service, and he wanted to mislead the eavesdroppers. Afterwards, one the German agents made the italicized report. 51 That a sentential utterance lacks a complete propositional content is not always the result of a referential failure. Utterances of wh-questions have no truth-evaluable contents. The incomplete propositional content of an utterance of the interrogative sentence ‘What is your favourite novel?’ is determined by the linguistic meaning of the open sentence ‘x is the favourite novel of y’ and the denotatum of the speaker’s utterance of the addressing pronoun. If a hearer correctly reports an utterance of that interrogative sentence by saying, ‘He asked what my favourite novel is’, she manifests propositional understanding. 52 Gareth Evans (1982) 71–73 maintains: ‘[1] Nothing is said by someone who utters a sentence containing such a term [a demonstrative] unless the term has a referent… [2] To say that nothing has been said in a particular utterance is, quite generally, to say that nothing constitutes understanding the utterance.’ I agree with [1], because there cannot be a true oblique report of such utterances. I disagree with [2]. Of course, Evans did not mean to deny that third-level understanding of Macbeth’s utterance is possible, for that is only knowing what the (type-) sentence used by Macbeth means. But in the sense I explained above, fourth-level understanding is also possible. 53 Grice seems to underwrite this entailment in his (1989) 87. But, as Andreas Kemmerling pointed out to me, this appearance is deceptive. Most of the time Grice uses ‘say’ in a quasi-technical sense, and at this point he only wants to maintain that this entailment holds of ‘say’ in his ‘favoured sense’. If that is his message it would have been less misleading to introduce a new term, e.g. ‘to grisay’, and to stipulate ‘A grisays that p’ entails ‘A means that p’, thereby at least partially fixing its sense. What­Is­Said is a theoretical notion in Grice’s philosophy of language (see Grice (1989) 118, and Kemmerling (2013) 97), and the stipulated entailment shows a glaring difference between What-Is-Said and what is said, or so I shall argue.

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by expressing his respect for his predecessor, but to Sigmund Freud’s delight he did not say ‘Ich bin nicht geeignet (I am not qualified)’ but rather (10) Ich bin nicht geneigt, die Verdienste meines sehr geschätzten Vorgängers zu würdigen. Bad luck for the speaker, but the correct oblique report of his utterance is ‘Professor N.N. said that he was not inclined to pay tribute to the merits of his venerable predecessor’.54 If Reverend Dr. Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford, said in a sermon, not ‘The Lord is a loving shepherd’ but, (11) The Lord is a shoving leopard, a surprised German student at New College would have been right in maintaining, presumably with raised theological eyebrows: ‘Dr. Spooner hat gesagt, dass der Herr ein drängelnder Leopard ist.’55 Sometimes misspeaking has the form of a malapropism: the speaker utters the sentence he wanted to utter, but that sentence does not mean what he takes it to mean.56 Suppose Sally, a British student at the University of Castilla-La Mancha says to her Spanish boyfriend, (12) Estoy embarazada. Thereby she might cause an entirely unintended alarm. What she said is that she was pregnant. But as a matter of fact, she fell victim to a linguistic confusion: understandably enough, Sally thought that ‘embarazada’ in Spanish means the same as ‘embarrassed’ in English. So, what she wanted to say is that she was embarrassed, and that is what she is likely to be as soon as the interlingual trap into which she fell is pointed out to her. The most memorable description of a series of malapropisms is due to Marcel Proust:

54 Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1916), in: A. Mitscherlich et al. (eds.), Freud­Studienausgabe, vol I, Frankfurt/M 1969, 57. 55 I owe this example of a lapsus linguae to Michael Dummett, who used it in conversation and told me of Reverend Spooner. 56 Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals is a counterpart to Frau Stöhr in Thomas Mann’s Zau­ berberg. A good description of the phenomenon can be found in Bolzano (1837) III, 548. Davidson’s better known 1986 treatment of malapropisms, now ch. 7 of his (2005), was soon considered to be mal à propos by his critics (and I happen to agree with them). See below fn. 79.

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The more languages [the Rumanian hotel manager in Balbec] learned, the worse he spoke the old ones. He announced that he had reserved a room for me on the top floor of the hotel… ‘I hope’, he said, ‘that you do not consider this to be a lack of impoliteness. I found it embarrassing to give you a room of which you are unworthy, but I did it because of the noise, for now you will have no other persons above you… You can be at ease, for I shall let the windows be closed, so the casements will not flap. Concerning this I am unbearable.’ These words did not express what he thought, namely that one would always find him unwilling to bear such a state of affairs, but perhaps they expressed well what the room servants thought.57

How did the narrator catch hold of what the manager aimed to convey? He knows French far better than the speaker, and he could easily find plausible intentionalist explanations for the bizarre utterances he heard. Pressed to answer our question, the narrator could argue: ‘The manager’s relation to me is such that I can be sure: he wants to forestall any impression of impoliteness on his part and to show appreciation for me and to stress how much he cares for his guests. But he cannot reasonably believe that his utterances serve these three ends if he means to convey what his words express. But as soon as one assumes that he fell victim to three easily explainable linguistic confusions, his linguistic behaviour turns out to be rational.’ At this point the narrator can rely on his mastery of the language that the manager had only insufficiently mastered, and continue: ‘The manager is afraid that his guest might consider his being accommodated on the top floor as a sign (marque), rather than as a lack (manque), of impoliteness, and he does not mean to insult his guest when he calls him ‘unworthy of the room’, for what he wants to say is that the room is unworthy of so noble a guest.’ The third malapropism is explicitly explained in the inserted passage. (In section 6a.5 below we shall again encounter the hermeneutic presumption of means-ends rationality on which this argument relies.)58

57 au fur et à mesure qu’il apprenait de nouvelles langues, il parlait plus mal les anciennes. Il m’annonça qu’il m’avait logé tout en haut de l’hôtel. «J’espère, dit-il, que vous ne verrez pas là un manque d’impolitesse, j’étais ennuyé de vous donner une chambre dont vous êtes indigne, mais je l’ai fait rapport au bruit, parce que comme cela vous n’aurez personne au-dessus de vous …. Soyez tranquille, je ferai fermer les fenêtres pour qu’elles ne battent pas. Là-dessus je suis intolérable», ces mots n’exprimant pas sa pensée, laquelle était qu’on le trouverait toujours inexorable à ce sujet, mais peut-être bien celle de ses valets d’étage.» (À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. Four, Sodome et Gomorrhe, pt. II, ch. 1, concluding section ‘Les intermittences du coeur’). Of course, Proust does not use the pointing finger of italics that I have employed in my translation. 58 Sometimes a linguistic error has a more drastic consequence. A speaker can mean to say that q although his utterance fails to express any proposition. Consequently, he cannot be reported as having said that q. Many Germans mistakenly think that ‘handy’ in English is not only used as an adjective but also as a noun, and they believe that this allegedly English noun means what ‘Handy’ means in German, namely mobile phone. So, when a German utters the ungrammatical

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The second reason why proposition expressed and proposition intended sometimes drift apart is that something to which the speaker referred in his utterance may not be what he wanted to talk about. Here are three examples for this kind of mishap. Suppose a French visitor has just entered my office in the department. I offer him a cup of coffee, and, casually pointing over my shoulder to the wall behind me, I say, (13) That is a portrait of my favourite philosopher. I wanted to say something about the picture of Bolzano that was hanging there for years, but alas! before my arrival in the morning, my secretary had replaced the lithograph of Bolzano with a photograph of Jacques Derrida. I have no idea what made her play this cruel joke on me, but as a result, the following report is entirely correct: ‘Herr K. said about a portrait of Jacques Derrida, to which he demonstratively referred, that it is a portrait of his favourite philosopher.’59 In the night from Monday to Tuesday, a bestseller writer looks at her watch that reads 11:58 p.m., and she compliments herself by saying, (14) Today I have managed to write three chapters. But alas! her clock is four minutes slow. She wanted to say something true about Monday, but what she did say was something ridiculously false about a day that by then had hardly begun. Suppose on the last day of 1769, Rip van Winkle (the hero of Washington Irving’s eponymous story) wanders into the mountains to escape his wife’s nagging, drinks a lot of Jenever, and falls into a deep Dornröschen slumber that lasts 20 years. When he awakens with a bad headache on the first day of 1790 he heaves a sigh,

string ‘I forgot to take my handy along’ what he means to say is that he forgot to bring his mobile along. (The mistake is forgivable: after all, ‘Handy’ sounds as if it were an English word, – that’s why Germans are fond of using it, and mobiles really are handy.) The ungrammaticality of the string they utter makes a report like ‘Karl said that he forgot to bring his handy along’ ungrammatical as well. See above, sect. 4.2, sub Fourthly. 59 (13) is just a variant of a famous example by David Kaplan: intending to point at a picture of Rudolf Carnap, he said of a picture of Spiro Agnew [Vice President of the U.S. under Nixon] that it pictures one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century (Kaplan (1970) 396 f). Unfortunately, in the year 2017 Kaplan could easily have intensified the painfulness of his referential mishap by unintentionally talking about a picture of the then President of the U.S.

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(15) Yesterday evening I consumed far too much alcohol. He is thoroughly convinced that he has spoken the truth about the last evening of the year 1769, but what he has formulated is a glaring falsehood about the last evening of 1789. My last example is an interpolation into a novel published two centuries ago. Eduard no longer loves his wife Charlotte, but rather her beautiful young niece Ottilie, and his wife Charlotte has fallen in love with the Captain, Eduard’s childhood friend. And yet one night Eduard remains in his wife’s room. Here is the poet’s description of the ensuing event: In the dim lamplight the inward affection, the imagination, immediately maintained their rights over the real; it was Ottilie who was resting in Eduard’s arms; and before Charlotte’s mind the Captain hovered now faintly, now clearly. And so, strangely intermingled, the absent and the present flowed in a sweet enchantment one into the other.60

Now suppose that during the night of this double imaginary adultery Eduard whispered into Charlotte’s ear, (16) I love you. Then what he said would have been false, even though he really loves the person he meant. So, what a speaker wanted to say is not always identical with the actual propositional content of his utterance. It is worth noting that cases like (13) to (16) show that one can sincerely assert something which one does not believe, and consequently, that one need not lie if one asserts what one does not believe.

4.6 Big Steps Upwards Back to my moving-upstairs metaphor of advancing in understanding a linguistic utterance. Of course, if the sentence used in an utterance is free of intra- and inter-lingual ambiguity, and if it contains no denotatively instable elements, then linguistic competence allows the hearer to move in one step from level (1) to level (4). This situation does not obtain very often, but with respect to utterances of sentences like ‘83 is a prime number’, ‘A vixen is a fox’ or ‘Liquid nitrogen freezes

60 Goethe, Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), I/11.

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at –210 °C’, propositional understanding does not go beyond linguistic understanding but coincides with it. (If a mathematical or conceptual truth or a law of nature is the content of an utterance, one can know what was said without knowing when the utterance was made, hence the present tense of the verb is not an indexical element of the sentence that is uttered.61) In such cases, the verbatim direct report can be transformed without much ado into an oblique report if the language of the report is identical with the language of the reported utterance. If the language is English, ‘without much ado’ is an understatement: the sentence quoted in ‘Charles said, “All men are mortal”’ reappears in ‘Charles said (that) all men are mortal’. In some languages, a syntactical transformation is required: ‘Karl sagte: “Jeder Mensch ist sterblich”’ turns into ‘Karl sagte, dass jeder Mensch sterblich ist’ and ‘Carolus dixit, “Homo mortalis est”’ is transformed into ‘Carolus dixit hominem mortalem esse’. Henceforth I shall use the noun ‘content’ as short for ‘propositional content’.

5 Understanding an Utterance as Knowing Which Illocutionary Force (If Any) It Has If I were to say to the host of a conference in Toledo (17) I shall return next year he would effortlessly recognize the content of my utterance. But it is perfectly possible that in a certain respect he does not understand my utterance as an action. Is it the declaration of an intention? If so, is it a promise, or rather a threat? Or is it a prediction? (Knowing my proclivities and soft spots, I am certain that I will be unable to resist the temptation to return as soon as possible to so fabulous a place.) As long as the hearer does not recognize how my saying that p is to be taken, the hearer’s understanding of my utterance is deficient. Austin called the way an utterance is to be taken its illocutionary force: we know which il­ locutio­nary force a saying that p has only in the case where we know what kind of utterance the speaker performs in saying it.62 (Saying with a very harsh voice that 61 Cp. Frege (1918) 64. 62 See Austin (1962) 91, 98 f. He coined the adjective ‘illocutionary’, and the noun in the phrase ‘illocutionary force’ suggests that he uses the adjective in order to generalize Frege’s notion of ‘behauptende Kraft’. (After all, Austin translated Grundlagen der Arithmetik.) Cp. Frege (1918) 62–63 and my commentary in (2010) 423–443. Austin was far from claiming that his elucidation

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p is also a way of saying it, but bellowing is not an illocutionary act: it is not something one can do in saying that p but rather something one can do when saying it, and it would make no sense to say of an utterance that is to be taken as a bellow.) A hearer could show that she has reached level (5) of understanding if she were to replace the ‘illocution-neutral’ report ‘He said that he would come again’ by an ‘illocution­specific’ report like ‘He promised that he would come again’. Both reports report the very same act, but the second one does so in a riskier way, in a manner that is more prone to error. If a speaker promises that p, his saying is a promising: his saying and his giving a promise are not two simultaneous acts like his ascending a staircase and whistling a tune are when he is whistling while ascending. The reservation ‘(if any)’ inserted into the title to this section is called for because an utterance of a declarative sentence that is not a saying that p is eo ipso devoid of illocutionary force.63 The bearers of illocutionary force are utterance acts. At this point it becomes important to pay attention to the act/product ambiguity of the verbal noun ‘utterance’. In the case of writers’ utterances it is easy to distinguish the act of writing from its product, which is an inscription, a visible token of a type expression. In the case of speakers’ utterances one is prone to neglect the difference between the act of speaking and its product, which is a sequence of sounds, an audible token of a type expression, for here the product does not normally survive the act. (Normally not: if the token is recorded and reproduced by some gadget, one can hear it not only at the time at which it is produced.) Strictly speaking, direct and oblique reports are reports of deeds of a speaker or writer, identified via their products or their contents. Sometimes the speaker or writer himself uses a verb that, in virtue of its meaning, applies only to utterances with a special illocutionary force. I could take a deeper breath and make an uncalled-for promise by saying, (18) I promise to return next year, thereby making what Austin called an explicit performative utterance.64 But not every utterance beginning with the prologue ‘I promise’ is a promise, so a hearer

via ‘in saying …’ together with his open list of examples amount to a definition of ‘illocutionary act’: ‘I am not suggesting that this is a clearly defined class by any means’ (99). Mark Siebel (2002) has scrutinized various attempts at defining the notion, but found them all wanting. But then, there are ever so many very useful notions we cannot define (recall Wittgenstein on ‘game’), and for all I know, there has never been any doubt about how to continue Austin’s open list. 63 Recall the examples in section 4.2 sub (v). 64 Austin (1961) 241 f.

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who knows the meaning of the prologue of my utterance does not thereby know its illocutionary force. Somebody who heard me utter (18) may very well be wrong when she reports, ‘Herr K. promised to come back’. After all, if somebody were to ask me, ‘What does “Ich verspreche, dass ich nächstes Jahr wiederkommen werde” mean in English?’, I would use the very same English sentence without promising anything to anyone. Perhaps I am reading aloud from a letter or a novel when I utter (18). If I were to use that sentence as actor on stage, I would not give a promise to anyone but rather act as if I were doing so.65 So even if the sentence that was used has the performative prologue, grasping the meaning of that sentence as used in the utterance does not amount to grasping the illocutionary force of the utterance, for it might not have any. An utterance does not have an illocutionary force of kind f unless the speaker has a f-specific intentional profile. Consider Reinach’s and Searle’s favourite example, the act of promising. If A, in saying that she will do X (or in saying that she promises to do X), gives B the promise to do X, then (1) A intends to convey to B that she is able to do X and that she is willing to do X, and (2) A believes that it would be better for B if she were to do X than if she were to abstain from doing X. (A’s promise is void if A is not able to do X, it is insincere if A is not really willing to do X, and it is unwelcome if B prefers A to abstain from doing X.)66 If B is right in understanding A’s saying that p as a promise, she knows, or is at least in a position to know, that A has this intentional profile. Obviously, it takes more to (be in a position to) have this knowledge than just to know what ‘(I promise that) I will do X’ means. Misunderstanding an utterance on the fifth level can have three different forms. First, it can consist in taking an utterance to have one illocutionary force while it really has another one: in taking a prediction for a threat, for example. Secondly, it can consist in taking an utterance which is devoid of illocutionary force to be a bearer of such a force. Suppose an actress on stage says, ‘Nobody is ready to help me.’ She does not, in saying that nobody is ready to help her, complain about this state of affairs, nor does she perform any other illocutionary

65 Austin was very careless when he wrote in (1961) 242, my italics: ‘if I say “He promises” or … “I promised”, I … report on an act of promising, that is to say, an act of using this formula “I promise”.’ A promise can be made by using a sentence without this performatory prefix, and prefixing it to a sentence does not ensure that a promise is made. 66 Unlike Searle I think that even a promise that is void or insincere or unwelcome is a promise: contrast Searle (1965) & (1969) ch. 3. Husserl’s pupil Adolf Reinach has shown in his theory of social acts that (1) and (2) together are not sufficient for an act’s being a promise: somebody might fulfil these conditions and yet refuse to promise to do X, for by promising one incurs an obligation, and that’s something the speaker might shy away from. See Reinach (1913) 156 f.

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act. She plays the role of a woman who is complaining, and in so doing she acts as if she were herself complaining. I use ‘x acts as if to ϕ’ as a stylistic variant of ‘x pretends to ϕ’, and I take pretending not to involve the intention to deceive. By definition, x pretends to ϕ if, and only if, x tries to bring about the following situation: x appears to ϕ, although x doesn’t ϕ.67 Pretending to complain is not merely a phatic act, since the mimesis of the illocutionary act of ϕ-ing is a more demanding performance than ϕ-ing. (If this were not so there would be no demand for drama schools.) Now, if a Don Quixote is in the audience when the actress plays a woman who is complaining about the brutality of her husband, he might jump on the stage and offer her his help.68 He would deserve praise for his chivalry but not for his comprehension. Thirdly, misunderstanding on level (5) can also consist in the reverse error: regarding an utterance which has illocutionary force as being devoid of it. Kierkegaard’s description of such a misunderstanding alludes to a fire disaster in Saint Petersburg: ‘In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious.’69 Some minutes later they had nothing to laugh about anymore. Unlike the notion of illocutionary acts, Austin’s category of perlocution­ ary acts is irrelevant for an account of understanding utterances. If one knows which perlocutionary character an utterance has, then one knows what the speaker actually achieved by saying what he said: one knows for example that he managed to convince, or to intimidate, the hearer.70 One can understand an utterance perfectly without knowing whether it has such an effect. Suppose somebody is intimidated by a threat. If one does not recognize that the utterance is a threat, hence an attempt to intimidate somebody, one’s understanding of the utterance is deficient, for one has missed its illocutionary force. But if one does not recognize that the threat intimidated the addressee, hence that an attempt to intimidate was successful, one’s understanding of the utterance is not impaired. One just misses a causal feature of the utterance that often cannot be recognized at the time when it is made. Henceforth I shall use ‘force’ as short for ‘illocutionary force’.71

67 If you were to ask me I could right now pretend to be drunk without thereby intending to deceive anyone about what’s the matter with me. Cp. Anscombe (1958) 85 f. 68 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Bk. IX, Chapters. 8–9. 69 Søren Kierkegaard, Entweder / Oder (1843), vol. 1, First Diapsalmata, Köln 1960, 40, cp. 944 f. 70 Or: to alarm, amuse, becalm, bore, comfort, dissuade, embarrass, encourage, impress, insult, persuade or upset the hearer. 71 As Dummett and Davidson do most of the time.

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6.1 Understanding an Utterance as Knowing What (If Anything) Its Mediate Propositional Content Is 6.1.1 Conveying Something That Is Less Trivial Than What Is Said Sometimes our understanding of an utterance is still deficient even though we know its content and its force. Let me quote a passage from the magnum opus of my favourite philosopher, which can help us to characterize understanding on level (6a). It is an excerpt from the section on analyticity in Bolzano’s Wissen­ schaftslehre: People say frequently ‘Whatever is bad is bad’; taken literally (seinem Buchstaben nach, according to the letter), this is indeed an empty tautology. Yet, what one actually thinks when using these words and what one also intends to convey (zu verstehen geben will) by means of them is presumably something quite different, and it very much varies under different circumstances. One speaker may intend to insinuate (andeuten wollen) by using these words that he is not prepared to refrain from calling bad what he deems to be bad. Somebody else may have the intention (die Absicht haben) to call to our attention that it is a vain effort to whitewash and euphemize the bad, for sooner or later it will be recognized for what it is. Likewise, … ‘Even a learned man is a man’ is not analytical if one interprets (auslegen) it as having the sense (Sinn) that is required for finding it useful (nützlich) to say this.[72] For then one interprets it as amounting to ‘A learned man is fallible.’ … Similarly, Pilate’s saying ‘ὃ γέγραφα, γέγραφα [what I have written I have written]’ was not a tautology, but had the sense ‘What I have written, I will not change.’73

Consider the last example that Bolzano took from the Gospel of John (19:22). The High Priests had complained to the Roman prefect about the trilingual label on the cross. ‘Don’t write, “Jesus the Nazarene, the King of the Jews” but rather “who claimed to be the King of the Jews”.’ Bolzano quotes Pilate’s answer: (19) What I have written, I have written. What his utterance (of the Latin counterpart) of (19) expresses is a logical truism.74 If the High Priests had thought that an excessively plain logical truth

72 Cp. Bolzano (1837) III, 547: ‘unnütze (useless) Tautologien’. 73 Bolzano (1837) II, 85; translation corrected. 74 When Bolzano calls this truth a tautology he uses this term like everybody else before the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – in the sense that had been introduced in ancient treatises on rhetoric and that covers only a subset of logical truths: a ταὐτολογία is a sentence of the form ‘a is (identical with) a’, ‘Whatever is F is F’ or ‘If p then p’. The name alludes to the

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was what the Roman prefect intended to convey to them, they would have had reason to wonder, ‘But that goes without saying. Why on earth does he tell us this?’ They would not have seen the point (Witz) of his utterance, they would not have succeeded in making sense of his linguistic action. But of course, they had no problem to see the point of Pilate’s reply. They could show that they had reached the sixth level of understanding by giving the following oblique report of his utterance: ‘By saying that he had written what he had written, the prefect intended to convey to us that he was not prepared to alter the inscription on the cross.’ To put it schematically, by saying one thing, namely that p, the speaker intends to convey another thing, namely that q. The proposition singled out by the first that-clause is what I call the immediate content of the utterance. The proposition singled out by the second that-clause is its mediate content. I have rendered Bolzano’s phrase ‘zu verstehen geben wollen’75 not by ‘wanting (or wishing) to convey’ but by ‘intending to convey’.76 (In the indented passage Bolzano himself uses ‘wollen’ and ‘die Absicht haben’ interchangeably.) One can want, or have the wish, to reach a certain goal without having the slightest reason to believe that one can reach it, but one cannot have the intention of reaching a goal unless one has reason to believe that one can succeed. This applies to the cases with which we are occupied: one cannot have the intention to convey something unless one has reason to believe that one’s utterance will be understood in this way. By saying ‘There is glory for you!’ Humpty Dumpty could not have intended to convey to Alice that he had confronted her with ‘a nice knock-down argument’, since (before he had put forward his stipulative definition of ‘glory’) he had not the slightest reason to believe that she would understand his utterance in this way. But in the course of a philosophical discussion in which chapter VI of ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ is repeatedly alluded to, a sufficiently arrogant

fact that in such sentences the same is said (better: either denoted or predicated or expressed) twice. (Quintilian was not at his best when he defined a tautology as ‘eiusdem verbi aut sermonis iteratio (a repetition of the same word or sequence of words [sc. within the same sentence])’: Quintilianus (c. 90) VIII.3, 50. Presumably he would not want to classify ‘Narcissus likes the look of Narcissus’ and ‘I did not see him, and you did not see him either’ as tautologies.) 75 In what follows I shall stick to Bolzano’s ordinary-language phrase ‘zu verstehen geben wol­ len’. (It is a pity that its translation as ‘intending to convey’ does not contain the word ‘understand’.) I prefer this phrase to Grice’s verb ‘implicate’, which is a theoretical term. It is highly problematic to appeal to intuitions as guides for our use of this theoretical term, and in Grice’s papers this disadvantage is not compensated for by a clear explanation. But many of his examples of what is ‘conversationally implicated’ are also examples of what a speaker did not say but intended to convey. 76 I shall use ‘aim to convey’ and ‘mean to convey’ as stylistic variants of ‘intend to convey’.

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participant can use Humpty Dumpty’s words to convey to his opponents that he had confronted them with a nice knock-down argument.77 Before we move on, a note of caution has to be entered. As we saw in section 4.5 above, speakers sometimes inadvertently say things they did not intend to say. Now recall Proust’s hotel manager or the simpler example (12), the case of the British student in Toledo who misunderstood the word ‘embarazada’: it might seem to be the case that by saying that she was pregnant she intended to convey that she was embarrassed. But the appearance is deceptive. The verb ‘intend’ has wide scope in such a report: the speaker intends (by saying that p to convey that q).78 This entails that the speaker intends to say that p. This condition is not fulfilled if the speaker unwittingly says that p. One may reasonably wonder whether the content of an utterance that I have called mediate does not simply nullify what I’ve called its immediate content. If that were the case, my distinction would lose its point, of course. But I don’t think that this is the case, and neither does Bolzano. Just have a look at his comment on the first example: he does not claim that ‘Whatever is bad is bad’ is not an empty tautology.79 Wittgenstein seems to deny this: ‘“War is war!”,’ he wrote, appending an exclamation mark to the sentence, ‘is not an example of the law of identity.’80 Let us briefly ponder over this remark. First a somewhat pedantic comment. What Wittgenstein says here is correct in a way that he did not intend. Since the word ‘war’ is not a singular term, ‘War is war’ does not even have the right form

77 See Keith Donnellan (1968) 211–213, taken up in Davidson (2005) 97, 147. Unfortunately, Davidson is far from acknowledging the wisdom of Alice’s rejoinder ‘But “glory” doesn’t mean a nice knock­down argument’. He maintains (to complete an earlier quotation), ‘Understanding, to my mind, is always a matter not only of interpreting but of translating [sc. from the speaker’s current idiolect into the hearer’s current idiolect], since we can never assume we mean the same things by our words that our partners in discussion mean’ (op. cit. 275). I would have thought that we always assume this until confronted with proof to the contrary. In my attempt at explaining how Proust’s narrator succeeded in catching hold of what the Rumanian hotel manager was aiming to convey (see above sect. 4.5) the narrator’s mastery of the language that the manager vainly tried to speak properly played a key role. Generally, the reader can see from the importance I assign to levels (2) and (3) of understanding and the essential role the concept of a shared language plays on all higher levels that I find the denigration of this concept in Davidson (2005) chpts. 7, 8, 10 & 12 entirely undeserved. I have nothing to add to the arguments against this denigration in Dummett (1986), (1994b) & (2007a, c) and Kemmerling (1993) & (2017) 377–384. 78 If you intend to please her by playing a mazurka, you must intend to play a mazurka. Quite generally, one cannot intend to ϕ by ψ-ing without intending to ψ. 79 Nor would he deny that ‘Business is business’, ‘Versprochen ist versprochen’, ‘War is war’ and ‘Que será, será / Whatever will be will be’ (Doris Day) are tautologies. Note the ‘presumably’ in Bolzano’s comment on the first example and the if-clause in his comment on the penultimate example. 80 Wittgenstein (1984) 564. This example is also mentioned in Grice (1989) 33.

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for being an example of what Frege and Russell call the Law of Identity, ‘For all x, x = x’. (‘War is identical with war’ is simply gibberish.) In the Frege-Russell framework it can only be regarded as an example of a law in second-order predicate logic, ‘For all F, for all x, if Fx then Fx’. (‘A war is a war’ looks like an acceptable paraphrase.) Enough of this. What about Wittgenstein’s punctuation mark? In logic no axiom or theorem ends with an exclamation mark. Miss Anscombe did not preserve it in her translation,81 but I think Wittgenstein places this sign with forethought. By using the exclamation mark, he gives us a hint that he is talking about ‘War is war’ as a hackneyed saying that is all too commonly used for shrugging off military atrocities: those who protest when they hear a military man or a politician use this phrase do not express dissatisfaction with a logical truism.82 That is certainly correct, but I do not think that it is a good reason for denying that utterances of the English sentence ‘War is war’ express a logical truism. To be sure, in our day-to-day transactions we generally expect each other to refrain from saying what goes without saying, and if somebody seems to ignore this ban, we tend to assume that what he says does not coincide with what he wants to tell us.83 But sometimes it is absolutely appropriate to say something that goes without saying. One does so, for example, when one applies the rule of Universal Instantiation to the logical law that everything is what it is, saying, ‘Therefore, what is bad is bad, what is yellow is yellow, whatever I have written I have written, whatever I have drunk I have drunk, a rose is a rose, war is war.’ If one utters these six sentences as conclusions of a deductive argument, each of these utterances has a logical truism for its content, and none of them is meant to convey anything but 81 Wittgenstein (1953) 221. 82 It’s not that only military men and politicians make apologetic use of this tautology. In the last week of August 1914 the German army had burnt down the precious library of the university of Louvain. Subsequently, Romain Rolland, a great admirer of German literature and music, published in the Journal de Genève (02.09.1914) a ‘Lettre ouverte à Gerhart Hauptmann’, the German Nobel laureate in Literature of 1912: ‘Au nom de notre Europe, je vous adjure de protester… contre ce crime.’ The Vossische Zeitung published both a German translation of Rolland’s letter and Hauptmann’s reply (Berlin, 10.09.1914, evening edition). In this reply Roland was told, ‘Krieg ist Krieg. Sie mögen sich über den Krieg beklagen, aber nicht über Dinge wundern, die von diesem Elementarereignis unzertrennlich sind. (War is war. You may complain about the war but you should not be surprised at things that are not separable from this elementary event.).’ Didn’t Rolland express moral outrage rather than surprise? (When the Swedish Academy decided in 1915 to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Rolland, the literary quality of his 10-volume novel on a German composer who went to Paris as a young man may not have been the crucial reason. Or so one would like to think.) 83 When a trade unionist says to a miner ‘If you are sick you are sick’, the addressee will be prone to think that the unionist intends to convey to him that he should stay at home if he feels sick.

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those logical truisms. So, I propose to distinguish in the case of cynical utterances of ‘War is war’ both immediate and mediate content. Their ‘canonical’ report would run as follows: ‘By saying that war is war the speaker intends to convey that in times of war one has to put up with these things’, where the indexical phrase is used to refer to some event that was mentioned before. The first thatclause singles out the immediate content of cynical utterances of the tautology, a content that they share with all utterances of that English sentence, while the second that-clause singles out their mediate contents that vary from context to context and give them their repellent point. In the examples Bolzano presents the immediate content is a trivial logical truth. That’s not surprising at all, for his main topic in this section of his Wissen­ schaftslehre is the notion of analyticity. His second example fits Kant’s account of analyticity (which he had criticized on the preceding pages) like a glove. Remaining in the realm of logically determinate propositions, let us briefly look at the reverse side of the coin. A foreman shouts at the other workers who show signs of fatigue, (20) Enough isn’t enough. The immediate content of his utterance is a logical falsism – the mediate content can be expressed by the sentence ‘You think you have done enough for today, but it isn’t enough at all’, and that content may very well be true. In the first stanza of her poem ‘Mit leichtem Gepäck (Traveling light)’ Hilde Domin conjoins a tautology and a blatant contradiction, and this conjunction serves as a reason for the warning with which the poem begins: Gewöhn dich nicht. Du darfst dich nicht gewöhnen. Eine Rose ist eine Rose. Aber ein Heim ist kein Heim

(‘Don’t get used to it./You must not get used to it./A rose is a rose./But a home/is not a home.’) Why are we cautioned against settling down, against getting used to a place as our home? The answer follows, I think. By saying that a rose is a rose whereas a home isn’t a home the ‘speaker’ intends to convey to us: while a rose will remain a rose as long as it exists, one’s home will not remain one’s home as long as one lives – especially if one is a Jewish expatriate.84

84 This poem appeared 1962 in print, shortly after Hilde Domin, née Löwenstein had returned to Germany from the Dominican Republic, the last station of an odyssey that had begun three decades

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Some sentences are such that you cannot know their meaning without knowing that all utterances of them express truths, although these truisms are not logical truths. Consider (21) I am here. If the adverb is not used deictically (as when you try to identify your location on a map), each utterance expresses a truth, but since the speaker might as well have been somewhere else, these truths are not necessary, let alone logical truths (if  one takes being true in all possible worlds to be a conditio sine qua non of being a logical truth).85 But you can use (21) in the woods in order to convey to the hearer in which direction he can find you, or in the class-room to ask your hearers to turn their attention to you. On the other hand, when your partner takes a telephone call which you do not want to answer, you can, by saying (22) I am not here, convey to her that she should tell the caller that you are not at home. You could also use (22) at a meeting of a committee to convey to the other members that they should proceed as if you were not present. – The Cartesian counterpart of (21), ‘I exist’, reminds us of the fact that a philosopher can use a sentence whose utterances express an indexical truism without aiming to convey more than what its utterances express. Of course, we try to reach the sixth level of understanding not only when confronted with conceptual truisms or falsisms. Suppose Ann and Ben plan to go to a party this evening. After some rummaging around in her well-stocked wardrobe, Ann looks at Ben with desperation and exclaims, (23) I have nothing to put on.86 It is obvious to both that what she says is false. So, what she seeks to convey to Ben cannot coincide with what she says, and the oblique report ‘She said that she

before. When reading the parenthetical ‘perhaps’ in the last two lines of the poem, if not before, the reader comes to think of the most extreme case of homelessness that speakers of the poet’s language had inflicted upon European Jews: ‘and, perhaps, / you will be allowed to have a grave (und, viel­ leicht, / ein Grab)’. H.D., Sämtliche Gedichte, eds. N. Herweg & M. Reinhold, Frankfurt/M 2009, 101. 85 Cp. Kaplan (1979) 402. 86 I have borrowed this example from Kemmerling (2003) 176–181, where it receives a very elaborate Gricean treatment.

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had nothing to put on’ would be clearly inappropriate. An appropriate report of Ann’s utterance could run as follows: ‘By saying that she had nothing to put on, Ann intended to convey that she had nothing to put on for the party she planned to go to.’ It is easy to imagine a situation in which the less verbose report ‘Ann said that she had nothing to put on’ would be entirely apposite. On a very hot summer day Ann is walking by a lake. There seem to be no other people around, so she takes off her clothes, hides them under a bush and jumps into the water. When she returns she realizes that somebody has stolen her clothes, and she exclaims with a start, ‘I have nothing to put on’. The effect of the italicized ‘addition’ that the report makes to the sentence used in front of the wardrobe is vastly different from the effect of the ‘addition’ of an indexical or of a demonstrative phrase to (4) ‘It is raining’ and (5) ‘He has had enough’. If the context is kept constant, (4+) and (5+) serve to express the very same content as do (4) and (5), – the only difference is that in the elongated sentences everything upon which the truth-value of what is said depends is explicitly represented. Moreover, only linguistic knowledge is needed to supply an annex that is always appropriate. By contrast, the result of the ‘addition’ to (23) is a sentence that serves to express what is conveyed by the utterance of (23) in the situation I described, and that is not the same as what is said in that utterance. In this case, linguistic knowledge does not suffice to supply an annex that is apposite in a given situation.87 Up to now all my examples for understanding on the sixth level, beginning with Pilate’s rebuffing of the High Priests, have shared the following feature: what the speaker said is so obviously true or so patently false (be it conceptually or because of the circumstances of the utterance) that his linguistic behaviour would appear foolish if what he meant to convey were identical with what he said. In the philosophical literature, Plato’s Socrates may well have been the first who tried to cope with this kind of situation. In the course of his (rather capricious) interpretation of a poem by Simonides he says about a verse he has just quoted: the poet ‘does not say this as if he had said, “Whatever is white is unmixed with black”, for that would be ridiculous (γελοῖον) in many respects. Rather, he wants to say that ……’88 Presumably Socrates would also endorse the analogous claim in which the paradigmatic truism is replaced by the corresponding falsism ‘Whatever is white is mixed with black’. If so, his hermeneutic maxim seems to be this: a speaker or writer should not be taken as intending

87 Bach calls additions of the former kind ‘completions’, those of the latter kind ‘expansions’: (2001) 19 f. 88 Plato, Protagoras 346 D.

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to convey something that is obviously true or obviously false if taking him this way were to make his linguistic behaviour appear pointless. Now it cannot be excluded that occasionally a person’s linguistic behaviour not only appears to be foolish, but really is foolish. So, we’d better phrase the maxim of detrivialization as follows: (Maxim) One should try to avoid as far as possible to take a speaker or writer as intending to convey something that is obviously true or obviously false if taking him this way were to make his speech act appear unreasonable.

All hearers of utterances of (19) – (23) in the scenarios I have described could have appealed to this maxim if they had been asked to justify why they did not identify what the speaker said with what he or she intended to convey. As for the if-clause, recall that the linguistic behaviour of somebody who repeatedly applies Universal Instantiation to ‘Everything is what it is’ or that of Descartes who repeatedly asserts ‘Ego sum, ego existo’ is far from being unreasonable.

6.1.2 Generally, Conveying More Than What Is Said For a very plain reason the maxim of detrivialization is not applicable to the cases that I shall now consider: the utterances that are here to be understood require moving to the sixth level, but they do not express excessively plain truths or ludicrous falsehoods. We will have to look for a more general maxim. With my first example89 I return to the genre of musicians’ anecdotes. In 1835 Franz Liszt worked for some months as honorary piano professor at the newly founded Conservatoire de musique de Genève where he had only female students. At the end of each term all teachers had to write reports about the achievements of their students, short evaluations that could help the governing body to decide which student, if any, was worthy of an award. In some cases, Liszt thought that a one-liner would do: (24) Jenny Gambini. Beautiful Eyes. When the members of the governing body read this, they had a choice. They could either assume that this teacher refused to be helpful – after all, what he wrote was compatible both with Jenny’s being very good as a pianist and with

89 It is a real-life counterpart of an example Grice used in (1989) 33.

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Jenny’s being very bad as a pianist – or they could assume that he used (24) to inform them about Jenny’s pianistic accomplishments. They had no reason for the former assumption, so they adopted the latter. Now, the one-liner could not possibly serve the purpose of providing them with useful information unless it was meant to convey that nothing positive can be said about Jenny as a pianist. Hence, under the assumption that Liszt is co-operative, the readers of his oneliner would be right to maintain: By saying that Jenny Gambini has beautiful eyes, Liszt intends to convey more than that, namely that as a pianist she has no merits whatsoever. In the following examples the sentence used by the speaker is customarily employed to convey something that differs from what its utterances express. What is said in an utterance of a sentence of the form (25) a looks like an F is compatible with a’s being an F and with a’s not being an F. By contrast, what is said in an utterance of an instance of ‘a merely looks like an F’ entails that a is not an F. Now if ‘a looks like an F’ is uttered with assertoric force, hearers often tend to assume that the speaker is ready to continue, ‘but a is not really an F’. After all, if the speaker thinks that a really is an F, why should he make the weaker statement? So, in many contexts hearers are prone to assume that by saying that a looks like an F the speaker aims to convey more than that, namely that a merely looks like an F.90 Let us see how Groucho Marx once showed, firstly, that ‘a looks like an F’ is commonly used to convey that a merely looks like an F (hence that a isn’t really an F), and secondly, that in spite of this common practice an utterance of a ‘looks like’ sentence can be prevented from conveying this, so it really is a mediate content. Groucho tells an audience91: ‘Gentlemen, Chicoleni here may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.’ I hope I will be forgiven if I do now what is generally a very bad idea: explain a joke. After ‘but don’t let that fool you’ we all expect the continuation: ‘He isn’t an idiot at all’. This shows that the preceding sentences are indeed customarily used to convey this. Nevertheless, Groucho’s sequence of utterances is

90 This depends on the context. If one doctor says to another, looking at the x-ray: ‘This looks like cancer’, his colleague would not expect him to go on to say ‘But it isn’t’ but rather ‘But is it really?’ Here the ‘looks’ sentence serves the speaker to ask for his hearer’s opinion. 91 Duck Soup [Die Marx Brothers im Krieg], USA 1933.

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consistent because the immediate content of his ‘looks’ talk is compatible with appearances’ not being deceptive.92 The next pair of cases has received the attention of novelists and of philosophers of language. What an utterance of (26) Thilda and Christian will soon get married expresses is compatible with their getting married to each other and with both getting married but not to each other. But if a term ‘R’ signifies a symmetric relation, it is common practice to aim at conveying that A is R to B by saying that A and B are R.93 So, somebody who utters (26) can reasonably expect that the hearer will take him as intending to convey more than that Thilda and Christian will soon get married to somebody, namely that they will soon get married to each other. After all, the hearer is prone to think: if the speaker had not aimed to convey this, he would have been less laconic and would have forestalled an imminent misunderstanding, – he would have said something to the effect that soon a double wedding will take place. Furthermore, if one were to hear an utterance of (26) at Christian’s and Thilda’s engagement party, one would be certain that the speaker is announcing that they will soon get married to each other. Sentences in which ‘and’ is flanked by two names are often contracted conjunctions: utterances of (α) ‘Goethe and Schiller are poets’ express the same proposition as the unfolded conjunction (β) ‘Goethe is a poet, and Schiller is a poet’ if the same two celebrities are referred to. Formulation (β) makes it perspicuous why ‘Goethe is a poet’ follows from (α). Of course, sentences in which ‘and’ is flanked by two names are not always contracted conjunctions, – sometimes the ‘and’ is an operator on names that forms the name of a pair (in the ordinary mereological sense of this term): ‘Goethe and Schiller wrote the Xenien’ does certainly not imply ‘Goethe wrote the Xenien’.94 Now (26) does imply ‘Thilda will soon get married’, and this becomes perspicuous if we put (26) into the semantical neighbourhood of (α)95: what is said by the speaker, the immediate content of his

92 Grice has shown how important it is for the philosophy of perception to pay heed to the distinction between immediate and mediate content of utterances of sentences of the type ‘This looks red to me’: cp. Grice (1989) 224–47. 93 The ‘and’ style of ascribing relations has an economic advantage: by saying ‘A, B, C, D and E are parallel’ we spare ourselves the tedium of formulating a conjunction of 20 two-place predications. 94 In the preceding lines I have echoed Frege (1914) 246. 95 Examples of the form ‘A and B are the same’ suffice to show that this does not hold for all sentences of the form ‘A and B are R’ in which ‘R’ signifies a symmetric relation.

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utterance, is the compound proposition (Gedankengefüge) that Thilda will soon get married (to somebody) and Christian will soon get married (to somebody). As the following quotations from two great novels show, a speaker can see to it that his utterance of a sentence of the form ‘A and B are R’ in which ‘R’ signifies a symmetric relation, does not have the mediate content that A is R to B: (T.M.) Schließlich sagte [Christian] zu seiner armen Kusine, die […] inmitten der Glücklichen saß: ‘Na, Thilda, nun heiraten wir auch bald; das heißt … jeder für sich!’ (H.J.) [In the Gardens nearest to Lancaster Gate, Kate and Merton] picked out a couple of chairs under one of the great trees and sat as much apart – apart from everyone else – as possible.96

Because of the appended comment on (26) Christian’s utterance as a whole announces a double wedding. Even without his comment we would understand his utterance in the same way if we knew that woman to be, as he very well knows, his widowed mother. The parenthesis in (H.J.) serves the same kind of purpose as the epilogue to (28) in (T.M.). What the utterance (27) Kate and Merton sat far apart expresses is compatible with her sitting far apart from him and with this couple’s sitting far apart from everybody else. But an utterance of (27) by itself would be understood as having the former proposition as mediate content. Because of the parenthesis the second conjunct of (H.J.) expresses the latter proposition. Here, too, knowledge about the persons referred to can also nullify the mediate content of an utterance of (27) even without any comment, e.g. knowledge that they have just been put under arrest and are chained together.97 In his discussion of ‘Moore’s Paradox’ Wittgenstein drew our attention to a philosophically far more interesting type of sentence that is customarily employed to convey something that differs from what its utterance expresses: I refer to sentences that are, or at least seem to be, self-ascriptions of belief.98 Suppose in the classroom the teacher asks which numbers between 80 and 90 are prime. Ann raises her hand and says,

96 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901), V/8, cp. VI/6; Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902), II/1. 97 Like the two escaped prisoners, one black and one white, in Stanley Kramer’s movie The Defiant Ones [Flucht in Ketten], USA 1958. 98 Wittgenstein (1984) 513–517 // (1953) 190–192.

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(28) I think that 83 is prime. Sentences containing the first-person pronoun can be used to express at least as  many propositions as there are speakers, so an oblique report of Ann’s utterance has to fix the denotatum of ‘I’, and the following report seems to be dead right: ‘Ann said that she thinks that 83 is prime’. But if one of Ann’s classmates is unwise enough to protest, ‘No, that’s not true’, he does not reject the self-ascription of a belief but an arithmetical claim, and if the teacher hastens to confirm Ann’s answer, he does not underwrite a first-person statement about Ann but a statement about 83. Although she said something that is compatible both with 83 being prime and with 83 not being prime, classmate and teacher agree in taking her to have opted for the first alternative. In such situations, it is common practice to respond to utterances of the type ‘I think that p’ not as autobiographical remarks but as hedged affirmative replies to the question whether p. Does this important Wittgensteinian observation show that my praise of the oblique report ‘Ann said that she thinks that 83 is prime’ was premature? Does it show that Ann’s utterance does not have the content that is singled out by the that-clause of this report? I don’t think so. But it does show that more has to be said about her utterance: the report tells us the truth about her utterance, but not the whole truth. One can alter the classroom scenario in such a way that the report no longer gives any reason for this complaint. Suppose Ann says, ‘I think that 83 is prime’, looks around in the room and continues, ‘Does anybody think likewise?’ Or suppose a desperate teacher complains, ‘None of the pupils in this classroom thinks that 83 is prime’, and Ann protests, ‘You are wrong, Sir. I think that 83 is prime.’99 With respect to these situations the report ‘Ann said that she thinks that 83 is prime’ would not betray deficient understanding of her utterance. Now why would it betray this with respect to the original situation? It would fail to take the point of Ann’s utterance into account, it would not make sense of what she was doing with those words. The teacher wanted to be told something about prime numbers between 80 and 100. If she wanted to answer an arithmetical question,

99 Of course, to change the placement of stress can change the propositional content of an utterance: it might be false that Ben mistakenly gave Ann the tickets, while it is true that he mistakenly gave Ann the tickets. But the difference between Ann’s saying that she believes that 83 is prime and her saying the she believes that eighty-three is prime dos not affect the content. It is more like that between saying that Ben gave Ann the tickets and saying that he gave Ann the tickets: one placement of stress is appropriate when the sentence is used to answer one question (Who believes that 83 is prime?), the other placement is appropriate when the sentence is used to answer another question (Which number does Ann believe to be prime?). Cp. Dretske (1972), Grice (1978) 50–52, Künne (2010) 451–453.

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she must have meant to convey an arithmetical truth. The reporter can capture the point of her utterance if he takes a deeper breath and asserts: ‘By saying that she thinks that 83 is prime, Ann intended to convey tentatively more than that, namely that 83 is prime’. In this report, one ascribes also a mediate content to her utterance, namely an arithmetical proposition. In this case, the enlargement of our understanding that takes place when we climb up to the sixth level and recognize the mediate content of the utterance is obtained by ‘subtraction’ from the immediate content, by deleting what ‘I think that’ contributes to what was said.100

6.1.3 Conveying Something Else Instead Some of the tropes, or figures of speech, that were botanized in ancient treatises on rhetoric are sources of a different kind divergence between what a speaker says and what he intends to convey: here what he aims to convey is not something else as well but something else instead. In the field of figurative speech what is said is usually called ‘what is literally said’, and I shall follow this usage, but the addition of the adverb is not meant to change the denotation of the phrase.101 Let us first have a brief look at ironical speech. ‘Speech’ is the right word, since the linguistic bearers of the property of being ironical are not sentences but utterances. (Notwithstanding the fact that some sentences are standardly used ironically, e.g. ‘Things have come to a pretty pass’, ‘Das ist ja eine schöne Bes­ cherung’.102) In ironical speech of the plainest kind, the speaker means to convey, by literally saying that p, something that entails that not p. Suppose Ann tells us

100 Here is a structural analogue in the field of utterances of interrogative sentences. ‘May I ask you what you need all this dynamite for?’ the gun-shop owner asks his reticent customer. ‘Of course, you may’, replies Charlie Varrick and leaves the shop (Don Siegel, The Last of the Independents [Der große Coup], USA 1972, starring Walter Matthau). By asking whether he may ask what etc., the shop owner asks what etc. Charlie replies to the immediate yes/no question and ignores the mediate wh­question. His reply shows that the mediate content of an utterance of an interrogative sentence (here: a sub-propositional part of a proposition) does not annul its immediate content (here: a proposition). 101 ‘Literal’ does not signify a differentia specifica that distinguishes, within the genus What Is Said, one species from others. What is literally said by a speaker who uses a sentence S figuratively, or (equivalently) what is literally expressed by his figurative utterance U of S, is determined by the meaning S has in U and the denotations the denotatively flexible elements of S have in U, hence it is identical with what the speaker says. The meaning that a sentence S has when it is used figuratively is identical with the meaning it has when it is used literally. 102 lit. ‘That’s a nice handing out of Christmas presents’, typically said when one encounters a particular-ly unpleasant situation.

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how villainously she was betrayed by somebody whom she always took to be her friend, and concludes by saying, (29) He really is a fine friend. Obviously, the claim for which her bitter story provides evidence is that its ‘hero’ is anything but a fine friend. But aiming to convey something that is incompatible with what is literally said is not – pace Quintilian, Grice, Searle and the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ – the way irony works.103 When Voltaire wrote in his philosophical novella Candide (30) [When the battle was over] the rival kings celebrated their victories with Tedeums in their respective camps,104 he clearly wanted to bring the royal ‘victors’ into derision: he expected his readers to recognize that the rivals cannot possibly both have won. By saying what he said Voltaire meant to convey that at least one of the rival kings celebrated what he falsely took to be his victory. Here, too, there is a sort of contrast between what is literally said and what is conveyed: the latter exposes a presupposition of the former as false. But what is conveyed does not entail the negation of what is literally said. There are many kinds of contrast that can obtain between what is literally said in an ironical utterance and what the speaker means to convey, and sometimes 103 Quintilianus (c. 90) IX.2, 44 maintains: in the case of ‘εἰρωνεία … something that is contrary to what is said is to be understood (contrarium ei, quod dicitur, intelligendum est)’. Without any reservation this claim is also endorsed in Searle (1979) 113 & Grice (1989) 34, 53–54, and in the dictionary we read s. v. Irony: ‘the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used.’ Grice claims that a speaker whose utterance of ‘p’ is ironical does not say that p but only ‘makes as if to say’ that p. Cp. his op. cit. 53, 30. He introduces this strange notion because he claims (stipulates) that saying something (in the sense he favours) entails meaning it. I cannot see that either notion is called for. The former notion is also rejected in Bach (2001) 17 f. (When I reject Grice’s ‘making as if to say’ I do not mean to reject ‘making as if to assert, to ask, to request, etc.’ These phrases are good descriptions of what an actor on stage does when he utters in a performance of Hamlet sentences like ‘The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold’, ‘Whither wilt thou lead me?’ or ‘Swear by my sword never to speak of this that you have heard’. See above, sect. 5, penultimate paragraph.) 104 The English translation (quoted after D. Sperber & D. Wilson, Relevance, Oxford 1986, 241) is more explicit than the original: … les deux rois faisaient chanter des Te Deum, chacun dans son camp (Voltaire, Candide ou l’Optimisme, Genève 1759, Ch. 3). Presumably the translator no longer dared to take for granted that 20th century readers still know for which purpose Kings let the Christian hymn ‘Thee, O God, [we praise]’ be sung after a battle.

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a speaker puts forward as true what he literally says in an ironical utterance. Suppose Ann who was let down by her ‘friend’ ends her story by saying (31) Good friends really are a blessing rather than (29). Her final remark is again ironical, but it is likely that she endorses (31) as we all do. By saying that good friends are a blessing she means to convey that people who merely seem to be good friends can be a curse, for that is another claim for which her bitter story provides evidence. Here, too, there is a kind of contrast between what is literally said and what is meant to be conveyed: their subject concepts and their predicate concepts are mutually exclusive. But both propositions can live as peacefully together as any other pair of truths. Metaphorical utterances are the most intricate kind of figurative speech, difficult to encompass by a general characterization and sometimes also difficult to understand properly when one encounters them in conversation or reading.105 Let us focus, as is common in philosophical discussions of metaphor and perhaps even methodologically wise, on assertoric metaphorical utterances that employ structurally simple predications like (32) The author of that paper is an ass (33) Achilles is a lion (34) Life is but a walking shadow.106 The primary bearers of the property of being metaphorical are not sentences in the abstract but utterances, for some utterances of a sentence may be metaphorical while others are not. (34) can hardly be used non-metaphorically, but if the German translation of (32) had occurred in Erich Kästner’s children’s book The Animals’ Conference, it would not have been a metaphor.107 (33) could be used

105 In Rhetorica III.2 (12) 1405 b Aristotle even went so far as to say, ‘Speaking metaphorically is talking in riddles (μεταφοραὶ γὰρ αἰνίττονται)’; which seems to be an unintended example of hyperbole. 106 The source of (33) is a passage in Rhetorica III.3 (4), 1406 b in which Aristotle transforms the comparison ‘… like a lion’ in Iliad XXII, 164 into a metaphor. (There is an echo of this passage in Quintilianus, op. cit. VIII.6, 8–9.) Example (34) is a quotation from Shakespeare, Macbeth V/5. 107 How is (32) used in such a book? Wittgenstein’s remarks on the ‘secondary’ use of language in fairy-tales and in the mouth of children playing with dolls and wooden trains are pertinent. See Wittgenstein (1953) § 282 and the comments in Hacker (1993) 92 f.

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non-metaphorically even in real life, for who is to prevent a tamer with classicist leanings from dubbing a circus lion ‘Achilles’? Assertoric metaphorical utterances – metaphorical assertions, for short108 – can be assessed in the dimension of truth and falsity. It is very likely that the author of the paper referred to in an utterance of (32) will vehemently deny that he is an ass. Whether a man is a lion or a chicken109 is often easier to decide than whether he is a schizoid or a paranoiac. If everybody were to lead a long and fulfilling life, life would not be nothing but a walking shadow. For metaphorical assertions that are elementary predications the following account tries to spell out the idea that metaphors invite comparisons: (Met) By saying that a is an F the speaker intends to convey that a shares some remarkable properties with F’s.110 In giving such a report of an utterance we show that we take the speaker to be ‘metaphorizing’.111 The second that­clause in a substitution instance of (Met) identifies the mediate content of a metaphorical assertion. If we assent to, or dissent from, a metaphorical assertion which we regard as metaphorical, we take a stand on what the speaker intended to convey. We deepen our understanding

108 Thus understood, this phrase does not hold of what is asserted (a proposition) but of acts of asserting. 109 I assume here that Aristotle’s interpretation of the Homeric metaphor (Rhet. 1406 b) is correct. In another context, when the speaker can count on the hearer’s recalling the traditional characterization of the lion as ‘king of the jungle’ or ‘king of beasts’, the sentence ‘Jack is a lion’ may be used to characterize Jack’s position in a power hierarchy. Furthermore, according to some stories lions panic when they confront a mouse… Cp. the quotation from Ernest Gombrich in Künne (1983b) 191. 110 Cp. Künne (1983b) & (2007). In order cover cases in which a proper name is used as a predicate (‘President N.N. was a Caligula’, ‘Trieste is no Vienna’) we must modify (Met) a bit: by literally saying that a is an N.N. the speaker intends to convey that a shares remarkable properties with N.N. In the course of pleading for the (very different) view that metaphors have the same meaning as comparisons, Severin Schroeder defuses various popular objections that may seem to threaten (Met) as well: (2004) 75–100. He also shows how ascriptions of resemblance can be formulated if the sentence used by the metaphorizer is not an elementary predication, and he goes on to deny (rightly to my mind) that there is an algorithm for constructing appropriate resemblance ascriptions: op. cit. 74 f. 111 The Greek word ‘μεταφορά’ is a verbal noun, and so are its Latin and German counterparts, ‘translatio’ and ‘Übertragung’. Aristotle uses the verb – lit. ‘to transfer’ – when he says in Poetica 22, §17, 1049a: ‘To metaphorize well is to perceive similarities (τὸ γὰρ εὖ μεταφέρειν τὸ τὸ ὅμοιον θεωρεῖν ἐστιν).’ Metaphorizing is something speakers do, but it is not a special illocutionary act – for the obvious reason that an utterance can be metaphorical no matter which force (if any) it has. Cp. the criticism of ‘speech-act theories of metaphor’ in Künne (1983b) 193.

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of a metaphorical utterance of ‘a is an F’ by searching for properties of F’s that are also remarkable properties of a. That is a vague restriction, and deliberately so, but it suffices to forestall the unwanted consequence that all metaphorical assertions express utterly trivial truths, for there is nothing with which a given object does not share some property. Among the countless properties that a certain man shares with quadrupeds of one kind or another (and not with anything else in the universe) there are not many that are remarkable properties of that man. Here as everywhere else the speaker might fail to reach his communicative goal. If Sally utters (32) with assertoric force, her friend Juan who grasps what she literally said may be tempted to think that she meant to convey what he would have meant to convey if he had applied the predicate ‘burro’ to the target of her scolding, namely that the author of that paper is renitent, intransigent, and the like. (Comparing him with another long-eared quadruped, we might feel like calling him ‘stubborn as a mule’.) If Juan yields to this temptation, he presumably misunderstands her utterance. This misunderstanding arises because Juan erroneously takes for granted that the respects in which some persons remarkably resemble asses according to her conception of those animals are the same as the respects in which a remarkable resemblance obtains according to his conception of asses. In this case, both conceptions are shaped by the common practice of speakers of English and Spanish respectively. As the possibility of such a misunderstanding shows, what matters for understanding a metaphorical utterance is not simply what F’s are but what they are according to the conception of F’s that the speaker takes for granted when making that utterance. There is an additional reason for this conception-dependence. The view of F’s that is invoked in a metaphorical utterance can be factually inadequate; that is, F’s may not really be as they are conceived of, and yet the metaphorical application of ‘F’ yields a truth. (The speaker might himself be aware of the factual inadequacy of the conception he invokes,112 or this inadequacy might be discovered only centuries after he made his utterance. Perhaps by now animal psychologists have very good reasons to deny that lions have certain properties that the singers of the tales of Ilion thought to be highly characteristic of lions.) So, if we want to find out whether a metaphorical assertion expresses a truth, we must seek an answer to the following question: does a share with F’s, as conceived by the 112 Conception is not belief, so its inadequacy need not be an error on the speaker’s part: one can conceive of F’s as being G without believing that they are G (just as one conceive of one’s favourite party as the winner of the next election although one knows that it is bound to lose). If one is metaphorizing in saying that a is an F, one can exploit what one takes to be a widespread prejudice concerning F’s in order to assert a truth about a.

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speaker, any remarkable properties? If we cannot find any such property, then this is either our fault (our search was not diligent enough), or it is the speaker’s fault. In the latter case, there is no such property, and the mediate content of the metaphorical assertion is false. In some cases, it is very hard to decide which of these alternatives obtains, but then there are ever so many non-metaphorical utterances for which the ascertainment of truth-value is none too easy either. If the speaker uses a frozen metaphor, as it is metaphorically called, then the number of respects in which a remarkably resembles F’s (as conceived by the speaker) will be very small,113 but the richer and more suggestive the metaphor, the larger the number of such respects. A property can belong to them even if the speaker himself did not have it in mind. As a very bright man once put it (metaphorically), a metaphor can be ‘weit klüger als ihr Verfasser (much brighter than its author)’.114 The speaker himself may even hope to become brighter by mulling over the comparison which his metaphorical utterance invites. In section 3.2 above, I emphasized the difference between understanding as an ability and interpreting as an activity. Whenever we deepen our understanding of a metaphorical utterance by searching for remarkable respects of resemblance we go beyond grasping the mediate content of such an utterance: we engage in the activity of interpretation, aiming to understand better than we did before. The first that­clause in a substitution instance of (Met) identifies what is literally said by the metaphorizing speaker. This immediate content of his utterance is grasped on the fourth level of understanding, the level that presupposes knowledge of the meaning the sentence has in that utterance. The words used by the metaphorizer mean what they mean in non-metaphorical speech: there are utterances that are metaphorical, but there is no such thing as meanings that are metaphorical.115 As regards the truth-value and the epistemic status of what is literally said in metaphorical assertions, there are four possibilities. Acknowledgment of this manifold of possibilities can protect us from false generalizations when the question is raised, ‘what makes a hearer or reader suspect that an 113 If the ‘body temperature’ of a metaphor has ‘sunk below zero’, the time for expanding an old entry in the dictionary has come: ‘ass n. – donkey; fig. stupid person’. But the addition to the old entry is correctly marked ‘fig.[urative]’: to know that ‘ass’ means donkey remains relevant for understanding the metaphorical application even when such applications have become routine. 114 Lichtenberg (1776 ff) F 366. 115 Cp. above fn. 101. Friedrich Schleiermacher emphasized some 180 years ago that in metaphorical speech words do not shift their meaning, and Grice, Searle and Davidson followed him (without acknowledgement). For references, cp. Künne (1983b) 192. Hardly anyone is inclined to regard the existence of ironical speech as a reason for concluding that the predicate ‘is a fine friend’ sometimes means is not a fine friend. In the case of metaphorical speech, one should not multiply meanings either.

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utterance might have to be understood as metaphorical?’ After all, speakers only seldom explicitly announce with a prologue that this is the way their utterance is to be understood: ‘To speak metaphorically, p’. The immediate content of a metaphorical assertion can be [I] obviously false, [II] false but not obviously so, [III] obviously true and [IV] true but not obviously so.116 (In each of these four kinds of cases, what the speaker intends to convey, the mediate content of his metaphorical utterance, can be a truth as well as a falsehood.) Firstly: Sometimes one can recognize an utterance as metaphorical just by knowing what the sentence used in the utterance means. Such metaphorical assertions belong to the first class. Nelson Goodman had them in mind when he wrote: ‘a metaphor might be regarded as a calculated category mistake.’117 Schopenhauer produced a specimen when he maintained that (35) Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is a mousetrap.118 The immediate content of his utterance defies belief. Of course, ludicrous falsity of what is literally said does not guarantee that an utterance is metaphorical. This holds even the utterance ‘Juliet is the sun’,119 the most prominent example in the philosophical literature on metaphor. The meaning of this sentence does not prevent it from being used for a different figure of speech, even if the Veronese referents are kept constant. Imagine you are in a classroom of an elementary school in Verona when the teacher (let us call him Galileo) is about to explain to his pupils some Copernican truths. He asks Juliet (Giulietta), Romeo and Baldassare to come to the front and says, ‘Juliet is the sun. She stands here, and she stays put. Romeo, you are the Earth: you revolve slowly around Juliet – just as you are prone to do on the schoolyard. Baldassare, you are the Moon: you quickly circle around Romeo… Here we go!’ Galileo does not speak metaphorically. In the ill-defined terminology of ancient rhetoric, one might call his speech metonymic. By saying that Juliet is the sun, Galileo means to convey that she is to represent the Sun in the didactic ballet. Secondly, what a metaphorizing speaker literally says can be false without being obviously false. When Marc Antony caught sight of Cleopatra for the first

116 It follows that not all assertoric metaphorical utterances can be said to flout the conversational maxim ‘Try to make your contribution one that is true’. So, what Grice (1989) 53 claims covers only a subset of assertoric metaphorizing. 117 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis 21981, 73; similarly Grice (1989) 34. 118 Arthur Schopenhauer, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (1847), §39, pen-ultimate sentence. 119 Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II/2.

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time, she sat enthroned on a gold shimmering luxury boat on the Nile. His first general Enobarbus recalls the incident: (36) The barge she sat in …/Burn’d on the water.120 Knowledge of the meaning of this sentence does not preclude accepting this utterance as literally expressing a truth. But the rest of Enobarbus’ speech makes it clear that there had been no need to phone the Egyptian fire brigade. Thirdly, the immediate content of a metaphorical utterance can be obviously true. No man would deny that no man is a landmass, and in particular, that (37) No man is an island. But when a ‘metaphysical poet’ writes121: No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less …; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind

then his utterance of (37) is metaphorical. After all, it is followed by an utterance that expresses a glaring falsehood unless taken to be metaphorical, and the remainder of the passage gives a hint as to the mediate content of (39) in the poet’s mouth. Fourthly, what a metaphorizer literally says can be true without being obviously true. According to Wikipedia, the average winter temperature in the Siberian town Yakutsk is −34 °C. So, every utterance of (38) Yakutsk is a very cold city literally expresses a truth, at least for some time to come. Now suppose Boris, a young Russian engineer from Yalta, recently took up a job in Yakutsk, and his overanxious mother asks him in a letter, ‘Are your local workmates approachable? Do you spend your spare time with local people? Is your landlady warm-hearted?’ Boris’ reply is rather laconic, ‘No, Mamotschka, Yakutsk is a very cold city.’ In this context (38) is used metaphorically: Boris’ utterance of (38) makes no sense as a reply to the questions he was asked unless he is metaphorizing. An utterance of (38) can also be Janus-faced: using SMS Boris could punch in (38) only once and thereby answer

120 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II/2. 121 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Meditation XVII.

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simultaneously two questions, – his father’s question about the climate in Yakutsk and his mother’s question about the social climate in that town.122 To speak metaphorically, in so doing he would kill two birds with one stone, or to put it slightly less cruelly, er würde zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen.

6.1.4 An Aside on Understanding Poems Metaphorical speech has a property that is characteristic of the poet’s use of language no matter whether he is speaking metaphorically or not. I refer to the property of being resistant to substitution by synonyms. Suppose the friendship between Jules and Jim has passed the acid test, and Jules exclaims, (39) Now we are brothers. Clearly, he is metaphorizing. Now ‘brother’ means the same as ‘male sibling’, and in (39) this word is not flanked by quotation marks. Nevertheless, if we replace it by its synonym, the new sentence can no longer be employed for making a metaphorical assertion. The resulting sentence could serve to report a sex transformation, – perhaps Jules had been Jim’s sister Juliette (‘Now we are male siblings’), or it could serve to report an adoption, – perhaps Jules’ parents have adopted Jim (‘We were male altos in the school choir before, now we are also male siblings’). Why does the exchange of synonyms destroy the metaphor? The phrase ‘male sibling’ highlights a feature of the concept of a brother (which is the concept of a male sibling), sc. the gender of brothers, that is entirely irrelevant for the comparison to which the metaphorizing speaker invites. What holds of the occurrence of ‘brother’ in (39) also holds of Schiller’s and Beethoven’s better-known use of this word: ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder,/Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt (All humans become brothers,/Where your gentle wing abides)’. Within the ‘Ode to Joy’ the consequences of a replacement are aggravated, of course: rhyme and rhythm would suffer badly from the exchange. In a poem, not only metaphorically used words resist replacement by a synonym. This irreplaceability claim stands at the centre of Valéry’s protest against what he calls D’Alembert’s Theorem:

122 ‘In 1990 Helmuth Kohl was a man of considerable weight’ can be used to make a claim about a salient physical property of the former Chancellor or about his political standing, and what is literally expressed is as true as what is metaphorically expressed.

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‘Here is,’ d’Alembert wrote, ‘what seems to me to be the draconic but just law that our century imposes on all poets: it no longer acknowledges anything as good in verse that it would not find excellent in prose.’ This is one of those statements the exact opposite of which we should accept as true … Poets have tried to build poems that can never be reduced to the expression of a thought and that cannot be translated into other words without being destroyed.123

Once again, we encounter Wittgenstein in Valéry’s vicinity when he writes: We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other… In the one case the thought in the sentence (der Gedanke des Satzes) is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem.)124

Let the sentence be the first verse of John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird’. One manifests perfect linguistic understanding of this verse if one offers ‘You were not hatched in order to die …’ as a meaning-preserving paraphrase, for ‘hatched’ in talk about birds means what ‘born’ means when applied to humans and many other animals. By contrast, aes­ thetic understanding – as we might call it – requires that one recognizes what gets lost in this paraphrase. As long as one does not realize that exchanging ‘born’ for ‘hatched’ would partly destroy the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, one does not yet

123 «Voici, ce me semble, écrit-il, la loi rigoureuse, mais juste, que notre siècle impose aux poètes: il ne reconnaît plus pour bon en vers que ce qu’il trouverait excellent en prose.» Cette sentence est de celles don’t l’inverse est exactement ce que nous pensons qu’il faut penser… Les poètes … ont essayé … de construire une poésie qui jamais ne pût se réduire à l’expression d’une pensée, ni donc se traduire, sans périr, en d’autres termes. (Valéry (1935) 52–53, quoting from a public speech D’Alembert made as Secretary of the Académie française: ‘Réflexions sur la poésie’ (1769), in his Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, Paris 1822, 294.) Here is how Paul Celan, in the 2nd half of the last century arguably the greatest poet of the German language, formulated Valéry’s insight: ‘Das Gedicht ist, auch was die Wortbedeutung angeht, der Ort des Einmaligen, Irreversiblen; es ist, anders formuliert, der Friedhof aller Synonymik (es liegt jenseits aller Synonymik). (With respect to the meaning of words, too, the poem is the locus of uniqueness, of irreversibility; in other words, it is the cemetery of all dictionaries of synonyms (it lies beyond all synonymics)’.) (Celan, Der Meridian, Endfassung – Entwürfe – Materialien, ed. B. Böschenstein et al., Frankfurt/M 1999, 116). I owe this reference to Carsten Dutt. (The poem that goes by the name of Celan’s translation of Valéry’s ‘La Jeune Parque’ is as much a locus of uniqueness, of irreversibility as the French poem.) 124 Wittgenstein (1953) § 531; cp. op. cit. §§ 527, 532 f and Hacker’s comments on these sections in his (2000) 230–238. The German formulation I have placed between brackets is rather odd, and the English translation is not much of an improvement. I think it is best to understood along the lines of the second half of the sentence: ‘in the one case what is expressed by the sentence is also expressed by other sentences’.

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(aesthetically) understand that poem.125 Obviously, aesthetic understanding as involving recognition of irreplaceability depends on linguistic understanding. As involving recognition of irreplaceability, aesthetic understanding also involves perceptual understanding. Involving it is more than simply presupposing it. If you have perceptually understood A’s utterance of a declarative sentence, you might succeed in propositionally understanding it as well and hence know what A said. This knowledge may outlast your ability to give a word-for-word direct report of A’s utterance: you can still know what A said at a time when you forgot which words, and perhaps even which language, A used.126 Now suppose A is Keats, what he utters is his ode, and you enjoy the privilege of listening to him. The first thing you propositionally understand is verse 1, hence you know that he said, of a nightingale he made as if to address, that it was not hatched in order to die. This knowledge is something you can retain at a time when you have completely forgotten the wording of the poem. By contrast, your aesthetic understanding of that verse as part of the poem cannot outlive your ability to quote it verbatim.127 Wittgenstein mentions understanding a poem only as an example. The novelist Henry James did not exactly encourage his prospective French translator when he wrote to him: I confess that it is a relief to me … to have so utterly defied translation… I feel that in a literary work of the least complexity the very form and texture are the substance itself and that the flesh is indetachable from the bones! Translation is an effort – though a most flattering one! – to tear the hapless flesh.

He rejoiced that his later works were ‘locked fast in the golden cage of the intradu­ isible’.128 Moreover, not only works of literature are linguistic objects of aesthetic understanding. Consider the Italian adage ‘Traduttore, traditore’ that is pertinent here in more than one respect. If one knows that it means that a translator is a

125 In Dummett’s one-page excursion into the realm of literary studies you find a detailed explanation of this irreplaceability that would bring honour, I think, to every literary scholar: (2007b) 522. 126 As Valéry puts it in (1939) 144, ‘in the practical uses of language the form, i.e. the sensually perceptible in discourse, does not preserve itself; it does not survive the understanding: it has fulfilled its job, it has made us understand (dans les emplois pratiques … du langage, la forme c’est­à­dire … le sensible … du discours ne se conserve pas; elle ne survit pas à la compréhension; … elle a fait son office; elle a fait comprendre).’ 127 In Valéry’s words (loc. cit.): in a poem ‘this sensually perceptible form becomes so important that it somehow compels respect for itself (cette forme sensible prend … une importance telle qu’elle … se fasse, en quelque sorte, respecter)’. 128 Henry James to A. Monod, Sept. 7th, 1913, in: H. J. – Letters to A. C. Benson and Auguste Monod, New York 1969, 117 f.

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traitor and if one realizes that a speaker’s assertoric use of this adage is both metaphorical and hyperbolical, one has reached the sixth level of comprehension, but if one fails to recognize the pun the dictum contains then one lacks aesthetic understanding. Occasionally one can even read in a newspaper, and hear in a political speech, passages that are worthy of this kind of comprehension. 6.1.5 Linguistic Behaviour and Means-ends Rationality If the hearer were pressed to explain why she thought it necessary to move up to the sixth level of understanding, that is, if she were asked to justify why she takes what the speaker intended to convey to differ from what he (literally) said, to what hermeneutic maxim could she appeal? The Maxim we saw Plato’s Socrates to rely on is pertinent only to some of my examples of figurative speech. For the remaining examples as well as for all preceding cases from no. (19) onwards, the hearer could appeal to a generalized version of the principle of detrivialization: (Maxim*) One should try to avoid as far as possible to take a speaker or writer as intending to convey something that coincides with what he (literally) said if taking him this way were to make his speech act appear unreasonable.

If the hearer were to assume (in the cases discussed in this section) that the speaker aimed to convey nothing but what he said, she would not be able to make sense of what he is doing with words, for a necessary condition for making sense of it would not be fulfilled. It is a condition that holds for all teleological or intentionalist explanations of an action no matter whether it is a speech act or not: in order to make sense of somebody’s doing X one must presume that the agent wants to attain a certain end and believes that doing X serves to attain that end. If one were to assume that the speaker intended to convey nothing but what he said, there would be no want/belief pair that one could reasonably ascribe to him and that would rationalize his linguistic behaviour. But there is such a pair if we assume that by saying that things are thus and so he intended to convey more or something else instead.129 We proceed along these lines ‘as far as possible’: 129 Bolzano’s account of understanding an agent’s use of signs is contained in the 4th part of his (1837), entitled ‘Heuristics (Auffindungskunst)’. He regards the problem of ‘interpreting given signs (Auslegung gegebener Zeichen)’ (III, §.387) as a ‘special case’ of the problem of ‘discovering the intentions behind given actions (Entdeckung der Absichten gegebener Handlungen)’ (III, §.386). He describes the move from level (5) of understanding to level (6a) as follows: ‘if we find that the usual meaning does not yield a sense we can deem acceptable to the speaker, it is necessary to seek another sense that fits better (Finden wir, daß die gewöhnliche Bedeutung keinen Sinn gibt, den wir dem Sprechenden zumuthen könnten, so wird es nöthig, einen anderen, passenderen

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sometimes a person’s behaviour, be it linguistic or not, may resist any attempt at explanatory rationalization. Let us quickly apply this raisonnement to the first and to the last of the examples presented in this section. (19): If Pilate had wanted to tell the High Priests whether he was ready to change the inscription on the cross, he could not have reasonably believed that uttering his tautology was a suitable means for attaining that end unless what he meant to convey differed from what he said. (38): If our Russian engineer wished to answer his mother’s question about his social life in Siberia, he could not reasonably regard a statement about the temperature to be a suitable means for attaining that end unless what he meant to convey was not identical with what he (literally) said. In both cases, there are good reasons to affirm the antecedent of the conditional.130 Quite generally, an ascent to the sixth level is required if, and only if, knowing what the speaker said and which force his utterance has does not suffice for understanding his utterance, which now means: making sense of it as an action. To understand an utterance on this level you have to know the reason why the speaker made it.

6.2 Understanding an Utterance as Knowing What (If Anything) Its Mediate Illocutionary Force Is As regards force, some utterances are Janus-faced, and our understanding of them is deficient if we ignore one of these faces. Returning from a long journey, Lord Henry enters the library of his mansion where he wants to sit down and read the letters that arrived during his absence. Turning to his housekeeper Betty he remarks,

Sinn zu suchen)’ (III, 549). According to Bolzano’s (unFregean) distinction between ‘Bedeutung’ and ‘Sinn’, the Sinn of an utterance of a sentence is what the speaker intends to convey, and this can differ from the Bedeutung that the utterance expresses according to the standard use of that sentence. See op. cit. III, 67. In Künne (1990) §3, I drew in this context upon the hermeneutics of one of Bolzano’s most interesting precursors in this field, Georg Friedrich Meier. 130 Of course, in all such cases, recognizing that under the presumption of the speaker’s rationality an utterance has a mediate content is not yet to recognize which mediate content it has. When asked to justify one’s opting for a particular mediate content, C one has to defend the hypothesis that no ascription of a mediate content rationalizes the speaker’s linguistic behaviour better than the ascription of C. This hypothesis leaves room for more than one candidate. Grice’s theory of conversational implicatures offers no less than a dozen maxims that one could appeal to. When asked to justify one’s opting for a particular mediate content C the answer will always be, ‘No ascription of a mediate content rationalizes the speaker’s linguistic behaviour better the ascription of C’.

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(40) It is rather cold in this room. If she were to think that signalling her agreement were a sufficient reaction to this utterance, His Lordship would not be amused, and Betty would presumably not remain his housekeeper for long. For she would have failed to realize that the Lord’s utterance was not only a statement about the room temperature but also a request to turn on the heating. Lord Henry can expect her to realize this. She knows that he wants to stay for a while in the library, so the point of his utterance cannot be just to tell her what is pretty obvious anyway, namely that it is rather cold in that room; it must serve an ulterior purpose. Given the circumstances, the most likely ulterior purpose is that of prompting her to do something about the room temperature. (The same holds mutatis mutandis when the owner of a hacienda in La Mancha declares on a day in July that it is rather cold in his library: his housekeeper will do well if she takes his utterance to be a request to turn off the air­conditioner.) If one of the two illocutionary faces of an utterance is a figure of speech, the situation becomes a bit more demanding for the hearer. Suppose Ann wants to warn Ben against the concierge in the ground floor. She tells him about some unpleasant experiences with that woman and ends her report by saying (41) She is as mild as a dove. By literally asserting that the concierge is as mild as a dove, Ann conveys to Ben that the concierge is not an easy woman to deal with, and by conveying this she warns him against that woman. By making an ironical assertion she issues a warning. In cases like (40) and (41) one does not fully understand the utterance unless one realizes that by φ-ing that p the speaker did something else as well – he ψ-ed that q. The verb in the first description of the utterance specifies (what I propose to call) its immediate force, the verb in the second description specifies its mediate force. The first and the second that-clause single out the immediate and the mediate content respectively. If the hearer is pressed to explain why she thought it necessary to move up to level (6b) of understanding, she can appeal to a variant of (Maxim*): (Maxim†) One should try to avoid as far as possible to take a speaker or writer as intending to perform an act with only one illocutionary force if taking him this way were to make his speech act appear unreasonable.

Now the declarative sentence ‘It is rather cold in this room’ is not standardly used for making a request. Often the speaker only aims at answering a question about the room – without pursuing any hermeneutically relevant additional goal with

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his utterance. But sometimes a sentence that could be used for making speech acts of kind Φ is almost exclusively used for making speech acts of the different kind Ψ. Take ‘You are in extreme danger’: normally, the addressee’s reaction to an utterance of this sentence will show more concern than ‘O, that’s interesting’, for that sentence is customarily employed not just to make a statement but to issue a warning. Similarly, the interrogative sentence (42) Can you tell me what time it is? is standardly used for the request to be told what time it is.131 If the hearer were to think that saying ‘Yes, I can’ would suffice as a response, he would seriously misunderstand the utterance. It is common practice to use that interrogative sentence for making a request – and a specific kind of request that does not vary between England and La Mancha – a request for an announcement of time. Speakers standardly use (42) for this purpose because they can reasonably expect that an utterance of this sentence will be understood as serving this purpose. After all, the hearer will find it very unlikely that the speaker just wants to know whether she has the ability to tell him the time, for it is hard to see which value this information, just by itself, could have for him. She will regard it as far more likely that the utterance serves an ulterior purpose, and the most likely ulterior purpose is that of prompting her to make use of this ability (if she has it), that is, to tell him what time it is. Doesn’t all this show that classifying an utterance of the interrogative sentence as asking a question is simply a mistake? Doesn’t the force that I call mediate simply annihilate the alleged immediate force, so that my distinction becomes void? I don’t think so. Even in utterances of this kind, both forces remain in place: ‘canonical’ oblique reports of such utterances instantiate the schema ‘By asking whether p the speaker requests that q.’ Actually, the very structure of standard responses to utterances of such interrogatives suggests that. If somebody says to me, ‘Can you tell me what time it is?’, I for one tend to respond in the following manner: ‘Yes.’ < After a glimpse at my wrist watch: > ‘It is 11 o’clock sharp.’ The ‘yes’ part of my response can be extended to ‘Yes, I can’. It is a reply to a ques­ tion, hence it shows that I paid heed to the immediate force of the utterance. The remainder of my response reveals that the mediate force of the utterance did not escape me either. Furthermore, the mediate force can be suppressed.132 ‘Can you tell me what time it is? Hold on! Don’t tell me what time it is – that’s something

131 Cp. Searle, 1979, 30 on utterances of ‘Can you pass the salt?’ 132 This is confirmed by many of the stories about Signor Veneranda, the master of illocutionary slapstick, that are told by Carlo Manzoni in 100× Signor Veneranda, Munich 1966.

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I already know. What I want to know is whether you can tell me what time it is.’ Surprised about this intervention, the hearer has a look at his wrist watch, checks whether it is still running, and replies, ‘Yes, I can.’ In this context, the utterance of (42) does not have the force of a request for an announcement of time. What the speaker wants is information about the addressee of his utterance, and that’s what he is provided with by the addressee’s response. The mediate force can also be suppressed by embedding. ‘Can you tell me what time it is, or can you not?’ It would not be inappropriate at all if you were to confine your response to saying ‘I can. (I am wearing a wrist watch, and it is working properly.)’ What is shared by serious standalone utterances of (42) and the utterances I just described is the immediate force of a question. Let me vary the example slightly to drive the point home. The sentence (43) Do you know what time it is? has the same standard use ‘Can you tell me what time it is?’, but when a father uses (43) in a state of agitation when his 15-year-old daughter tiptoes into the house at two o’clock in the morning, he knows only too well what time it is, and the girl would be well advised not to confine her response to ‘Yes, Dad, I do. It’s 2 a.m.’ The mediate force of the paternal utterance just described is that of an animadversion, but it shares with all serious utterances of (43) the property of having the immediate force of a question.

Epilogue: Going Downstairs and Revisiting the Fields In our everyday communication, full understanding is seldom preceded by a process of arduously climbing up several levels of only partial comprehension: most of the time we communicate effortlessly on the sixth level of understanding. What I have tried to describe is how somebody who knows his mother tongue could get there by removing, step by unhurried step, deficiencies of his understanding. In our everyday communication, we go downstairs whenever we suspect that we have misunderstood an utterance because we cannot make sense of it as an action. Does this utterance perhaps have another illocutionary force than we thought? Does it perhaps have a different propositional content because the speaker used indexicals or demonstratives to refer to other items than we thought? (Is our current lack of understanding perhaps due to a mistake the speaker committed: did he perhaps not say what he had wanted to say? Did he

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perhaps not even utter the sentence he had wanted to utter?) Does the sentence the speaker used not have the meaning we took it to have in that utterance? Did we perhaps hear wrongly and did he not utter that sentence at all? If we are lucky we will find on one or several of these levels answers that help us to understand what we have so far found incomprehensible. As Heraclitus put it, ‘the way up and the way down are one and the same.’ At the beginning of this paper I promised to complete the quotation from Paul Valéry when I came to a close. As you will remember, Valéry said: if we hear the sentence ‘Ouvrez cette porte’ in the fields, we no longer understand it. (In the meantime, we have seen that the anaphoric pronoun ‘it’ misidentifies the item that is not understood in the fields.) At the point where I interrupted him Valéry goes on to say: Mais si toutefois c’est dans un sens figuré, elle peut être comprise. Or, ces conditions si vari­ ables, un esprit d’auditeur les ajoute ou non, est capable ou non de les fournir. (However, if taken in a figurative sense, it can be understood. A hearer supplies these variable conditions or he does not, he is, or is not, able to provide them.)

Let me try to supply two different conditions under which it would be reasonable to take an utterance of that sentence in the fields to be metaphorical. Suppose Ann and Ben are having a stroll in the fields. In the course of their conversation Ben tells Ann that he had tried two different approaches to solve a problem that worries him, but that each time he had reached deadlock. Ann tries to convince him that a third approach would be far more promising, and she ends with a note of encouragement: ‘Open this door, and the solution will stare you in the face.’ By literally asking Ben to open a door in front of him she intends to convey to him that pursuing the third approach resembles opening a door (in order to leave a house) in some very pleasant respects. Or suppose that Ann and Ben are in the fields while it is raining cats and dogs, and they are moving towards a weeping willow. Ann thinks that they should take shelter under it, so when they stand in front of the tree she points at two neighbouring branches and says, ‘Open this door, and we shall no longer need our umbrellas.’ By literally asking Ben to open a door in front of him she intends to convey to him that moving those branches apart shares with opening a door (in order to enter a house) very gratifying properties.133

133 This paper has profited from objections, questions and suggestions of a literary scholar and a philosopher: many thanks go to Carsten Dutt and to Peter Hacker.

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References Anscombe, Elizabeth, 1958: ‘Pretending’, in her Collected Papers vol. II, Oxford 1981. Austin, John L., 1961: Performative Utterances, in his Philosophical Papers, Oxford. Austin, John L., 1962: How to Do Things With Words, Oxford. Bach, Kent, 1999: The Myth of Conventional Implicature, Linguistics and Philosophy 22, 327–366. Bach, Kent, 2001: You don’t Say?, Synthese 128, 15–44. Bolzano, Bernard, 1837: Wissenschaftslehre, 4 volumes, transl. as Theory of Science, Oxford 2010; quoted by Roman volume number and page (original pagination). Davidson, Donald, 1984: Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford. Davidson, Donald, 2005: Truth, Language, and History (Collected Essays, Vol. 4), Oxford. Dretske, Fred I., 1972: Contrastive Statements, Philos. Review 81, 411–437. Dummett, Michael, 1986: A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs: Some Comments on Davidson and Hacking, in: E. Lepore & B. McLaughlin (eds.), Truth and Interpretation, Oxford. Dummett, Michael, 1994a: Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Cambridge/MA. Dummett, Michael, 1994b: Reply to Davidson, in: B. McGuinness & G. Oliveri (eds.), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Dordrecht. Dummett, Michael, 2007a: Reply to Lepore & Ludwig, b) Reply to Eva Picardi, c) Reply to Penco, in: R. E. Auxier & L. E. Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Chicago. Dummett, Michael, 2010: The Nature and Future of Philosophy, New York. Evans, Gareth, 1982: Varieties of Reference, Oxford. Frege, Gottlob, 1892: Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, repr. in his (2008), original pagination. Frege, Gottlob, 1918: Der Gedanke, repr. in his (2008), original pagination. Frege, Gottlob, 2008: Kleine Schriften, ed. I. Angelelli, Darmstadt. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1965: Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen2 1965. Grice, Herbert Paul, 1961: The Causal Theory of Perception, Proc. of the Aristotelian Society, SV 35, 121–152. Grice, Herbert Paul, 1989: Studies in the Ways of Words, Cambridge/Mass. Hacker, Peter Michael Stephan, 1993: Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 3, Pt. II (Exegesis), Oxford. Hacker, Peter Michael Stephan, 2000: Commentary, Vol. 4, Pt. II (Exegesis), Oxford. Hacker, Peter Michael Stephan, 2005: (partly with G. Baker) Commentary, Vol. 1, Pt. I (Essays), 2nd revised edn., Oxford. Kaplan, David, 1970: ‘Dthat’, as repr. in: P. French et al. (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, Minneapolis 1979 Kaplan, David, 1979: On the Logic of Demonstratives, in: French et al. (eds.). Kemmerling, Andreas, 1993: The Philosophical Significance of a Shared Language, in: R. Stoecker (ed.), Reflecting Davidson, Berlin. Kemmerling, Andreas, 2003: Was mit Glaubenssätzen gesagt wird, in: U. Haas-Spohn (Hrsg.), Intentionalität zwischen Subjektivität und Weltbezug, Paderborn. Kemmerling, Andreas, 2013: Speaker’s Meaning, in: M. Sbisà & K. Turner (eds.), Pragmatics of Speech Actions, Berlin/Boston. Kemmerling, Andreas, 2017: Glauben. Essay über einen Begriff. Frankfurt/M. Klev, Ansten Mørch, 2014: Categories and Logical Syntax. Dissertation, University of Leiden.

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Künne, Wolfgang, 1981: Verstehen und Sinn: eine sprachanalytische Betrachtung, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 6, 1–16; repr. in: A. Bühler (ed.), Hermeneutik, Heidelberg 2003, 61–78. Künne, Wolfgang, 1983a: Abstrakte Gegenstände. Semantik und Ontologie. (2nd enlarged edn. 2007), Frankfurt/M. Künne, Wolfgang, 1983b: “Im übertragenen Sinne”. Zur Theorie der Metapher’, Conceptus 17, 181–200. Künne, Wolfgang, 1985: Sinn(losigkeit) in Über Gewissheit, Teoria ‒ Rivista di Filosofia (Pisa) 5, 113–133. Künne, Wolfgang, 1990: Prinzipien der wohlwollenden Interpretation, in: Forum Philosophie (ed.). Intentionalität und Verstehen, Frankfurt/M., 212–236. Künne, Wolfgang, 2007: Wahrheit, “Metonymie” und Metapher, in: F. J. Czernin & Th. Eder (eds.), Zur Metapher. Die Metapher in Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Literatur, München, 57–74, 123–127, 129–132. Künne, Wolfgang, 2010: Die Philosophische Logik Gottlob Freges, Frankfurt/M. Künne, Wolfgang, 2015: Frege on That-Clauses, in: B. Weiss (ed.), Dummett on Analytical Philosophy, Basingstoke. Künne Wolfgang, 2015: Frege on That-Clauses. In: Weiss B. (eds) Dummett on Analytical Philosophy. Philosophers in Depth. London, 135–173. Lepore, Ernest, 1997: with Herman Cappelen, On an Alleged Connection between Indirect Speech and Theory of Meaning, Mind and Language 12, 278–296. Lepore, Ernest, 2014: with Una Stojnic, What’s What’s Said, in: C. Penco et al. (eds.), What is Said and What is Not: The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Standford 2017. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1776–79: Sudelbuch F, in: Schriften und Briefe, vol. I, ed. W. Promies, München, 1968. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1779–88: Sudelbuch G, in: Schriften und Briefe, vol. II, München, 1971. Moore, George Edward, 1962: Commonplace Book 1919–1953, ed. C. Lewy, London. Perry, John, 1986: Thought Without Representation, Proc. of the Aristotelian Society, SV 60, 137–151. Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius, c. 90: Institutio oratoria/Ausbildung des Redners, ed. & transl. H. Rahn, 2 vol.s, Darmstadt, 1972–75. Reinach, Adolf, 1913: Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechts, as repr. in his Sämtlliche Werke, vol. 1, München 1989; engl. transl. in Aletheia 3 (1983). Schroeder, Severin, 2004: Why Juliet is the Sun?, in: M. Siebel & M. Textor (eds.), Semantik und Ontologie, Frankfurt/M., 63–101. Searle, John R., 1965: What is a Speech Act?, as repr. in J. S. (ed.), The Philosophy of Language, Oxford 1971. Searle, John R., 1969: Speech Acts, Cambridge. Searle, John R., 1979: Expression and Meaning, Cambridge. Siebel, Mark, 2002: Was sind illokutionäre Akte?, in: M. S. (ed.), Kommunikatives Verstehen, Leipzig, 138–164. Strawson, Peter F., 1950: On Referring, as repr. in his Logico-Linguistic Papers, London 1971. Strawson, Peter F., 1970: ‘Categories’, as repr. in his Freedom & Resentment and Other Essays, London 1974. Strawson, Peter F., 1973: Austin and “Locutionary Meaning”, as repr. in his (1997b). Strawson, Peter F., 1997a: Meaning and Context, in his (1997b).

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Strawson, Peter F., 1997b: Entity & Identity and Other Essays, Oxford. Valéry, Paul, 1929: Littérature, repr. in his Tel quel, Ch. 4, Paris 1996. Valéry, Paul, 1935: Questions de poésie, repr. in his Variété III, Paris 1936. Valéry, Paul, 1939: Poésie et pensée abstraite, repr. in his Variété V, Paris 1944. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953: Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, Oxford. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1970: Über Gewißheit, Frankfurt/M. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1984: Werke, Bd. 1, Frankfurt/M.

Jocelyn Benoist

Two Ways to Fail to Understand Abstract: The author here analyzes the difference between Verstehen and Ver­ ständnis in Wittgenstein’s work. He shows that one should not exaggerate this difference, because there is no secret power of ‘comprehension’ (Verständnis) according to the Austrian philosopher, but only the fact that we understand (ver­ stehen) something to be understood in definite circumstances. No ‘comprehension’, then, exists without and beyond real understanding. The fact remains that Wittgenstein seems to mark a slight distinction in a famous passage of his Philo­ sophical Investigations (§§ 531–533). Prima facie it looks in this passage as if one could talk of ‘comprehension’ – as opposed to ‘understanding’ – when this comprehension could not be captured by an explicit definition, but rather induced by training. This paper is dedicated to the elucidation of this passage. It shows that beyond a superficial opposition, as much as there is no comprehension without and beyond understanding, there is no understanding of any kind without ‘comprehension’ in that sense either. Keywords: understand, comprehension, definition, explanation, meaning Does it make sense to distingusish between understanding and comprehension? A first possible track toward answering this question would be to consider that, in this lexical distinction, some hint is to be found of the contrast between different authors who have written on understanding and/or comprehension. For instance, we might place Wittgenstein on the side of understanding, whereas Dilthey and Husserl on the side of comprehension. Of course, this way to make the distinction is very unlikely, particularly as it cannot be based on any firm terminological distinction between the aforementioned authors. On the whole, they use the same term (in German): verstehen. Thus, if one wanted to ascribe a theory of understanding to one of them, and a theory of comprehension to the others, this terminological difference would be a mere tool of analysis: a way to capture a conceptual distinction between two different interpretations of ‘verstehen’. Such difference is probably to be found between Husserl and Wittgenstein, and between Dilthey and Wittgenstein too, leaving the remaining question open as to the difference that certainly exists between Husserl’s and Dilthey’s uses of the word verstehen. It is unclear whether this differentiation can be adequately captured by a lexical contrast between ‘understanding’ and ‘comprehension’. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-003

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In ordinary English, the difference between ‘understanding’ and ‘comprehension’ seems not so clear except for the fact that, maybe, ‘comprehension’ is not so ordinary. To be sure, there is a nuance. ‘Comprehension’ probably sounds more abstract and to some extent more global. Sometimes, it seems, it is used to designate some deeper level of understanding: what might be called a thorough understanding. The etymology suggests the capacity for the mind to encompass its object, whereas, according to the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, ‘under’, in ‘understand’, means ‘among’, ‘in the middle of’ (rather than ‘below’). Along these lines, to understand things is to be in the middle of them and to cope with them, whereas to comprehend them is to get an overview of them – an übersichtliche Darstellung. Perhaps, however, the philosopher should not rely too much on etymology. It may be the case that precisely such overemphasis on etymology depends upon a conception of understanding that should be criticized: it is as if the words had a meaning by themselves, independently of how they are used concretely. A certain mythology of understanding is based on the hypostatization of the words, understanding being then pictured as some kind of intuitive connection with what those words are supposed to mean in isolation. If this were what ‘comprehension’ should mean, we should definitely have to jettison comprehension in favour of sober understanding. However, I doubt this is usually what it means. As a matter of fact, it seems impossible to discuss this distinction in abstracto. It makes sense only against a background and relative to the actual uses of both words. It is not clear that a particular tradition is to be found in philosophy about distinguishing both of these terms. If we remain within the authorial parameters set above, we may find a clue when we observe that there is at least one passage of the English version of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations where the translator seems to have differentiated the use of these two terms. §§531–532 discuss ‘understanding’, whereas in §533 one finds ‘comprehension’.1 Maybe it does make a difference. As a matter of fact, this distinction made in English by Elizabeth Anscombe corresponds to a lexical distinction in the original German text: between ‘Verstehen’ and ‘Verständnis’ respectively. At first glance this does not help much, because, if some difference is to be found between ‘Verstehen’ and ‘Verständnis’ in German, it is probably scarcely more clear than the difference between ‘understanding’ and ‘comprehension’ in English. Of course, there is probably a grammatical difference between both German terms that does not exist between their given translations: that is to say, the categorial difference between a capacity (Verständnis) and its achievement (Verstehen). However, this does not seem to be what is at stake in the quoted

1 Wittgenstein 1958, 143–144.

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paragraphs. Thus, we have to go deeper into the respective uses of both terms in Wittgenstein’s series of remarks. Maybe, if we go deeper, we can expect some clarity about a possible contrast between ‘understanding’ and ‘comprehension’. Upon closer examination, however, the matter seems disappointing. In §531 of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein notes that we seem to speak of ‘understanding’ (verstehen) in two different senses: one in which something else can be substituted for what we understand – our capacity to perform such substitution being a good sign that we have understood what there was to understand– and another in which it is precisely impossible to replace what we understand with anything else. The understanding of prose seems to be of the first kind, whereas the understanding of poetry, like that of music, belongs to the second kind. Now, in the next paragraph, the philosopher makes very clear that he doesn’t hold these two senses to constitute different meanings. He “would rather say that these kinds of use of ‘understanding’ make up its meaning, make up (his) concept of one understanding”. He “want(s) to apply the word ‘understanding’ to all this”.2 However, this identification seems to raise an issue: “in the second case how can one explain the expression, ‘transmit one’s comprehension?’” In this case, no explanation seems in order, since there are no words one can substitute for those given: one can only repeat the same words. (This case reminds me of one among my Heideggerian teachers, who, everytime he recited a quotation, he read it two times, as if this could add any sense to the quoted words.) Wittgenstein, however, does not want to make the point that, in this case, no explanation is possible, but rather to draw our attention to the existence of another kind of explanation: “Ask yourself: How does one lead anyone to comprehension of a poem or of a theme?”3 To explain is not necessarily to translate into other words, even if, in many cases, it is. One might be tempted to reserve the word ‘comprehension’ for this particular case, as opposed to ‘understanding’, which we should apply to the case in which a translation is possible. However, the text does not say this. In fact, it states the exact opposite. It insists on the fact that it is licit to speak of ‘understanding’ in both cases, and, when it asks how, in the second case, “one can transmit one’s comprehension” (das Verständnis übermitteln), this seems to presuppose that there is ‘comprehension’ in the first case as well: in this case, it seems, no one has trouble ‘transmitting comprehension’. As a matter of fact, ‘comprehension’ is mentioned in the second case just because, then, prima facie, it is not so obvious

2 Wittgenstein 1958, 144. 3 Wittgenstein 1958, 144.

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that it can be ‘transmitted’. In other words, it seems here that ‘comprehension’ is a generic term, and that, if it is not strictly identical to ‘understanding’, it is at least closely associated with it. Thus, the contrast between these does not seem to make much sense. In fact, once the translation of this passage has drawn our attention to the difference between the two terms verstehen and Verständnis, it is possible to observe: 1) that Wittgenstein uses Verständnis a lot and 2) that ordinarily he uses it in relation to Verstehen and not as something substantially different from it. A grammatical difference still remains, and the fact that, in the quoted passage, ‘comprehension’ surfaces when one comes to the second case is not incidental – not because comprehension would be the prerogative of this case, but because this case, in its specificity, reveals something about ‘comprehension’ (in general). In the section of the Big Typescript dedicated to the question “What effect does a single explanation of language have, what effect comprehension4?”, Wittgenstein insists on the fact that “in the study of symbolism there is no foreground and background, no tangible sign plus an intangible capacity or comprehension that accompanies it (nicht ein greifbares Zeichen und ein es beglei­ tendes ungreifbares Vermögen, oder Verständnis).”5 Thus, his basic contribution about ‘Verständnis’ consists in debunking every philosophical mythology of ‘Verständnis’. In this regard, it is certainly possible to contrast his analysis and Husserl’s. Husserl’s doctrine of Verstehen, as it is sketched at the beginning of his first Logical Investigation, could probably be described as providing the ideal target for Wittgenstein’s criticism. At the heart of Husserl’s conception, one finds the contrast between the naked and, so to speak, inert sign: “a mere sensuous mark on paper” on the one hand, and the same sign as far as it “counts as an understood sign” (gilt als ein Zeichen, das wir verstehen) on the other.6 Wittgenstein does not deny that this contrast is a fact. He would agree as well with Husserl’s basic observation that, when one goes from the mere perception of the physical object that is a sign, to its perception as an understood sign – “no new, independent (psychic) content (‘kein neuer psychischer Inhalt’) is added to the old”. In other words: understanding is in no way the mere recollection of a psychic content to be associated with what is given. These associations may certainly help in some cases – understanding can piggyback on them; but they are not understanding itself. 4 In order to trace this distinction consistently, I correct the official translation, that renders ‘Verständnis’ by ‘understanding’ – which is perfectly in order. 5 Wittgenstein 2013, 134. 6 Husserl 2001, 209.

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For a long time, I was fascinated by Husserl’s anti-empiricist analysis of understanding, which (mis)led me to read it as being very close to Wittgenstein’s. When the founder of phenomenology strongly debunks the view according to which “to understand means to meet with pertinent mental pictures”, and primarily targets this view, I was happy to perceive an affinity between the perspectives of both philosophers, as equally critical ones. However, the fact that Verständnis is not given, in the sense that philosophers traditionally ascribe to this expression, i.e. does not boil down to the experience of any ‘content’, far from saving us from the myth of understanding, may turn out to be the very basis of this myth. Because it seems to leave us with a puzzle: how should “a symbol, a word, a sentence, a formula be understood, while nothing intuitive is present, beyond the mindless sensible body of thought (der geistlose sinnliche Körper des Gedankens), the sensible stroke on paper”7? In fact, the lack of an intuitive content with which the presentation of Ver­ ständnis could be identified may lead us to interpret it as some kind of enigmatic transcendent activity. This is indeed what Husserl calls ‘intentionality’, interpreted as a psychic performance and an act. As everybody knows, in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, semantic intention (Bedeutungsintention), introduced in the Ist Investigation, serves as the test case of intentionality. Now, Husserl names this intention ‘ver­ stehen’. To this one may object that, in ordinary language, verstehen – to understand – primarily refers to the reception and identification of meaning by a hearer or reader. The phenomenologist replies explicitly in the footnote to §23: I am not here restricting the use of the word ‘understanding’ to the hearer-speaker relation. The soliloquizing thinker ‘understands’ his words, and this understanding is simply his act of meaning them (das aktuelle Bedeuten).8

I am not going to elaborate here on this strange assimilation between meaning (Bedeuten) and understanding (Verstehen). Usually, a speaker is certainly assumed to understand what she says. This idea, however, makes sense only insofar as, sometimes, one might be under the impression that she does not. In fact, it is a feature of signs that sometimes we may not understand what we say by using them. It would be nonetheless nonsensical to infer from this that there should positively be something additional to do when we are speaking, that is to say: to understand what we say, as if some understanding were required on our part additionally to speaking. To say so would imply that one only assimilates 7 Husserl 2001, 208. 8 Husserl 2001, 321.

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the speaker to the role of a receiver in relation to her own speech. This, to some extent, might turn out to be true; but not primarily, only secondarily true: as a matter of fact, the kind of facts on which some philosophers feed (for instance, that I hear myself speaking and understand or do not understand what I say) are interesting only because, in the standard situation, my relation to the meaning of what I say does not depend primarily on that reception: I do not understand it primarily, but I mean it. Whether I understand it or not is interesting only because, in the first place, I mean it. Then, in some cases, the question might arise as to the identification (or its lack) between what ‘I mean’ and what ‘I understand’ – as when one means something and, struck by the oddness of the words in one’s mouth, hears oneself ‘say something she does not understand’. Now, to be sure, it is not Husserl’s purpose here to reduce meaning to under­ standing – I mean by this understanding in the distinctively receptive sense of the term – but the simple fact that he takes the liberty of straining the concept of understanding to the extent that it may encompass any kind of act by virtue of which sense is provided, is certainly one side of ‘the myth of understanding’. As soon as understanding is separated from the particular conditions under which it makes sense for someone to understand or not to understand a certain thing, one runs the risk of falling prey to this myth, understanding being treated as a capacity to be exercised unconditionally and not, for instance, just when one is addressed by someone else – or at least experiences the expression of someone else’s9 meaning. Wittgenstein does not want to indulge in such unrestricted use of the verb ‘verstehen’. Thus, he “brings back (this word) from (its) metaphysical to (its) everyday use”,10 refusing to exploit it in cases in which, in ordinary language, we would not. The unrestricted generalization of the use of ‘Verstehen’ points towards something like a faculty of sense, or at least the presence of an act that would be responsible for sense wherever there is sense. It is indeed what surfaces in the passage of Husserl’s first Logical Investigation, expressing most typically the myth of Verständnis: We do not at all think that, where symbols are understood without the aid of accompanying images, the mere symbol alone is present: we think rather that an understanding (das Ver­ ständnis), a peculiar act-experience (Akterlebnis) relating to the expression, is present, that it shines through the expression, that it lends it meaning and thereby a relation to objects.11

9 Who might be herself, but who is still in that case functionally someone else. 10 See Wittgenstein 1958, 48. 11 Husserl 2001, 208–209.

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Verständnis opportunely appears in order to overcome the lack of associated intuitive experience. We have traded an act for an experience. Now, it is unclear whether we are at this point better off. First, we should observe that this act itself is described as, in some sense, an experience: an Akterlebnis. Second, there are reasons to doubt that there is anything like this ‘Akt’. As a matter of fact, in ordinary language, we do not use the verb verstehen to signify the description of a real process as much as we use it as a normative term for measuring the fact that we have received a sequence of symbols correctly – thus, as they are supposed to be received. A certain philosophy introduces ‘Verständnis’ as an enigmatic capacity (ein Vermögen) that is supposed to be at work everywhere where sense (Sinn) is experienced or given. We should, however, ask: can sense ever be ‘experienced’? Can it ever be ‘given’ by proceeding in a definite way, by following certain rules? Now, Wittgenstein’s point against the myth of Verständnis is that, if we want to make sense of verstehen, we do not need to introduce anything like such an ‘act’. This move would, indeed, not explain anything, and even worse: as everything that does not bring any explanation in philosophy, it makes the situation more obscure. A famous passage from Wittgenstein’s Cambridge Lectures, targeting the myth of the meaning-body (Bedeutungskörper), makes things very clear. In this passage, Wittgenstein writes that “one cannot deduce the geometry of the cube from looking at the cube. Rules do not follow from an act of comprehension”.12 To put it simply, one might contrast a view according to which the rule is just the explicitation of Verständnis, as the ungreifbares Vermögen by which sense is grasped, and one according to which verstehen is just to proceed following the rule or, in other words, to apply the rule. In many texts, Wittgenstein insists that there is no real verstehen when there is no actual capacity to apply the rule. For instance, in the series of remarks dedicated to ‘understanding a command’ in the Big Typescript, the philosopher questions a picture of understanding according to which it would be some kind of precondition for being able to obey a command. He affirms: “there can be no intermediate step between grasping a command and following it”.13 Whatever intermediate step should be taken between the reception of signs and our actual reaction to them, as far as the latter is correct, is exactly what should be called Verständnis, according to the philosophical mythology of Verständnis. Now, Wittgenstein tells us that we do not need that: there is Verstehen only where we are actually able to use the signs, that is to say to react correctly to them, and before

12 Wittgenstein 1979, 69. 13 Wittgenstein 2013, 14.

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this there is nothing: as long as we do not know what to do about it, we simply have not understood. As Wittgenstein puts it in another part of the Big Typescript, there is no point in deriving “the execution from the sign plus comprehension (Verständnis)”.14 Comprehension is nothing magical that, added to the sign, will tell us what to do with it. It is because and as far as we know what to do with the sign that we understand it. So far for demythologizing ‘comprehension’. Thus, it seems, it would be possible to contrast a philosophy of Verständnis and a philosophy of verstehen – as normative practice, or, maybe, more exactly, one aspect of a normative practice. There is nothing but actual verstehen, and actual verstehen is on the side of our capacity to respond correctly to signs, not of some abstract grasping of ‘sense’. In other words, there is no other understanding than playing by the rule. It still remains that Wittgenstein, within this very framework, seems sometimes to make a certain distinction between understanding (verstehen) and comprehension (Verständnis). To be sure, in his view, Verständnis is nothing else than the simple capacity to understand, thus nothing separate from the actual exercise of verstehen – not any power upstream of actual verstehen. However, in this case we need a further analysis of verstehen. In §§531–533 of the Philosophical Investigations, with which we started, the philosopher refuses explicitly to make room for substantially different meanings of ‘verstehen’. However, there might be the case that the use of this word entails at least different dimensions – which is at stake in the same series of paragraphs, which distinguish indeed between two sorts of ‘cases’. From this point of view, it is probably not incidental that, in dealing with this diversity of dimensions, the philosopher is led to slip from using the term ‘understanding’ (verstehen) to the term ‘comprehension’ (Verständnis). It might be the case that there is a certain kind of problem surrounding verstehen that tends to be interpreted in terms of ‘comprehension’ (Verständnis). In other words, if it seems clear that we cannot exclude the understanding of what is not substitutable or translatable, like a musical theme or a poem, from the realm of understanding, the fact that understanding can also be this may reveal a dimension that is in fact present in every act of understanding, but which we usually do not notice, masked as it is by the routine of understanding. ‘Comprehension’ may not be a bad term to designate this original dimension. In order to make sense of this idea, we should tackle an issue that allows us to get a grip on the diverse dimensions of the notion of ‘understanding’: the one of the failures

14 Wittgenstein 2013, 278.

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of understanding which plays a major role in Wittgenstein’s analysis of understanding. It appears that the philosopher, in his reflections on understanding, systematically distinguishes between two kinds of failure. Maybe ‘to understand’ always means the same, but it still seems that, to some extent, there are different senses in which one may ‘not understand’ (nicht verstehen). Wittgenstein gives this example of the difference between someone who is unable to recognize what is pictured in a painted picture and the one who cannot even understand how it works: how something is supposed to be pictured in a picture.15 I think we can perfectly make sense of this example: who has not experienced this situation in which, because she is confronted with an unusual way of representing things, she is not able to make sense of the grammar of the picture? Now, it seems that not to understand the grammar of the picture and not to understand the picture are not the same, since it is possible to understand the former without understanding the latter. This happens when I know how it works and I am, in principle, able to let it work: this kind of picture works this way; yet, for one reason or another (for instance, I have never seen the kind of object that is pictured before), I am not able, in this particular case, to understand what it is about. Of course, one consequence of our previous reflections is that someone who would never be able to recognize anything in the picture could not seriously be said to understand the grammar of the picture either. To say otherwise would lead us back to the mythology of comprehension as operating upstream of actual understanding. There is no ‘comprehension’ of a grammar but for the capacity to let it work in actuality. Of course, this does not mean that we never fail in exercising this capacity. Sometimes we really do not manage to understand; but, then, we do not understand precisely in the way of people who, on the whole, understand. This failure of understanding only makes sense against a background of understanding. To this case we can contrast the one in which we have not entered this game of understanding –for instance, when we just cannot read the two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional things, because we have never been trained to do so. In order to capture this difference, Wittgenstein makes use of the words Mißverständnis (misunderstanding) and Unverständnis (lack of understanding) respectively.16 Intuitively, the distinction is rather easy to make: it is not the same not to understand correctly, and not to understand at all. On the one hand, what makes misunderstanding possible is the fact that one is already using a language,

15 Wittgenstein 2013, 7. 16 Wittgenstein 2013, 32.

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an thus proceeds according to its rules (its ‘grammar’). One’s misunderstanding, within the logical space opened up by this grammar, can be interpreted as a mistake. On the other hand, mere lack of understanding is something different. It means that one has not even made a step within this logical space. Thus, lack of understanding, to be sure, is more radical. However, one should not miss that it is a mere lack – a mere privation, marked by the prefix Un-: Unverständnis – denoting nothing positive. Unverständnis is not a failed understanding: in this case, there simply is no understanding – even if we believe that we understand something. The difference between the two kinds of failure to understand becomes manifest in the fact that they respectively call for different remedies. In Manuscript 116 of the Nachlaß, Wittgenstein writes: “against misunderstanding, explanation (Erklärung) proves helpful, against the lack of understanding, training (Abrichtung)”.17 The example that he gives in support of this affirmation is highly interesting, because it is an example of animal lack of understanding – that is to say: of a lack of understanding between animals: Once, in a farm, I saw how a wolf-dog wanted to play with a pig. It ran a bit, crouched ready to jump, barked – he wanted to invite the pig to join in. The pig looked once at the barking and then went on its way. It had understood nothing.18

The implication of this anecdote seems to be as follows: if an animal may lack understanding, then understanding might consist in training (Abrichtung in the sense in which this word, in German, primarily applies to animals). Of course, it is not explicit in the example cited above whether or not the pig had been been trained to play with the dog in the way the dog wanted, and Wittgenstein, in the same context, asks this trivial question that plays a role in the drafts of the Philo­ sophical Investigations as well: is it possible to train a cat? As is well known, what works with dogs does not work necessarily with cats. Anyway, it is highly significant that the question of the lack of understanding and its possible overcoming by training (Abrichtung) finds its illustration in an anecdote about (domestic) animal life here. In this sense, understanding is something that seems to depend on the ‘animal’ part of our life. Not in the sense of some kind of ‘animal intuition’ – instinct – but of our natural capacity to be trained, driven by elementary reactions. This is true to the extent that to learn to understand is, in the first place, to learn to do something – to react in the correct way. Now, to teach someone to do 17 Wittgenstein 2003, vol. VII, 35. 18 Wittgenstein 2003, vol. VII, 35.

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something does not rely on explanation but on training. Understanding as the ability to play by certain rules should be embodied, acquired by regular practice. In the absence of such practice, there is mere lack of understanding. This is the sense in which, for instance, we ‘do not understand’ medieval modal music (Wittgenstein MS 133 33r edited in Wittgenstein 2003 gives this as an example of Unverständnis): this can be explained to us many times, regarding what it is, and still we will not understand it. To understand it is to learn how to listen to it, and this can only result from regular practice: from intensive training. Because the point is no longer, for instance, whether we have identified the correct chord in this passage of the piece or not, but whether or not we should, in fact, listen to ‘chords’. What should we listen to?: there is no answer to this question but the one provided by ear-training. only thus may we finally “hear something new, something (we) haven’t heard before”.19 Finally, we “feel (empfinden) the ending of a church mode as an ending”.20 We now return to our initial quotation from the Philosophical Investigations. When Wittgenstein rhetorically asks21: “how does one lead anyone to comprehension of a poem or of a theme?”, the implied answer is certainly: by training. You can be trained to receive poetry as you can be trained to hear music – this is one of the things one generally tries to do at school. Thus training is the key to what Wittgenstein calls ‘Verständnis’ in this passage. The previous remark22 should, however, be taken very seriously: there are not two different meanings of ‘understanding’, and it would be a mistake to conclude that this point about ‘comprehension’ only concerns poems and musical themes. In fact, comprehension is just one side of understanding in general. When I am able to explain something, that is to say, to translate it into words – which usually means to translate some words into other words – it is because, in the first place, I am in a context in which I know what to do, how to proceed. In this kind of context only it is possible to talk of an ‘explanation’. In this sense, “Understanding a sentence (of language) is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think”23: ‘Verständnis’ is a universal dimension of ‘verstehen’. This does not mean that it should be anything that logically precedes ‘ver­ stehen’, in the sense that it could exist independent of any actual verstehen – as if I knew a language without being able to say anything about anything in it. This 19 Wittgenstein 2013, 322. 20 Wittgenstein 1958, §535, 144. 21 Wittgenstein 1958, §533, 144. 22 Wittgenstein 1958, §532. 23 Wittgenstein 1958, §527, 143.

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means rather that ‘Verständnis’ is a logical side of any actual verstehen itself, as far as the latter is contrasted to the possibility of Unverständnis: that is to say, to be out of the game of verstehen as to what is at stake, due to lack of practice.

References Husserl, Edmund, 2001: Logical Investigations, translated by J.N. Findlay, volume 1, London, Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1958: Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E. Anscombe, 2nd ed., Oxford, Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1979: Wittgenstein’s Lectures. Cambridge 1932–1935, edited by Alice Ambrose, Oxford, Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2003: Wittgensteins Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA: InteLex Corporation, 2003. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2013: The Big Typescript: TS 213, edited and translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue, Oxford, Blackwell.

Emil Angehrn

Understanding, Understanding Oneself, Self-Understanding Hermeneutic Considerations Proceeding from Wilhelm Dilthey Abstract: Wilhelm Dilthey defines the specific nature of understanding utilizing two aspects: on the one hand, understanding is a comprehension of connections, typically regarding the relation between a whole and its parts. Understanding captures the meaning of something according to this relation: We understand an episode from its function within a story, a text from its words and sentences. On the other hand, understanding consists of understanding something as an expression. We understand cultural and historical facts as objectifications of individual and social life. The triad life-expression-understanding forms the structural framework of hermeneutics. Eventually, understanding implies self-understanding. Therefore autobiography, for Dilthey, is the paradigm of understanding. Keywords: understanding, understanding oneself, explaining, reference, autobiography

1 Understanding and Explaining “Nature we explain, the mind we understand.”1 Thus Wilhelm Dilthey – as do other neo-Kantian philosophers – characterises the difference between the human and the natural sciences in his 1894 Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology. The accentuation of the concept of understanding makes clear that Dilthey does not use it in the ordinary, common- sensically broad sense. In such a broad sense, understanding means grasping relations of any kind, in various domains of reality. Here, the concepts of understanding and explaining have overlapping scopes – they do not stand in opposition to one another. Dilthey obviously has a narrower concept of understanding in mind, where understanding aims at mental or ‘inner’ things and proceeds from their innermost core, such as a motivation or an intention. This conception of understanding is often associated with certain cognitive acts, such as empathising with another or putting

1 Dilthey, 1990, 139–240, here p. 144; Dilthey, 2010, 115–210. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-004

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oneself in another’s shoes, but is also dismissed in philosophy of science.2 In many contexts, we are familiar with speaking of genuine understanding that comprehends the sense of its object rather than merely registering or classifying it. Equally, the aforementioned differentiation of methods has remained up to the present in manifold variations, e.g. in opposing phenomenological and empirical description, internal and external perspective, or quantitative and qualitative analyses, and in the debate concerning the naturalisation of the mind. We owe a systematically elaborated position in exploring this terrain to Wilhelm Dilthey. In his Introduction to the Human Sciences from 1883,3 Dilthey decisively articulates the project of re-establishing the human sciences, aiming at liberating them both from their “old subservience to metaphysics” and their “new subordination to the natural science”.4 Pivotal elements of this foundation are the “inner experience” and the “facts of consciousness”. Its point of reference, however, is not the abstract intellect and its functions, but the whole human being as “this willing, feeling, representing being”; not “mere representation”, but “life”.5 Thus, Dilthey’s re-foundational project marks a significant shift away from established epistemology. In The Formation of the Histor­ ical World in the Human Sciences, Dilthey systematically carries out the foundation he has announced in the Introduction, at the same time postulating an emphatic concept of understanding that considers understanding not as an isolated intellectual operation, but as being intimately coupled with life. The “connection of life, expression and understanding” constitutes the structural core of the human sciences: facts about the historical and cultural world are its object “insofar as [therein] human states are being experienced, become manifest in articulations of life, and insofar as these expressions are understood.”6 Explicating the act of understanding in its specific logic and systematic significance must proceed from this structure.

2 Internal Perspective and Reference to the Subject Understanding something – in contrast to merely noticing and describing it from an external perspective – means engaging with the internal perspective of that which is 2 The locus classicus being Abel, 1948, 211–218. 3 Dilthey, 1966, XVII. English: Dilthey, 1989. 4 Dilthey, 1966, XV. 5 Dilthey, 1966, XVII–XIX. 6 Dilthey, 1970, English: Dilthey, 2010a, Works III. Page numbers in the following text refer to the German edition.

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to be understood. Paradigmatically, it means understanding something as a subject’s expression or utterance. The utterance can be a report by which the subject wants to give a piece of information. Here, it is possible to ask what the subject ‘means’, what the utterance – or the subject, respectively – ‘intends to say’. But the utterance can be made without an intention to give a piece of information; it can articulate a wish, an intention, a mood, whose manifestation thus becomes the utterance itself. In each case, understanding means grasping the utterance from the wishing, intending, or acting subject’s perspective. Understanding means comprehending which action someone performs with a particular instance of behaviour, with a certain movement of his body. Understanding involves a fundamentally reflexive approach to its object insofar as it accounts for the sense the utterance has for its subject. Yet, understanding does not imply referring to the subject’s conscious intention. It is possible that the subject expresses or communicates something to others without being aware of it, much less being able to name it. His intention can be unclear to himself, he can be wrong about what he expresses, or even about what he means or actually wants. In extreme cases, such as understanding an ideologically biased subject or a pathological symptom, an act of understanding retains reservations concerning what the acting and speaking subject means. This kind of understanding is the topic of Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of suspicion. But also in the ‘ordinary’ case, understanding cannot simply rely on the subject’s manifest intention. The author’s intention is not the ultimate yardstick for substantially interpreting a text. More generally, the acting and speaking subject confronts the problem of becoming clear about what his utterance ought to express prior to making an utterance with a definite sense. Utterances equally serve to clarify one’s own thoughts and doings as they serve to communicate the result. The purpose of looking for the right expression, that is, does not only consist in finding the right way of putting one’s thoughts into words or one’s intentions into action, but first and foremost in shaping one’s thoughts and intentions with clarity and precision. Understanding must take an utterance’s provisional character into account insofar as it aims at disclosing what the subject really means or wants. Nonetheless, understanding in this case, too, means grasping the sense an utterance has in principle for the subject and from the subject’s point of view, i.e. even if the subject himself is not entirely clear about that very sense. In a broader sense, this model of understanding also applies to understanding artefacts, cultural practices, and institutions. Identifying a convention as a graduation ceremony, conceiving an instance of handshaking as a greeting or agreement, amounts to grasping the respective meanings of these events. Describing them adequately must account for their self-description, i.e. the way in which the subjects who are involved in the practice at issue, concerned by a story or operating with a certain object, would themselves describe their doings. Although this self-description

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can be disputable or false, it ontologically belongs to the object of understanding, and understanding the object covers more than registering its objectively measurable characteristics. It equally covers grasping the object’s being embedded in functional connections to acting, suffering and expressing subjects. As a minimal condition, understanding comprises grasping objects within a subject’s spaces of experience, action and resonance with reference to the subject himself. This is what distinguishes understanding from non-understanding descriptions most broadly. This minimal condition, however, does not specify as to what understanding itself, as a cognitive operation, is, how this operation ‘works’, what enables it to grasp its object, and what it is in which its genuine capacity of disclosing consists.

3 Understanding as Understanding Connections We can approach an answer to these questions by drawing on conceptions explicating understanding not primarily in terms of relevance to the subject, but in terms of objectively obtaining relations. As a minimal definition along these lines, understanding means grasping a connection. Understanding primarily and genuinely understands connections.7 It establishes intelligibility, i.e. it renders a phenomenon or a theory intelligible by emphasising certain relations in such a manner that the object of understanding gains a certain shape and is illuminated in a certain way. This presents a common denominator of all kinds of understanding and explaining which differ with respect to the factors and relations they consider relevant, and the disputation thereof constitutes the disputation of scientific methods. A particular variety of understanding connections, i.e. as understanding contexts, is presented in Wilhelm Dilthey’s model which interprets the context as a context of meaning and explicates understanding as understanding meaning. The paradigmatic object of this kind of understanding is a story; the paradigmatic framework according to which the manifold is grasped in its connectedness is the relation of parts and whole. This relation, ever since a fundamental schema of ontology, equally presents a privileged hinge between logical-ontological and hermeneutic conceptions. The interplay between part and whole is reflected in the figure of the hermeneutic circle. Understanding unfolds in their interdependence, in which the part “has meaning only in its connectedness with the whole”, and “the whole only exists for us insofar as it becomes intelligible from its parts.

7 Oliver Scholz, 2016, 17–32.

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Understanding always hovers between both perspectives”.8 Proceeding from either side, i.e. from the side of the part or of the whole, their relation illuminates aspects that are genuinely relevant for understanding. Proceeding from the whole, the real constitution of the context at issue comes into view. Dilthey specifies it as a “context of effects”,9 defining it by the agency of a creating and expressing life. Coupling the relation of the whole to the part with the idea of force and its expression opens the possibility of simultaneously grasping this relation according to the relationship between the inner and the outer, the expressed and its expression, which is fundamental to hermeneutics. Life, insofar as it yields effects, expresses itself in these; as a whole, it becomes manifest in individual “objectifications of life”10 that constitute the object of the human sciences. Proceeding from the other side, the part, the relation, primarily appears as a context of cognition and understanding in which it is intertwined with the category of meaning. Understanding something as a part of a whole, as an episode of a story, means grasping its significance for the whole, its function for what happens on a more comprehensive level, e.g. its functioning as the beginning, the inversion, or the completion of a project. This description of understanding converges with a hermeneutic connection by its phrasing only. Grasping something in its function for something else means presenting it in its meaning or meaningfulness for the latter: The functional relation is projected onto an epistemological relation, in which meaning is a correlate of understanding. With respect to the original question, it remains open as to what understanding, grasped as understanding meaning, consists in, and to what extent the aforementioned reflexivity and subject-relatedness is brought to bear. Moreover, the relation between the two directions of understanding, proceeding from the whole and from the part, is still in need of explication, and so is the question as to whether and in which sense they reach beyond the circularity of mutual reference.

4 Sense and Meaning Now it becomes clear that Dilthey here does not merely envision a symmetric reflection. This may seem so at the surface insofar as we understand something in the light of its larger context which we in turn interpret with respect to its ele8 Dilthey, 1970, 288. 9 Dilthey, 1970, 186. 10 Dilthey, 1970, 180.

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ments. In some sense, this inversion is inevitable insofar as the first direction of understanding may involve several stages and is potentially open-ended: A story presenting the horizon of meaning for a particular event is understood as a part of a larger process and so forth. We can continue this interpretation as an iterating interlacing of different levels up to the vanishing point of universal history which, itself being all-encompassing, is explicable only in the reverse direction, by reference to the framework of its constitutive elements. So far, we are concerned with two complementary, oppositely proceeding implementations of understanding within the framework provided by the relation between part and whole. However, Dilthey does not content himself with this way of closing the regress. Rather, he answers the seemingly aporetic question as to how the whole ought to be understood in itself with a conceptual differentiation: He distinguishes the meaning of the part from the sense inherent in the “whole as the bearer of values and purposes”.11 The meaning refers to the relevance of a part within a whole whereas the sense concerns the whole as such: We understand the relevance of an episode, and the sense of a story. Admittedly, the terminological distinction of sense and meaning itself is not very illuminating for the problem, the more so since Dilthey himself does not strictly observe it and since it has not prevailed in either everyday or scientific language (though there have been suggestions made to this effect, e.g. by Frege12). Conceptually, Dilthey connects this distinction with a differentiation concerning the temporal orientation of life. Accordingly, we grasp the meaning of life by retrospective remembering whereas, in the present, we experience the positive or negative value of things and extend to the future in the category of pur­ pose.13 That is, understanding meaning originally occurs in instances of referring to the past. Importantly, the narrowest unity of the context of life is constituted in instances of this kind of reference, whereas the various purposes and values forming our lives when relating to present and future remain separate, side by side.14 Alongside its temporal form, another structural characteristic of understanding is important, which relates to the aforementioned reflexivity: the subject-referentiality inherent in understanding. The sense of history, in contrast to the meaning of its parts, does not consist in having meaning-for-something-else.

11 Dilthey, 1970, 206. 12 Frege (1898), 1980, 56–78. Frege distinguishes the meaning of a name (the object it refers to) from the sense of an expression or sentence (the way in which the object is presented), as in his famous example of the planet Venus that is presented as the morning or the evening star, respectively, depending on the time of day at which it is observed. 13 Dilthey, 1970, 248. 14 Dilthey, 1970, 248f., 292.

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It is nothing but the sense of history in and for itself. The sense of history does not exceed history, but refers back to it, in a sense back into it. More precisely, the sense of history must be determined as sense-for-the-subject whereby the subject here needs not be thought of as an actual agent, but rather serves as the formal subject of reference of history. It presents what is at issue in a story and whose history is constituted in a particular course of events. That the whole in this way refers back to the elements whose collective entirety it constitutes – as the story refers back to the subject whose story is at issue and which constitutes its identity from within the story – is, as Dilthey emphasises, an essential trait of understanding. In virtue of the connection life-expression-understanding, understanding proceeds from the part to the whole, relating the “outer, the particular event to something inner” whose expression it is. Transitioning from part to whole does not reduce to a simple process of going out, but extends to the actions of returning, going into oneself. Referring back to the inner, however, is more than structurally adjusting to the centre. It constitutes the core of a personal self-relation which, again, is a condition for the unified whole in question. The parts of a context of life belong to one another only insofar as they refer to a person, a “self”, and a life, to which they “belong”.15 The reference to the subject in question is more than an outer reference to a subject for whom the parts are meaningful. Rather, it is a reference to a self which is realised eventually as self-reference. That the unity of the context in which sense is established and the identity of the subject are related must be conceived from an internal perspective, from the subject’s point of view whose life-story is at issue.16 What it is that actually constitutes the unity of the story and the sense of the whole cannot, in the end, be disclosed other than by reference to the subject’s self-referentiality. Just as the subject is not isolable from its story, the form the story takes cannot be separated from the reference to the subject of the story and its self-relatedness.17

15 Dilthey, 1970, 301, 240. 16 Similarly, Heidegger relates the world’s “connectedness of involvement” and the “significance” of understanding to the human being as their eventual “for-the-sake-of-which”: Heidegger, 1962, §§31, 69. 17 Paul Ricœur presents the inseparability of the constitution of the subject from the story whilst simultaneously highlighting the interplay of two forms of narrative identity, which he specifies as “mêmeté” and “ipséité”: Ricœur, 1985, 352–358; Ricœur, 1990, 167–180.

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5 Autobiography and Self-Understanding The intimate connectedness between the subject and its story constitutes the core of Dilthey’s eminent thesis, which emphasises the privileged status of the autobiography: “The autobiography is the utmost and most instructive form in which we encounter the understanding of life”.18 The core of this connectedness is the internal entanglement of life and its reflexive self-presentation. Historical life is not exhausted by being subject to an outer process of becoming, but always takes place in the dimensions of realising, remembering and projecting oneself. (A subject’s) Story and history do not proceed in separation from each other, they mutually permeate one another, as existentially reassuring oneself is not different from one’s conduct of life, but an integral element of it. It is important to note that the connectedness in question is a bidirectional one and must be read as such. As life is not lived independently of becoming self-aware and orienting oneself reflexively, reflection, too, is not accomplished in separation from the internal motion and self-referentiality of life. Dilthey emphasises this issue with respect to the logic of historiography, whose way of unifying and structuring its matter is modelled on and rooted in the way individual lives are shaped. Here, “a context has been formed in life itself” by life’s integrating the multitude of particular experiences into selective structures: “That is, the work of historiography has been halfway done by life itself”.19 Yet, this is not only about the premises of historiography. The concept of autobiography paradigmatically stands for the irreducibility of relating to oneself in understanding. True understanding has to recognise and articulate the manifestations of life from the subject’s self-referential perspective as the medium of the subject’s expressing itself and giving shape to its life. Before I come to tracing how this thought is reflected in Dilthey’s theory of the human sciences, I want to extend the self-referentiality of understanding with a further step, thereby going beyond Dilthey’s conception. Interlocking understanding and understanding oneself, Dilthey in substance touches considerations in existential hermeneutics which, coming from the other side, conceives of understanding as a fundamental principle of being oneself as a subject. Continuously developing a picture and an understanding of oneself and the world belongs to human life. Understanding oneself means more than formal self-reference or knowledge of one’s own states and characteristics. It rather amounts to a kind of self-exploration aiming at theoretically and practically exploring and coming

18 Dilthey, 1970, 246. 19 Dilthey, 1970, 247.

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to terms with oneself. The scope of its manifestations ranges from biographical remembering and searching one’s conscience to psychoanalytic self-enlightenment and active self-understanding which includes projecting oneself, critically scrutinising oneself, and constructive self-formation. Human existence takes place in the dimensions of understanding and self-understanding which converge to the achievement of an understanding way of reflecting on oneself. Paul Ricœur has articulated this basic thought as a hermeneutic of the self; Charles Taylor has shaped the phrase of human beings as self-interpreting animals; Dieter Henrich has spelled out the concept of self-understanding (Selbstverständigung) as the guiding idea of subjective being-oneself.20 Self-understanding is both the environmental realisation of understanding and the mutual permeation of life and reflection in individual cases: It is a kind of self-understanding that is equally constitutive for as it roots in and develops from one’s conduct of life.

6 The Objectifications of Life and the Human Sciences The triad life-expression-understanding articulates the origin of the self-referentiality of life as well as the foundation of the human sciences. Dilthey defines their unified object as the “objectification of life”.21 Clearly, his theory follows the general line of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit wherein the cultural-historical world presents nothing but the external realisation of spirit in the world. Dilthey’s theorem of the objectification of life apparently transforms the Hegelian conception of the objective spirit. The forms objective spirit materially adopts – for instance, political institutions or the force of history – instantiate it as it proceeds from subjective interiority to manifest realisation in the world. However, the transformation between Hegel and Dilthey involves a significant shift of immediate concern for the thought developed in the foregoing. Among the objectifications of life, Dilthey does not only count what Hegel treats as ‘objective spirit’, but also what he treats as ‘absolute spirit’. Hegel distinguished the dimensions of arts, religion, science and philosophy from the institutions in which spirit is realised in the world as those dimensions in which spirit reassures itself and appears in its self-explication. The difference is analogous to the difference between the two uses of the word ‘culture’ in contemporary

20 Ricœur, 1990, 27ff.; Taylor, 1985, 45–76; Henrich, 1999; Henrich, 2001; Henrich, 2007. 21 Dilthey, 1970, 177f.

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language. In the broad sense used in cultural studies, ‘culture’ as opposed to ‘nature’ refers to whatever is the work of human beings, from street-building to opera. In the narrow sense, as implied by the terms ‘cultural affairs’ or ‘department of culture’, it means so-called ‘high culture’ as a form of presentation or reflection. We are concerned with two stages of transcending life as such: On the one hand, material externalisation as realisation and formation of life and, on the other hand, intentional expression as presentation and reflection of life. Subsuming both under the concept ‘objectifications of life’ and designating those as objects of humanistic understanding, as Dilthey does, plausibly converges them in both respects. For the material forms of objective spirit (such as an economic system) are comprehensible in terms of their inherent interpretations of life and, reversely, the instantiations of absolute spirit (such as a particular religion) equally adopt an institutional form in the world. In various cases, the two levels of manifestation overlap and merge into one another. Still, it is noteworthy that their functional roles differ. In one case, we are primarily concerned with actual manifestations and in the other case with instances of explication and reflexive understanding. The difference reveals where the model of expression fails to comprise all aspects of hermeneutics. The forms of spirit are more than objectifications in the sense of the manifestations of a force or the sedimentations of a (causally) effective nexus. Introducing the acts of manifesting and reassuring oneself into his concept of life-expressions, Dilthey underlines the moment of reflexivity that is not exhausted by formal self-reference, but extends to the cognitive act of disclosing and interpreting oneself. The phenomena of culture are not only expressions of life, but nodes of crystallisation in the process of human self-explication.

7 Double Reflexivity and Interminability of Understanding This view exceeds the reflexive loop of understanding as it was presented in the beginning. More is at stake than the act of perceiving a certain instance of behaviour from the agent’s point of view, although this certainly remains the basis and, in many cases, also the hinge of understanding. But there is more involved, in ordinary communication as well as in conducting one’s life. Reflexivity is not only relevant with respect to the object, but also to the act and the subject of understanding. This becomes manifest in instances of interactive exchange in which communication can be hampered by impenetrability and obscurity on both sides, the speaker’s and the hearer’s. Whoever is not at peace with himself

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has difficulties with understanding others and unravelling an intricate message – not for nothing is self-analysis the precondition of practicing psychoanalysis. A non-reductive explication of understanding must acknowledge the author and the reader, the speaker and the hearer as subjects who are constantly engaged in struggling with their own opacity and coming to terms with themselves. Generally, the constitution of sense which permeates the cultural world, thus making it the object of the human sciences, is a twofold reflexive and dialogical process. It involves acts of constituting and receiving sense, of producing, apprehending, interpreting and continuing contexts of sense, each of which is in need of disclosure and involves acts of self-explication. Understanding is not simply a particular intellectual operation (such as a subsumption under a general concept, a combination or integration of elements) and not a kind of intuitively assimilating or empathising with another’s experiencing either, but a kind of participating in a complex process of the reflexive constitution of sense. The human world, the object of the human sciences, is not adequately accounted for by understanding it as an assemblage of formations and sediments of life and materialisations of sense. It fundamentally presents a process, participation in which, as agents and recipients, constitutes the act of understanding and interpreting. Human life, as it proceeds within the dimension of culture, participates in this process by acting and speaking, receiving and interpreting, creating and producing. At the same time, the reflexivity of this process brings to bear its openness and infinity. Contemporary hermeneutics has emphatically called attention to this aspect of constituting sense. The interminability of interpreting has been addressed under different aspects by authors like Ricœur and Gadamer. It can find roots in what Ricœur describes as the inexhaustible potential to make sense inherent to symbols, texts, and works of art that have to be experienced and apprehended, whose meaning has to be disclosed and brought into shape time and again. It can equally emerge from the infinite mediateness of understanding, from the incongruity of the frameworks of language and meaning, which remains even in most successful acts of communicating and translating, from the irreducible otherness of I and You. Not least because of the subject’s remaining mediate and alien to itself, translation and communication with others never comes to an end. Gadamer has carried this insight into the constitution of sense, all the way up to the formula that his own work on hermeneutics was essentially concerned with, “rehabilitating ‘malicious infinity’”.22 In addition, Jacques Derrida has emphasised the outward non-seclusiveness of sense and called attention to the mutual permeation

22 Gadamer, 1970a, 505; Gadamer, 1970b, 8; Gadamer, 1970c, 135.

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of sense, medium and material, text and context, all of which he regards as elements of never-ending, deconstructive reading. Obviously, more contemporary authors reach beyond Dilthey’s hermeneutics with regard to sounding and founding infinite understanding. It is, however, interesting in what manner they continue Dilthey’s project, to what extent they take up and advance his themes. Dilthey, too, emphasises the limits of understanding that are effective in the potential infinity of every process of understanding, “which can never be realised completely”.23 As one reason for this infiniteness, he presents the fact that experiencing itself is “unfathomable” and that, hence, the task to illuminate and articulate it is “never-ending”.24 Another reason is that the claim for clearly grasping another person’s thoughts is unsatisfactory because their “individual ways of combining” is not demonstrable, but at most only “divinatorily” conjecturable.25 As a final and general reason, the transition from elemental understanding of utterances to spiritual understanding sense harbours various uncertainties and obscurities.26 With regard to our guiding question, those complications which are due to the pursuit of self-knowledge and self-understanding are of special interest. If experiencing and understanding oneself constitute (are) the basis of hermeneutics, they cannot provide their certain or transparent foundation because, as Dilthey laconically says, “we do not understand ourselves”.27 Yet, “a man’s pondering himself” remains the “yardstick and foundation” of understanding.28 It is a kind of self-pondering viewed in a certain light, as autobiographical reflection “on one’s course of life”,29 that Dilthey considers here. It appears to him as “utmost explication” in the course of “comprehending and interpreting”,30 and he explains it with reference to classical paradigms in Augustine’s, Rousseau’s, and Goethe’s works. It is a kind of negotiating one’s own life by which one explores it in its guise, directedness, and value, which Dilthey explicates in its entirety in the light of historical understanding, as retrospectively becoming aware of oneself. Its complementary concept consists in prospectively projecting oneself and in finding practical orientation concerning one’s own wanting and doing. A complete instance of coming to terms with oneself would involve taking

23 Dilthey, 1970, 280. 24 Dilthey, 1970, 277. 25 Dilthey, 1970, 279. 26 Dilthey, 1970, 259. 27 Dilthey, 1970, 278. 28 Dilthey, 1970, 251. 29 Dilthey, 1970, 247. 30 Dilthey, 1970, 251.

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in both perspectives on one’s life, the theoretical and practical, the one related to the past and the other related to the future. Both elements together constitute the reflexive momentum of the kind of understanding which, exceeding the scope of formal self-reference, means understanding oneself in one’s own existence. That this constitutively belongs to the concept of understanding is one of Dilthey’s fundamental insights forming the potential of his hermeneutics. The reflexivity of understanding is an essential, maybe the decisive point that is involved in determining the infiniteness of understanding and makes Dilthey’s conception adaptable for later conceptions of understanding.

References Abel, Theodore, 1948: The Operation called Verstehen, American Journal of Sociology (54/3) Nov., 211–218. Dilthey, Wilhelm, 1966: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Erster Band, Gesammelte Schriften, Band I, Stuttgart: Teubner/Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Dilthey, Wilhelm, 1970: Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, introduction by ManfredRiedel, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. Dilthey, Wilhelm, 1989: Introduction to the Human Sciences, Selected Works I, 1989. Dilthey, Wilhelm, 1990: Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, Gesammelte Schriften, Band V, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 139–240. Dilthey, Wilhelm, 2010: Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology, in: Understanding the Human World, Selected Works II, R.A. Makkreel and F.Rodi (eds.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 115–210. Dilthey, Wilhelm, 2010a: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Selected Works III, 2010. Frege, Gottlob, 1980: On Sense and Meaning” (1898), in: Peter Geach, Max Black (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford, Blackwell, 56–78. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1970: Gesammelte Werke, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1970a: Selbstdarstellung, in: Gadamer, 1970, Vol. 2, 479–508, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1970b: Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik. Versuch einer Selbstkritik, in: Gadamer, 1970, Vol. 2, 3–23 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1970c: Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus, in: Gadamer, 1970, Vol. 10, 125–137. Heidegger, Martin, 1962: Being and Time, translation by JohnMcQuarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell. Henrich, Dieter, 1999: Bewusstes Leben. Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Subjektivität und Metaphysik, Stuttgart, Reclam Henrich, Dieter, 2001: Versuch über Kunst und Leben. Subjektivität – Weltverstehen – Kunst, München, Hanser. Henrich, Dieter, 2007: Denken und Selbstsein. Vorlesungen über Subjektivität, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp.

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Ricœur, Paul, 1985: Temps et récit, Tome III: Le temps raconté, Paris, Seuil. Ricœur, Paul, 1990: Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil. Scholz, Oliver, 2016: Verstehen = Zusammenhänge erkennen, in: Klaus Sachs-Hombach (ed.), Verstehen und Verständigung, Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 17–32.Taylor, Charles, 1985: Self-interpreting animals, in: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 45–76.

Christian Bermes

Towards a Performative Hermeneutics Wittgenstein and Husserl on the Understanding of Cultural Practices Abstract: Following Husserl’s analysis of lifeworld and Wittgenstein’s discussion of Frazer’s Golden Bough, this paper addresses the understanding of cultural practices. It proceeds on the assumption that the comprehension of cultural practices is grounded on a unique form of understanding and cannot be reduced to other types of understanding. Such a form of understanding relativizes the as-structure of classical hermeneutics to describe the pre-givenness and the commitment of cultural practices. A description that accomplishes this is called ‘performative hermeneutics’ in this article. It will here be shown that there is an understanding of commitments, a cultural or performative understanding, in which the as-structure does not play a primary role, but which becomes understandable only by canceling this structure. Keywords: hermeneutics, understand, cultural practices, performative hermeneutics, commitment, comprehension

1 Hermeneutics and Understanding of Cultural Practices Histories of reception are factually given in philosophy, but they could also be rearranged and re-enacted retrospectively. If, for instance, Wittgenstein’s Big Typescript had been chosen as the major point of reference for any examination, Wittgenstein might have been more influential in the hermeneutical tradition. The Big Typescript begins with a longer passage on understanding, which is only then followed by various thoughts on meaning. Hermeneutics would thus stand prior to the theory of meaning. The same is true for Husserl. The late reflections from the 20s and 30s relativize the harsh criticism of Dilthey’s hermeneutics and the so called “writers-philosophy” (Literaten­Philosophie) as it is brought forward by Husserl in his programmatic work Philosophy as Rigorous Science (Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft). In his lecture on anthropology from 1930, Husserl calls phenomenology hermeneutics, even if he does so with a very distinct use of the term. He says: “Real analysis of consciousness is hermeneutics of the life of consciousness, so to speak” (Echte Bewusstseinsanalyse ist sozusagen Hermeneutik https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-005

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des Bewusstsein). “We must put the thumbscrews not to nature (like Bacon), but to consciousness, or rather, to transcendental ego, so that it reveals to us its secrets” (Nicht der Natur (wie Bacon) muss man, sondern dem Bewusstsein bzw. dem transze­ ndentalen Ego Daumenschrauben anlegen, dass es uns seine Geheimnisse verrate).1 The adequate description and formulation of understanding forms indeed a continual question in Wittgenstein’s and Husserl’s philosophy. At the same time, however, both concepts are based on convictions that do not correspond to the classical hermeneutical tradition, and which thus have the potential to readjust systematically the concept of understanding. In the case of Wittgenstein and Husserl, this conceptual reorientation seems to become apparent in the description and understanding of cultural practices.2 I will try to show that both, with regard to culture, want to secure and comprehend the autonomy and irreducibility of cultural practices by applying a new concept of understanding I call ‘performative hermeneutics’. Speaking of ‘performative hermeneutics’ allows for two interpretations. On the one hand, hermeneutics is itself performative; on the other, the object of hermeneutics is marked by performance. I will concentrate on the second meaning here, without excluding the other.

2 The ‚as-structure‘ in Hermeneutics and in the Description of Cultural Practices “Nothing is so difficult as doing justice to the facts (Nichts ist so schwierig, wie Gerechtigkeit gegen die Tatsachen).”3 This remark by Wittgenstein can be read as a phenomenological imperative with regard to the description of culture.4 At the beginning of the 1930s, Wittgenstein discusses Frazer’s The Golden Bough and returns to this topic towards the end of his life, probably starting in 1946. Wittgenstein is interested in cultural facts at this point, whose description by Frazer he considers as an utter failure. Frazer does not fully grasp cultural facts. Instead, he gets stuck with interpretations and opinions about a particular culture without understanding the peculiarity of the phenomenon of culture. Culture does not constitute itself in or through constructions of a culturally distant intellectuality; culture also cannot be reduced to the empirical data of cultural history or ethnology; and, moreover, culture is not a sanctuary for a political or politicizing 1 Husserl, 1989, 177. 2 For the philosophy of culture, see Bermes, 2014, 85–99. 3 Wittgenstein, 1995, 35. 4 See Bermes, 2012, 138–144.

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sensemaking. Instead, you could say that culture is a performative occurrence of sense (Sinnereignis) with actions referring to actions. It is worthwhile to consider how Wittgenstein tries to embed and integrate his reflections on Frazer’s ethnological theses into his argumentation. In the manuscript, his criticism of Frazer is preceded by the following sentences: I now believe that it would be right to begin my work with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic. But in doing this I must not make a case for magic nor may I make fun of it. The depth of magic should be preserved. – Indeed, here the elimination of magic has itself the character of magic.5

The “elimination of magic has itself the character of magic”. It is this remark (with regard to the understanding of performative occurrences of sense within culture) that I am mostly concerned with in the following. The reference to this truism of Wittgenstein functions as a guideline for the following line of thought, even though Wittgenstein’s phrase will not always be explicit. The remark reminds one of Husserl’s tools of the Epoché, which makes it possible to shift from the assessment of existing objects to the description of intentional experiences. In the current context we can detect a changing viewpoint as well, but here with reference to actions that define themselves as cultural actions. The thoughts Wittgenstein stated in his discussion of ethnology serve as a guidepost and hint for the concept of a performative hermeneutics. The concept of performance will be understood as an adequate concept to describe cultural facts. However, the term ‘fact’ should not be abridged hastily in this context, because in the case of culture, facts appear as practices. For the ongoing chain of thought, it is also necessary to hint at a common mindset toward philosophical problems, which we find in Husserl and Wittgenstein. Although there are a number of differences between Wittgenstein and Husserl in terms of the realization of philosophical analysis, they surprisingly share the attitude that the given, which needs to be understood, is not lost in the analysis of understanding. Husserl and Wittgenstein doubtlessly share the conviction that above all philosophy (but also other sciences) is endangered by a fundamental, maybe inherent, and unavoidable difficulty. You easily stumble into this difficulty, because an alleged helplessness is supposed to be covered, concealed, or whitewashed. The helplessness, then, consists in giving an explanation

5 qt. In Wittgenstein, 1995, 141: „Ich glaube jetzt, dass es richtig wäre, mein Buch mit Bemerkun­ gen über die Metaphysik als eine Art von Magie zu beginnen. Worin ich aber weder der Magie das Wort reden, noch mich über sie lustig machen darf. Von der Magie müsste die Tiefe beibehalten werden. – Ja, das Ausschalten der Magie hat hier den Charakter der Magie selbst.“.

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of a thing instead of the thing itself, while stating that the explanation is more reliable than the thing itself. But it is this kind of method that leads to a distortion of facts, at least the cultural facts of the human world. It occurs when the explanation or interpretation of culture occupies the space of cultural practice. It is above all the theory of culture which is affected by this approach. Cultural practices do not gain their certainty from any explanation but – according to Husserl – from their ‘pre-giveness’ (Vorgegebenheit), which manifests itself in a form of practice that produces ‘practical’ commitments.6 It is the very conviction that cultural practices are ‘pre-given’ (vorgegeben) as practices of commitment which lies at the bottom of Husserl’s and Wittgenstein’s reflections. Husserl’s credo that the pure and mute experience must reveal its own meaning, as it is programmatically written in the Cartesian Meditations,7 refers to this kind of ‘pre-giveness’ and could also serve as an epigraph for one of Wittgenstein’s many unwritten books. After these preliminary considerations it is now possible to state my thesis in a more precise form: Following Wittgenstein and Husserl, the thesis I aim at suggests that in the context of the understanding of cultural practices, the “as­struc­ ture” of understanding is relativized, while the pre­giveness of cultural practices demanding their own commitment (Verbindlichkeit) is uncovered at the same time. Any description trying to show this I call performative hermeneutics. There seems to be an understanding of commitments, a cultural or performative understanding, in which the as-structure does not play a primary role and which becomes understandable only by deactivating this structure. I do not want to generalize this thesis; instead I claim that it applies for those kinds of cultural practices that constitute the infrastructure of culture. These are the kind of thoughts I link to the sentence: “The elimination of magic has itself the character of magic.” If hermeneutics is defined by its status as a science of understanding based on ‘as-structures’, the following reflections might lead to a new understanding of hermeneutics. Performance, as I understand it here, would serve as the principle for a new or other concept of hermeneutics, maybe a performative hermeneutics. I consider the phenomena of performance accordingly as a cultural occurrence of sense that is located beyond or on this side of the structure of understanding ‘something as something’. As I will subsequently show with reference to Husserl, these enownings of meaning do not call our attention to an as-structure, but to a structure of style and stylization. With the concept of performance, the

6 For the concept of commitment, see Bermes 2017, 51–65. 7 Husserl, 1963, 77.

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understanding of ‘something­as­something’ is replaced by a stylization and uncov­ ering of practices which take up, support, continue, but also relativize or adjust each other in a stylizing manner.

3 Wittgenstein’s Performative Hermeneutics of Cultural Practices In Frazer’s ethnological writings, Wittgenstein encounters descriptions like the following, which try to explain the institution of adoption in so-called primitive peoples: The same principle of make-believe, so dear to children, has led other peoples to employ a simulation of birth as a form of adoption. … A woman will take a boy whom she intends to adopt and push or pull him through her clothes; ever afterwards he is regarded as her very son and becomes heir to his adoptive parents’ possession.8

Frazer explains this ritual by saying that we are led to believe that this action is a birth. According to Frazer, it is the ‘principle of make-believe’ that leads to the opinion or interpretation that pulling the child through the clothes is in fact a birth and thus justifies the adoption. The adopting mother only simulates a birth by pulling the child through her clothes. Frazer does not describe primitive cultures in this approach, but rather tries to decipher them. By doing this, the meaning of the practice (here: the ritual of adoption) is subordinated to the interpretation of the practice (here: performing a birth) by the participants, but also by Frazer. The result is very peculiar: the interpretation of a fake birth, so to speak, replaces the actual action of adopting a child. Wittgenstein is hard on explanations of the kind he finds in Frazer’s work. He regards them as “dissatisfying” because conceptions are qualified as errors at this point.9 The explanations are misleading since you could simply invent and understand these rituals without having Frazer’s explanations at hand. Eventually, it is nothing but a distortion of the ethnological point of view as a whole, because the other is replaced by the self:

8 Wittgenstein, 1995, 33 fn.: „Ebendieses bei Kindern beliebte Grundverfahren des So­Tuns­als­ob hat andere Völker dazu veranlasst, bei der Adoption eine Geburt vorzuspiegeln. ... Dabei packt die Frau den Knaben, den sie an Kindes statt annehmen will, und stößt oder zieht ihn durch ihre Kleider; danach gilt er als ihr eigener Sohn und erbt das gesamte Eigentum seiner Adoptiveltern.“ 9 Wittgenstein, 1995, 29.

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What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer! And as a result: how impossible for him to understand a different way of life from the English one of his time!10

Frazer is the real savage and primitive for Wittgenstein and not the described, supposedly primitive people: Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for these savages will not be so far from any understanding of spiritual matters as an Englishman of the twentieth century. His explanations of the primitive observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves.11

Wittgenstein’s position is clear. An error can only correlate with an opinion. But neither the religious symbol nor the related ritual is based on an opinion that could be false (with the exception of Frazer’s). The ritual is not understood as something and interpreted as something in its practical performance; it rather is what it is in this performance. The ritual of pulling the child through the clothes does not need any further explanations, because the meaning of the action is simply apparent: the acceptance of the child through an adoption. It is thus not a simulated birth that could be called ‘wrong’ in this context. The “characteristic feature” of a ritual, Wittgenstein summarizes accordingly, “is not at all a view, an opinion, whether true or false, although an opinion – a belief – can itself be ritualistic or part of a rite.”12 In a certain sense, Wittgenstein eliminates magic to preserve the characteristic features of magic. He eliminates magic as a kind of mythology, a particular manner of interpretation, to bring into focus the meaning of the ritual itself. But this elimination is not opposed to magic. It shows itself features of magic inasmuch as it is an action, a performance that reveals a distinct occurrence of sense. This ambiguity appears to be of importance for the kind of phenomena I am interested in here, and which I understand as phenomena of performance. Phenomena such as these are not tested or falsified but occur in the performance of cultural actions. And their ‘interpretation’, if you want to use this term, realizes 10 Wittgenstein, 1995, 33: „Welche Enge des seelischen Lebens bei Frazer! Daher: Welche Un­ möglichkeit ein anderes Leben zu begreifen, als das englische seiner Zeit.“ 11 Wittgenstein, 1995, 36: „Frazer ist viel mehr savage, als die meisten seiner savages, denn diese werden nicht so weit vom Verständnis einer geistigen Angelegenheit entfernt sein, wie ein Eng­ länder des 20sten Jahrhunderts. Seine Erklärungen der primitiven Gebräuche sind viel roher als der Sinn dieser Gebräuche selbst).“ 12 Wittgenstein, 1995, 35: Das „Charakteristische der rituellen Handlung [ist] gar keine Ansicht, Meinung, ob sie nun richtig oder falsch ist, obgleich eine Meinung – ein Glaube – selbst auch rituell sein kann, zum Ritus gehören kann.“

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itself in this performance, which is itself always embedded in further contexts of action. It is also important to note that Wittgenstein talks about ‘surveyable representation’ as a methodical concept in this context. This concept indicates that actions are not summarized and interpreted according to a single pattern of explanation such as chronological order. ‘Surveyable representation’ rather conveys an understanding that consists of “seeing connections”.13 These connections are themselves nothing but performative occurrences of sense which constitute meaning with one another through actions. There is another thing that needs to be mentioned with regard to Wittgenstein. Based on the described phenomena that relate to actions of other cultures, as well as one’s own culture, he develops a humble cultural anthropology by speaking of man as a ‘ceremonial animal’. But Wittgenstein wouldn’t be Wittgenstein if he did not immediately relativize this statement: One could almost say that man is a ceremonial animal. That is perhaps partly false, partly nonsense, but there is something correct about it. That is, one could begin a book on anthropology by saying: When one examines the life and behavior of mankind through the world, one sees that, except for what might be called animal activities such as ingestion, etc. etc., men also perform actions which bear a characteristic peculiar to themselves, and these could be called ritualistic actions.14

Anthropology shall not be pursued here. It is interesting, however, that Husserl also calls attention to anthropology in the fragment that will be highlighted in the following paragraph – which is quite unusual for him – and even calls his thoughts “anthropological reflections”.15 After this first approach with reference to Wittgenstein, a performative hermeneutics could be characterized as follows: A performative hermeneutics of culture is firstly marked by bracketing the ‘something­as­something­structure’. Simultaneously, it establishes forms of ritualistic actions that unfold their magic in a practice that lies beyond these structures, without submitting itself to the magic of an interpretation.

13 Wittgenstein, 1995, 37. 14 Wittgenstein, 1995, 35: „Man könnte fast sagen, der Mensch sei ein zeremonielles Tier. Das ist wohl teils falsch, teils unsinnig, aber es ist auch etwas Richtiges daran. – Das heißt, man könnte ein Buch über Anthropologie so anfangen: Wenn man das Leben und Benehmen der Menschen auf der Erde betrachtet, so sieht man, dass sie außer den Handlungen, die man tierische nennen könnte, der Nahrungsaufnahme, etc., etc., etc., auch solche ausführen, die einen eigentümlichen Charakter tragen und die man rituelle Handlungen nennen könnte.“ 15 Husserl, 2008, p. 204.

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What occurs performatively as meaning in practice also leads to the acknowledgment of pre-giveness by Wittgenstein. In practice, commitments are expressed which cannot simply be manipulated. Performance refers to pre-given rules in their distinct commitment. Here we do not find obligations that are secured by an external criterion. They rather appear as practical commitments which are pregiven in the action itself.

4 Husserl’s Performative Hermeneutics of Cultural Practices Much has been written about Husserl’s ‘General Thesis of the natural attitude’ and about Epoché as the bracketing of this General Thesis (most of all by Husserl himself), so that there can hardly be added something new. For the line of thought followed here it is only important to note that there is a family resemblance between Wittgenstein’s and Husserl’s argumentation. Wittgenstein states that in his reflections, the “elimination of magic has itself the character of magic”. In the same line, Husserl argues against all so called “false theories” by bracketing the ‘positing of factual existence’. By doing this, he moves from theories of a supposedly rigid and interpretable reality to the factual description of mental life processes and performances. The magic of the General Thesis of the ‘natural attitude’ (which alone guarantees meaning and is directed towards a self-sufficient reality) is bracketed by Husserl to reveal the magic of the performance itself: We do not give up the thesis that we have posited, we alter nothing in our conviction. That conviction remains in itself as it is, as long as we do not introduce new motives for judgment, which is precisely what we do not do. And nevertheless it undergoes a modification – while it continues to be in itself what it is, we place it as it were ‘out of action’, we ‘suspend it’, we ‘bracket it’. It is still here as before, like the bracketed in the brackets, like the suspended outside, the context of the suspension. We can also say: the thesis is an experience, but we make ‘no use’ of it.16

16 Husserl, 1977, 63: „Die Thesis, die wir vollzogen haben, geben wir nicht preis, wir ändern nichts an unserer Überzeugung, die in sich selbst bleibt, was sie ist, solange wir nicht neue Urteilsmotive einführen: was wir eben nicht tun. Und doch erfährt sie eine Modifikation – während sie in sich verbleibt, was sie ist, setzen wir sie gleichsam ‚außer Aktion’, wir ‚klammern sie ein’. Sie ist weiter noch da, wie das Eigeklammerte in der Klammer, wie das Ausgeschaltete außerhalb des Zusam­ menhangs der Schaltung. Wir können auch sagen: Die Thesis ist Erlebnis, wir machen von ihr aber ‚keinen Gebrauch)“

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Regardless of the epistemological and ontological implications which this step has for phenomenology, I would like to emphasize only one thing: Husserl’s movement of thought corresponds to Wittgenstein’s when the latter criticizes Frazer’s explanations of the mythical world by stating that we could also understand this world if it were fictional. Wittgenstein brackets the thesis of the all-securing reality and also the thesis that only this reality can guarantee meaning. He does so by pointing out that we could understand a fictional version of these cultural relations as well. To put it another way: The magic of the ‘natural attitude’ Husserl detects in the ‘General Thesis’ is bracketed to conceive the ‘natural attitude’ in the sense of the lifeworld as a kind of magic of its own. This act of bracketing, however, does not contradict the ‘natural attitude’, but is itself an action that is performed in the ‘natural attitude’. This is only the starting point, even though a necessary one, to the analysis Husserl later introduces in his Crisis-book under the title of ‘lifeworld’. Husserl is interested in the foundation of meaning of theoretical judgment – among other things, of course. His answer leaves nothing to be desired in terms of clarity: “Practice in its particularity limits what is supposed to count as (real, theoretical) being and true judgment – as that which is practically sufficient”.17 This practice is always a particular one, i.e. it is not an invariant kind of action in changeable contexts, but a contextually situated action. This, then, indicates a ‘communalized practice’; it is not a kind of practice one could follow by himself (if there is such a thing). The being-sense of the practically constituted world is not realized “by myself, but by these fellow human beings, primarily those ones I grew up with”.18 It is a kind of practice that is situated in relations of actions, one that is performed at the right time and has its particular duration; it is incorporated and expressed in bodily performances. The actions of this practice fit into and relate to each other, even in a conflicting manner, and form a so called “world-picture” in and with these practices. Wittgenstein speaks of such a ‘world-picture’ as well when he uses this term to describe the connections of cultural practices in On Certainty.19 A world-picture is not a body of knowledge of whose correctness you could be persuaded. Instead, it is the “inherited background against which I distinguish between true

17 Husserl, 2008, 200: „Die Praxis in ihrer Jeweiligkeit begrenzt, was als (wahrhaft, theoretisch) Seiendes und wahres Urteil gelten soll – als das praktisch Genügende.“ 18 Husserl, 2008, 202: “Der Seinssinn der sich in der Praxis konstituierenden Welt verdankt sich nicht mir allein, sondern diesen Mitmenschen, zunächst denen, mit denen zusammen ich erwachsen bin.“ 19 Wittgenstein, 2002 (in the following I use the abbreviation OC).

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and false”.20 “The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules”.21 We do not have this world-picture through any kind of “persuasion”,22 it is neither an ‘invention’ nor a ‘hypothesis’23 – it is lived, so to speak, performed, it is a performative occurrence of culture. The world-picture can change, of course, yet not in the sense that one (one’s) world-picture is replaced by another, but rather in the sense that individual persuasions can change their function within a world-picture, which is indeed nothing but a performative act. Much could be added to the concept of the world-picture; with regard to my line of thought, I only want to emphasize that the term world-picture consists of nothing but the practices themselves and is constituted in the process of practices referring to one another. This is what Husserl occasionally calls ‘style’ in his analysis of the lifeworld. Stylization, to put it shortly, is the formation of actions in and through actions. ‘Style’, Husserl writes, “has actuality only in the form of a temporality in which joint, communalized human subjects live next to and with each other, individually and in a situation­related togetherness, each in a situation of the moment and a universal horizon of their life situation, in a horizontally predetermined, despite all the relative determinacy of the predetermination undetermined style.”24 In 1951, Merleau-Ponty expressed this formation of practice in and through practice (which is performed this side of or beyond a structure of ‘interpreting-something-as-something’) slightly differently, and has thus maybe delivered the punchline that belongs to a performative hermeneutics of culture: If we want to describe and interpret culture, “we have to conceive of a labyrinth of spontaneous steps which revive one another, sometimes cut across one another, and

20 „Es ist der überkommene Hintergrund, auf welchem ich zwischen wahr und falsch unterschei­ de.“ Wittgenstein OC §94. 21 “Die Sätze, die dieses Weltbild beschreiben, könnte man mythologisch nennen. Und ihre Rolle ist ähnlich der von Spielregeln, und das Spiel kann man auch rein praktisch, ohne ausgesprochene Regeln lernen.“ Wittgenstein OC §95. 22 Wittgenstein OC §262. 23 Wittgenstein OC §167. 24 Husserl, 2008, 197 (Der ‚Stil’ so schreibt Husserl „hat Aktualität nur in der Form einer Zeitlichkeit, in welcher nebeneinander und miteinander lebende, miteinander vergemeinschaftete menschli­ che Subjekte jeweils einzeln und im Miteinander situationshaft leben, jeder in einer Moment­ situation und in einem universalen Horizont seiner Lebenssituationen, in einem horizonthaft vorgezeichneten, im Übrigen bei aller relativer Bestimmtheit der Vorzeichnung doch unbestimmten Stil).

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sometimes confirm one another – but across how many detours, and what tides of disorder! – and conceive of the whole undertaking as resting upon itself.”25 This might be the very point (but also the inscrutability and danger) of performance, style, and culture. The whole enterprise of culture rests on itself and the peculiar attempt of a self-stylization, i.e. the formation of meaning through practice. The commitment (Verbindlichkeit) that is demanded by cultural practices, and which is pointed out by Wittgenstein, becomes apparent in Husserl’s term ‘stylization’. In the practices, styles are constituted that cannot be changed arbitrarily, but distinguish the lifeworld in its pre-giveness. The other and the own seem to be such elements of style, but also traditionality and historicity. Wittgenstein remarks in his Philosophical Grammar that rules can be understood without “super-rules”: “I’m allowed to use the word ‘rule’ without first tabulating the rules for the use of the word. And those rules are not super-rules”.26 This remark could be regarded as the principle of a performative hermeneutics of culture. Whoever wants to understand cultural practices should not search for the rules of the rules. The facts of culture cannot be found on this level; they are simpler, but also more fragile; they reveal themselves in the performative constitution of meaning of and in actions. These actions support each other in a process of stylization and express a world-picture that not only sustains the practices, but operates in them, maybe develops out of them.

References Bermes, Christian, 2012: Wittgensteins Kulturphilosophie, in: Handbuch Kulturphilosophie, ed. by Ralf Konersmann, Stuttgart, 138–144. Bermes, Christian, 2014: Deutung oder Praxis? Die Tatsachen der Kultur und Wittgensteins Kulturphilosophie, in: Christian Krijnen e.a. (eds.): Kulturphilosophie. Probleme und Perspektiven des Neukantianismus, Würzburg, 85–99. Bermes, Christian, 2017: Commitment (Verbindlichkeit), in: Jesús Padilla Gálvez und Margit Gaffal (eds.): Intentionality and Action, Berlin/Boston, 51–65. Husserl, Edmund, 1963: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. by Stefan Strasser, Husserliana I, Den Haag.

25 Merleau-Ponty, 2003, 96: „Bei der Beschreibung und dem Verstehen einer Kultur müssen wir uns „ein Labyrinth spontaner Schritte vorstellen, die sich aufnehmen, sich manchmal Überschneiden und bestätigen, aber auf wieviel Umwegen und durch welchen Wust von Unordnung hindurch – das heißt, wir müssen begreifen, dass das ganze Unternehmen auf sich selbst beruht.“ 26 Wittgenstein: 1991, 115: „Es ist mir erlaubt, das Wort ‚Regel’ zu verwenden, ohne erst die Regeln des Gebrauchs dieses Wortes zu tabulieren. Und diese Regeln sind nicht Über­Regeln.“

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Husserl, Edmund, 1977: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie 1. Halbband: Text der 1.-3. Auflage, ed. by Karl Schuhmann, Husserliana III/1, Den Haag. Husserl, Edmund, 1989: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), ed. by Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana XXVII, Dordrecht/Boston/London. Husserl, Edmund, 2008: Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution, Husserliana XXXIX, Dordrecht/Boston/London. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2003: Der Mensch und die Widersetzlichkeit der Dinge, id.: Das Auge und der Geist. Philosophische Essays, ed. by Christian Bermes, Hamburg. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1991: Philosophische Grammatik, Werkausgabe 4, Frankfurt/M. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1995: Bemerkungen über Frazers Golden Bough, in: Wittgenstein: Vortrag über Ethik und andere kleine Schriften, ed. by Joachim Schulte, Frankfurt/M. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2002: Über Gewißheit, Werkausgabe 8, Frankfurt/M.

António Marques

Wittgenstein on Understanding and Description Abstract: My analysis of Wittgenstein’s conception of what constitutes “understanding” starts from Philosophical Investigations § 109, where the activity of “Beschreibung” plays a central role. There Wittgenstein traces a sharp contrast between the activity of “describing” and that of “erklären” and defends the former as the correct philosophical method. Here we want to explore that kind of activity as well as the meaning of such a gap. I claim that in the late Wittgenstein this activity (describing) cannot be separated from the perspective of the first person and often includes expressive language (Ausdruck). Thus, “understanding” has special connections with what one can call “describing with expression.” Keywords: understanding, description, expressive language, primacy, irreducibility, first person One of the most difficult issues in the philosophy of Wittgenstein post-Tractatus is the relation between the activity of describing and the process that is referred to as understanding (Verstehen). I will explore some problems that this relation gives rise to and will claim that Wittgenstein’s view is a peculiar one, particularly in regard to his effort to contrast his thought with the behaviourist conception of “understanding”. His distance from or contrast with the behaviourist stance can only be understood if one can arrive at a clear notion of what understand­ ing is for the late Wittgenstein. Taking a more Wittgensteinian approach, in what follows we inquire how both understanding and description work as members of the same family of concepts. After the harmony has been broken between language and the world, grounded on the doctrine of logical forms, the descriptive power of language with regard to reality seems to vanish. Describing reality turns out to be a multiform activity, a plurality of uses of language associated with the conviction that there is not something that can be said to be the true description of the phenomenal world. This, let us say, crisis of the descriptive power of language dramatically occurred after the Tractatus period1 and gave rise to two major consequences simultane-

1 The critique that Wittgenstein carried out of his own earlier conception of language is made under the title of a deconstruction of the “Augustinian picture of language” . This is precisely the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-006

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ously: first, Wittgenstein adopted a new scepticism (which remained throughout his entire philosophy up until his latest writings) towards any form of theory or doctrine, and, secondly, he felt the loss of any realistic anchor that propositional language could mirror. In fact, propositions, the totality of language, are representative of facts, and the totality of facts is the world.2 But Wittgenstein himself begins to criticise this picture from the beginning of the thirties, as most commentators date it and as Wittgenstein recalls in the Preface to his Philosophical Investigations (1945). Before proceeding to explore the consequences, referred to above, of this post-Tractatus crisis regarding the status of description, it is convenient to clarify that this scepticism towards any form of theory or doctrine already appears in the Tractatus as a very clear stance against theory. There one reads, “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity”. What is the aim of this activity? “Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred”.3 Yet this sharp delimitation is not to be found in his later conception of philosophical activity, which is characterised rather differently. I will not elaborate more on this contrast, but only wish to remark that the problem of delimitation between sense and nonsense (the true philosophical issue of the TLP) will no longer be understood on the basis of the logical clarification of thoughts but on the basis of grammatical elucidation. Let us consider a conversation with the Vienna Circle from the 1930s where the issue of values is referred to and Wittgenstein again takes up his anti-theoretical stance of the Tractatus: Is value a particular state of mind? Or a form attaching to some data or other of consciousness? I would reply that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation. If I were told anything that was a theory I would say, No, no! That does not interest me. Even if this theory were true, it would not interest me – it would not be the exact thing I was looking for. What is ethical cannot be taught. If I could explain the essence of the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of no value whatsoever. At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person. I think that this is something very essential. Here there is nothing to be stated any more; all I can do is to step forth as an individual and speak in the first person.4

kind of descriptive conception of language in general that determines the entire philosophical enterprise. As Baker and Hacker recall, “It is part of the Augustinian conception of language to take it for granted that the fundamental role of sentences, certainly of declarative sentences, is to describe something. Similarly ‘I have toothache’ is assumed to be a description and the philosopher’s task is to determine whether it describes a private experience, a behaviour pattern or a brain state” (G.P. Baker & Hacker, 2009, 8–9). 2 Wittgenstein, TLP, 400.1, 1.1. 3 Wittgenstein, TLP, 4.112. 4 Wittgenstein, 1979, 116–7.

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The anti-theoretical stance remains the same as that which characterises the philosophical activity in the Tractatus. Yet something new must be noted, which is the relevance of the first person if one wishes to continue to speak as an individual. I do not think this is an element of the Tractatus that imposes absolute silence beyond the representation of world facticity. A new role for the first person, or at least the need to speak in the first person in matters like ethics, converges with another major shift in the thirties referred to above, which is the loss of a realistic anchor for the descriptive power of language. This is a frequently discussed theme among Wittgenstein interpretation and philological studies, and of course a great deal of controversy has developed on the issue of when and how the philosopher begins to distance himself from his Tractarian views, what remains and what is new, how deep and structural is the change, whether there is a real and substantial change, and so on. These are all questions that have played a central role in Wittgensteinian studies.5 Nevertheless, even without any realistic support for the activity of description as being the genuine method in philosophy, description seems to acquire a new and decisive role in the context of the Philosophical Investigations. Section 109 is quite clear about the philosophical status of description: It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically ‘that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible to think such-and-such’ – whatever that may mean. (The conception of thought as a gaseous medium.) And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved rather by looking into the workings (Arbeiten) of our language, and that in such a way as to make us to recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.6

Some essential points of the Tractatus remain: the anti-theoretical view is repeated and the view that the task of philosophy is an empirical one is rejected as well. Even the critical enterprise seems to remain the same since the goal of philosophy is to free intelligence by means of language, and in the Tractatus philosophy seeks to 5 In the 1945 Preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein is very clear about his “earlier grave mistakes: “For since beginning to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book.” (Wittgenstein PI, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 6 Wittgenstein, PI, 109.

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identify the disguising of thought.7 But what Wittgenstein meant by this critical move was the disclosure of the real logical form of the propositions by showing the apparent logical form.8 Yet one essential and different point must be stressed, which is the way that philosophy solves its problems by looking only at its workings. Then it also seems that we are far from the metaphysical analysis of logical atomism, and in particular the radical separation of the sensical and nonsensical use of language. All problems are to be solved in language since there is not an exterior form of language that could be invoked as a criterion for its correct use. What is meant here is that one must be focused on the grammar of the workings of language. Therefore the situation can be formulated thus: the crisis of descriptive activity like the one presented in the Tractatus gives rise to another notion of the describing activity, which now seems to be conceived as being more self-sufficient and without exteriority. Nevertheless, if description corresponds to the “workings” of language, which point to something that is described, yet this something that is described is not represented by the true description, which would be considered a piece of ideal language. So the question arises: if all philosophical activity is description, if this is working in language, that is, the ordinary language of every day, which by definition does not reach any instance outside language, then all understanding is description or it will be reduced to description. This is fairly consistent with Waismann’s recording quoted above in the context of the Vienna Circle period. If all understanding is description, and this corresponds to a perspective of reality, my perspective is one among an unlimited number from which the world can be seen. This is a well-known image in philosophy and is usually connected with a number of threats such as relativism, scepticism or subjectivism. I remember how a philosopher like Thomas Nagel depicts this situation as a kind of “centerless view of the world”. As he explains: The centerless conception of the world must include all the innumerable subjects of consciousness on a roughly equal footing – even if some see the world more clearly than others. So what is left out of the centerless conception – the supposed fact that I am TN – seems to be something for which there is no room in the world, rather than something which cannot be included in a special kind of description or conception of the world. The world cannot contain irreducibly first-person facts.9

Is the Wittgensteinian activity of description that characterises philosophy a “centerless” view of the world in the sense referred to above by Nagel? If it is, then there is no room either for a privileged point of view (a particular description) 7 Wittgenstein, TLP, 4.002. 8 Russell’s merit, Wittgenstein, TLP, 4.002, 4.01 9 Nagel, 1986, 57.

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as Wittgenstein seems to accept, or more importantly for a first-person view. A centerless view of the world leads us to a form of life in which genuine first-person statements appear to be spurious, or at least irrelevant, since all that counts are the innumerable different descriptions on an equal footing. But that is not how things function in humanlife, where persons interact through language involving processes like “knowing”, “understanding”, “reading” or “following rules”. These are central topics of the late Wittgenstein and, as we will see, he does not throw away, on the contrary, the first-person perspective, whose importance had already been recognized at the beginning of the thirties, as mentioned above. We have now reached a point which requires us to demonstrate that Wittgenstein keeps his conception of philosophical activity as description, yet the status of the latter does not lose the first-person point of view. In fact, it incorporates it under the form of the primacy and the irreducibility of the expression. In other words, the descriptive use of language develops in multiple language games that start from the expressive use of language.10 Let us consider part of section 244 of the PI that begins the series of so-called private language problem. Here Wittgenstein asks how words refer to sensations, and notes that asking this proffers the same question as asking how a human being learns the meaning of the names of sensations, that of pain, for example. And he proposes a possibility: … words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expression (Ausdruck) of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new painbehaviour. ‘So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ replaces crying?’ – On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it.11

What is primitive and irreducible is the verbal expression, not the description of the sensation. ‘I am in pain’ is an avowal that takes place before any verbal description of pain. It is reasonable to ask whether anyone who has not learned the verbal expression of pain (like the child mentioned) can understand another person describing his own pain. In the following sections of the PI about private language, what is at the centre of the dialogue between Wittgenstein and his interlocutor is precisely the primitive role of the verbal expression, which is at the root of all understanding of a description. Wittgenstein’s effort consists in dismantling a picture of language in which the primitive verbal expression is left out of any description whatsoever. The common picture of the description of an experience, a feeling, a sensation, also a behaviour, etc. presupposes that the verbal 10 See Marques, 2004, 129–139. 11 Wittgenstein, PI, 244.

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expression, from the first-person perspective, is substituted by propositions that simply describe them; but this is misleading because what we call “descriptions”, says Wittgenstein, are instruments for particular uses: Think of a machine – drawing, a cross-section, an elevation with measurements, which an engineer has before him. Thinking of a description as a word-picture of the facts has something misleading about it: one tends to think only of such pictures as hang on our walls: which seem simply to portray how a thing looks, what it is like. (These pictures are, as it were, idle.)12

So description is not to be conceived as a word-picture, since it seems to suggest something like hanging inert pictures on our room’s walls. The reference to “idle” pictures as the outcome of description-as-word-picture is quite interesting, particularly if one wishes to explore correctly some of the basic processes of human life that are referred to above. Even describing a person’s behaviour would seem to coincide with describing a room, but describing a living human being involves using language games of sensations, feelings, and so on. “Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) living human beings can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious”.13 The fact is that the description of, say, a pain-behaviour presupposes most of the time a primitive verbal expression. Of course, one can attribute pain-behaviour to objects, and children do this when playing with dolls, but this use of the concept of pain is a secondary one.14 Understanding pain-behaviour, if by that one means that it is not an “idle” description, presupposes first-person expressions (even though not always explicit) in the behaviour of other persons. It is also interesting that here Wittgenstein faces twin threats: the threat of irreducible subjectivism (that is, something, some mental processes, in other minds that cannot be reached by our language) and the threat of a sort of behaviourism, which he recognizes as such, when the interlocutor asks him if his philosophy is not a sort of disguised behaviourism.15 In fact, the transition between an explicit verbal expression and the existence of hybrid uses of language with both elements is a complicated process. Wittgenstein stresses this transitional and hybrid situation in the use of language when he remarks: But here is the problem: a cry, which cannot be called a description, which is more primitive than any description, for all that serves as a description of the inner life. A cry is not

12 Wittgenstein, PI, 291. 13 Wittgenstein, PI, 281. 14 Wittgenstein, PI, 282. 15 Wittgenstein, PI, 307, 308.

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a description. But there are transitions. And the words ‘I’m afraid’ may approximate more or less to being a cry. They may come quite close to this and also be far removed from it.16

Now one can better grasp the presence of the first person in many situations of the basic human form of life, where at first glance only descriptive uses are at work. A striking example is given related to understanding a series when the pupil says, looking at the numbers 4, 6, 8, 10, something like, “Now I can go on”. Then he says, “Yes, now I know that series” and goes on.17 We observe that and describe his behaviour. But can we say that by this description of the pupil’s behaviour we have grasped what understanding is? At this moment we reach a tricky evaluation, because it is also thinkable that the formula of the series merely occurs to the pupil. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein insists that when he acts and expresses in such a way it must mean more than that, and understanding seems to go beyond, say, following a rule or a formula blindly. Nevertheless, it happens that I am describing what seems to be a first-person verbal expression when the pupil says: “Now I can keep going, and I understood the series.” Stressing that first-person element, Wittgenstein wishes to avoid mere behaviourism because it is not the same as describing behaviour; on the other hand, he also avoids trying to conceive understanding as a hidden “mental process”. The motto is not to try “to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. […] But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what circumstances, do we say, ‘Now I know how to go on’, when, that is, the formula has occurred to me?”18 In other words, the expressions of the pupil do not describe the process behind the formula, because he can represent the formula or apply it automatically and not understand it; at the same time, merely describing the behaviour, what the pupil says, his gestures, etc., is not enough for the teacher to say: well, he has understood the series. The same thing happens with other processes of understanding. For example, reading: I can read Cyrillic if I am familiar with the alphabet, but without understanding what I am reading. Understanding seems to come very close to the use of certain first-person verbal expressions, which furthermore belong to certain language games of description, teaching, learning and so on. The essential point is that its expression can be taken as a criterion of understanding, but only so far as the expressivist language game pervades all the other language games. The sections of the PI where the struggle with the experience of “understanding” reaches, let us say, a dramatic intensity are sections 143 to 184, a sequence which includes reflections on reading19 and 16 Wittgenstein, PI, II, ix, 189. 17 Wittgenstein, PI, 151. 18 Wittgenstein, PI, 154. 19 Wittgenstein, PI, 156–178.

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prepares the discussion on the nature of rules or the meaning of following a rule. (We could also say that the digression on this theme is a sequel to the previous sections on understanding.) In conclusion, we wanted to relate the concept of description and the concept of understanding closely, since the true method of philosophy consists in describing, not explaining or theorising. Section 109 of PI has a central role here and repeats the conception of the early thirties and the Vienna Circle recordings, but without explicit reference to the role of first-person perspective. Yet a conception of the use of language without the element of verbal expression does not fit with human experience. The irreducibility of the expressive element shows up in the initial learning of (for example) the verbal expression of pain-behaviour. In this framework, the concept of description presented in section 109 needs to be clarified, and this is just what Wittgenstein does in later discussions on understanding, reading, and following rules. Understanding is not a process behind primitive verbal expression, which then presupposes it. It is also not a descriptive account of linguistic or gestural behaviour. Understanding what “understanding” is in lived human experience requires taking into account the decisive role of the connection between description and expression in the use of language.

References Baker, G.P. & P.M.S. Hacker, 2009: Wittgenstein, Rules, Grammar and necessity, vol.2 of an Analytical Commentary of the Philosophical Investigations – Essays and Exegesis of §§ 185–242, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. Marques, Antonio, 2004: Expressive Language Games, Seduction, Community, Speech, ed. Franck Brisard, M Meeuwis, Bart Vandenabeele, Amsterdam, John Bengamins Co, 129–139. Nagel, Thomas, 1986: The View From Nowhere, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1979: Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1980: Philosophical Investigations, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell.

Sandra Laugier

Understanding, Meaning, and Expression Abstract: One important result of Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) is the calling of our attention to human expressiveness. OLP is a minority current in the mainstream philosophy of language, and even in the field of pragmatics. Making the human voice heard is the aim of OLP, which takes ordinary uses of language as the starting point for philosophy. Its primary methodological ambition is a conceptual analysis that would facilitate the recognition of the importance of context in the practice of language, thought, and understanding – that is, in our different ways of engaging in the real – while at the same time defending a form of realism anchored in agents’ practices: their words, expressions, meanings. Its ambition is to describe the cognitive, perceptual, linguistic, social, and moral dimensions of our usages, and to analyze all forms of expression – not only descriptive and performative, but also emotive or passionate. In line with Austin’s notion of linguistic phenomenology, OLP orients its reflection on language toward a type of adequacy gauged no longer by correspondence, but rather with reference to functionality, or fit of human adjustment. OLP does not encourage defining the meaning of a term as the set of situations where this term is appropriate or as a list of established uses, but rather advocates examining how meaning is made and improvised through its integration into self-expressivity. Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? was the first work to ask the question of the relevance of our ordinary statements in terms of their relevance in relation to ourselves and the understanding of ourselves. The content (objective, semantic, or empirical) of propositions is no longer the question, but rather the fortunes and misfortunes of ordinary human vulnerable expression. Keywords: understanding, meaning, expression, relevance, subject, voice

Introduction My aim here is to show how Wittgenstein, and Ordinary Language Philosophy, transforms the idea of meaning and understanding through and attention to human expressivity. Ordinary Language Philosophy, by relentlessly asking and examining “what we should say when,” challenges our modes of expression. The starting point of my book Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy1 was the 1 Laugier, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-007

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idea of a philosophy of language anchored neither in standard analytic philosophy nor in continental philosophy but rather in attention to uses of language, to language as it is used, in circulation. This use of Ordinary Language Philosophy can be termed realistic: it is an ordinary realism that construes language both as a human practice and a tool for refining perception and depiction. In Ordinary Language, the ideas of adjustment, fitting, and the perception of differences and resemblances account for realist aspirations, but are inseparable from recognition of the fact that language is part of the world. The meaning of ordinary language philosophy does indeed lie in recognition that language is used and spoken and meant by a human voice, filled with human breath. This sense of language is what the later Wittgenstein means by our “form of life” : the question is no longer, as in his early work, whether language is an image of reality, but of how we can “come back to earth” and to ordinary conditions of life, to mean what we say. These are the differences that must be the object of a “sharpened, intelligent description of life.” The notion of “human life” is here obviously connected to Wittgenstein’s form of life conceived as attachment to ordinary language: The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning – there could be human beings to whom all this is alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words). And how are these feelings manifested among us? – By the way we choose and value words. How do I find the “right” word? How do I choose among words? Without doubt it is sometimes as if I were comparing them by fine differences of smell: that is too… – This is the right one. But I do not always have to make judgments, give explanations; often I might only say: “it simply isn’t right yet.”2

Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell propose therefore a new species of realism, which we will call ordinary realism. This is a realism based not on a metaphysical link between language and reality, mind and world, but on our attention (another ordinary sense of mind) to the practices and life of language, to language as it is used within a form of life, but also as it is used to create new forms of life. Ordinary realism construes language both as a human practice and as a precision tool for the description of what matters. Fundamental to this vision are the twin recognitions that language is used and spoken by human voices and that language is part of the world. For Austin and Cavell, language use is a search for the just perception of differences and resemblances, an effort to adjust or fit our expressions to the world and to our position within it. The question is no longer whether language

2 Wittgenstein, PI, II, xi.

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is a right or wrong image of reality, but of the practices that collect around our words; practices in which language is at once caught and caught up. To say that language is not only representation of the real but a part of the real is to say that language affects us, allows us to affect others, and constantly transforms our meanings. This is the fundamental idea in Cavell’s brilliant first book, Must We Mean What We Say? “Linguistic phenomenology” – the name Austin considered giving his philosophy – means paying attention to our words. In return, we get a “sharpened awareness” of words and what they are about. When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or “meanings,” whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.3

One essential feature of Ordinary Language Philosophy therefore lies in the idea of attention to importance: Cavell speaks of “the importance of importance.”4 The conversion required to put aside competing ideas of the important, to destroy our ideas of the important, is the condition of possibility for (women’s) expression (see Cavell’s chef-d’oeuvre, Pursuits of Happiness, on the emergence of women’s voices in conversation, in the talking movie). Attention to human voices and to ordinary life creates a paradigm shift in ethics that is deeply connected with attention to, and repossession of, ordinary language. Attention to the experiences of everyday life and to human textures and expressions is the deepest critical feature of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Knowing what we mean, meaning what we say is the core of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Ordinary Language Philosophy is a minority current in the mainstream philosophy of language, and even in the active and recognized field of pragmatics. The analytic philosophy that emerged from the “linguistic turn,” and which is now a dominant strand linked to the cognitive sciences and the so-called “philosophy of mind,” is certainly fertile, but it has systematically neglected important and vibrant contemporary approaches to language that are irreducible to cognitivist or naturalistic models, but are instead descriptive and attentive to everyday usages of language. Ordinary Language Philosophy takes ordinary uses of language as the starting point for philosophical analysis because it considers this to be the necessary condition for avoiding the “scholastic illusion” denounced by Austin in the 1950’s and later by Bourdieu, which consists in taking “the things of logic for the logic of things” and often leads to thought becoming sterilized in vain scholasticism 3 Austin, 1979, 182. 4 Cavell, 1981, Chapter 3.

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that loses all connection to the problems posed in ordinary life. Thus, Ordinary Language Philosophy is from the outset oriented toward social matters and attention to the unseen, to neglected reality. Its primary methodological ambition is a conceptual analysis that would make it possible to recognize the importance of context in the practice of language, thought, and perception – that is, in our different ways of engaging in the real – while at the same time defending a form of realism anchored in agents’ practices: their words, expressions, and thoughts. Thus, Ordinary Language Philosophy is the inspiration for today’s trend of “contextualism” in the philosophy of language and epistemology. Still, this development of contextualism or “relativism” has ignored some important aspects and potentialities of Ordinary Language Philosophy: its ambition to describe, as precisely as possible, the cognitive, perceptual, linguistic, social, and moral dimensions of our usages and to analyze all forms of expression – not only descriptive and performative, but also emotive or passionate. In particular, the domain of the perlocutionary is a sort of “dark continent,” which, with the exceptions of Stanley Cavell and Nancy Bauer, has not been explored in philosophical literature. As Cavell has shown, the expressivity involved in the perlocutionary may well be connected to women. With the Austinian notion of linguistic phenomenology, Ordinary Language Philosophy orients its reflection on language toward a type of adequacy that is no longer correspondence, but rather the fineness of fitting. It does not encourage defining the meaning of a term as the set of situations where this term is appropriate or as a list of established uses, but rather advocates examining how meaning is made and improvised through its integration into practice and self-expressivity. Ordinary Language Philosophy sees language as part of the real and as affecting us, allowing us to affect others, and as constantly transforming our meaning. This the main idea of Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? The agreement we act upon Wittgenstein calls “agreement in judgments”,5 and he speaks of our ability to use language as depending upon agreement in ‘forms of life’.6 But forms of life, he says, are exactly what have to be “accepted;” they are “given.”7 That we agree in language means that language – our form of life – produces our understanding of one another. Words, says Austin, are “middle-sized dry goods,” typical of our ordinary objects, and we are in touch with them, so this tangible relation we have to our words is something that connects Ordinary Language Philosophy and attention to literature and to the general question of sensibility to words.

5 Wittgenstein, PI, §242. 6 Wittgenstein, PI, §241. 7 Cavell 1979, 30.

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The agreement at the heart of linguistic phenomenology and Ordinary Language Philosophy is not the correspondence between words and things but rather the agreement between ourselves, what we mean, and reality. This sharpened attention to use completes the social agreement in language. Cavell’s major contribution on this point is to define our relations to our words and our expressions in terms of voice and claim. This is also one of Austin’s intuitions through to the end: we must not concern ourselves only with analysis of what we say, but with the we, the should, and the say. Must We Mean What We Say? was perhaps the first work to ask the question of the relevance of our statements in terms of relevance in relation to ourselves, in various domains, and by turning to unexpected resources (literature, art criticism, theater) that provide a space and time for women’s voices. The content (objective, semantic, or empirical) of propositions is no longer the question, nor is “nonsense” or “performativity,” but rather the fortunes and misfortunes of ordinary human vulnerable expression – the search for (or loss of) the right tone or right word; the pitch.

1 Meaning What We Say, Saying What We Mean In 1969, when Cavell published what he deliberately called a “book of essays,” he knew he was upsetting a well-established American philosophical tradition. This was the tradition that had emerged out of the arrival of Vienna circle philosophers, epistemologists, and logicians fleeing Nazism onto the American philosophical scene.8 In Must We Mean What We Say? analytic philosophy is called into question for the first time in America, where it had become dominant over the course of the twentieth century, and the book proceeds from of one of analytic philosophy’s unassimilable, even repressed, elements: ordinary language philosophy, as represented by Austin and Wittgenstein. To take interest in our ordinary statements, in what we say and mean offends at once the “classical” philosophical tradition, which most often wants to go beyond ordinary meaning, and the analytic tradition, which wants to analyze and correct ordinary propositions. Must We? has thus gained new relevance with the return of Austin and with recent questionings of the efficacy of the analytic model and method. The title essay, “Must We Mean What We Say?,” which develops a theory of “meaning” in double opposition to propositional sense and psychological intention, as well as “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” are articles of historical importance, provoking a great deal of discussion at the time of their 8 For a historical perspective on this, see Laugier, 2014.

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publication and determining many current readings of Wittgenstein (Cora Diamond’s and Hilary Putnam’s, among others). The latter essay contains the seed of all of The Claim of Reason as well as an element of radicality and simplicity that constitutes the importance of Cavell’s approach, which effects a radical displacement: one must not only attend to analyzing the (empirical) content and logical structure of statements, one must also look to what we say – to we and to say. That is, we must ask ourselves what we do with our language; how what we do in such or such a situation is part of what we say. Must We Mean What We Say? was the first work to ask – in various domains and by turning to unexpected resources (Beckett, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, the discourse of musical critique)  – the question of the relevance of our statements (no longer the question of their meaning or non-meaning), as relevance to ourselves. The notion of relevance has since been absorbed into a mentalist philosophy of communication, but we must not let this prevent us from seeing the importance of the model that Cavell, with great fidelity to the Austinian model, proposes here. The central question of Must We Mean What We Say? is no longer the question of propositions’ contents (objective, semantic, or empirical content), nor that of their non-meaning, but of the fortunes and misfortunes of ordinary expression. The problem is no longer what propositions mean, nor even what they do, but to mean what one says. Do we know what we mean? And who can know this? Cavell has a watchword taken from Wittgenstein: to bring words back from their metaphysical to their ordinary use; to bring them home.9 This return to ordinary uses is truly critical. Cavell maintains in Must We Mean What We Say? that we know neither what we think nor what we mean, and that the task of philosophy is to bring us back to ourselves – to bring words back to their everyday use, to bring knowledge of the world back to knowledge or proximity of the self. The “voice of the ordinary” takes its meaning only in response to the risk of skepticism, that loss or distancing of the world, that failure of words, impossibility to mean anything. The appeal to the ordinary and to our uses of words is not obvious; it is pervaded with this skepticism, with what Cavell defines as the “uncanniness of the ordinary.” Thus, the ordinary is not the common sense philosophy sometimes claims for itself, nor has it anything to do with a rationalized version of ordinary language philosophy in which ordinary language properly analyzed would be a trustworthy source of knowledge. The ordinary is lost or distant. Cavell’s originality thus lies in defining the ordinary on the basis of ordinary language and the thought of the ordinary on the basis of the philosophy of ordinary language. It is Cavell’s reading of Austin – the first to bring out Austin’s

9 Wittgenstein, PI, § 161.

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“realism” – that makes such an approach possible. To talk about language is simply to talk about what language talks about, says Cavell: The philosophy of ordinary language is not about language, anyway not in any sense in which it is not also about the world. Ordinary language philosophy is about whatever ordinary language is about.10 Examining ordinary language offers us a “sharpened perception of phenomena.” It is this sharpening of visual and aural perception that Cavell seeks as early as Must We Mean What We Say?, where what is at stake in ordinary language philosophy is, as he will later put it in Pursuits of Happiness, “the internality of words and world to one another.”11 This is an intimacy that cannot be demonstrated, or posited by thesis, but can only be brought out, as Austin does, by examining our uses and attending to the differences traced by language. Austin is searching for the natural (almost “boring”) relation between words and the world and makes the (“field”) examination of uses a way to find the naturalness of the relationship between language and the world. Contrary to what is classically maintained, their problem is not agreeing on an opinion, but on a point of departure, a given. This given is language not as a body of statements or words, but as agreement on what we would/should say when. For me, it is essential at the beginning to come to an agreement on the question of “what we would say when.” To my mind, experience proves amply that we do come to agreement on “what we would say when” such or such a thing, though I grant you it is often long and difficult. No matter how long it may take, one can nevertheless succeed, and on the basis of this agreement, this given, this established knowledge, we can begin to clear our little part of the garden. I should add that too often this is what is missing in philosophy: a preliminary datum on which one might agree at the outset.12 What we should say – the agreement is normative. It is possible because ordinary language. “embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations…”13

Austin’s “realism” consists in this conception of differences and resemblances (a theme he shares with Wittgenstein). In “Austin at Criticism” Cavell insists on the real nature of distinctions in Austin, in contrast with the distinctions usually established by philosophers.

10 Cavell, 2015, 95. 11 Cavell, 1981, 204. 12 Wahl and Beck, 1962, 334. [Translation mine] 13 Austin, 1979, 182.

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Too obviously, Austin is continuously concerned with drawing distinctions, and the finer they are the merrier, just as he often explains and justifies what he is doing by praising the virtues of natural distinctions over homemade ones. […] better not merely because finer, but because more solid, having, so to speak, a greater natural weight; appearing normal, even inevitable, when the others are luridly arbitrary; useful where the others seem twisted; real where the others are academic; fruitful where other the others stop cold.14 “Fitting” designates a concept no longer of correspondence or even of correctness, but rather the appropriateness of a statement within the circumstances; the fact that it is proper. “The statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions…”15

Wittgenstein also has a say in formulating what has been Cavell’s obsession throughout his work: the search for the right, fitting tone – at once conceptually, morally, and perceptually – which Cavell mentions in his first autobiographical essay with regard to his mother’s musical talent and his father’s jokes. It is a matter of finding a fine sensitivity to things and the fit of words at the heart of ordinary uses. What Cavell introduces – already in Must We Mean What We Say? and later as the object of his reflection on voice – is rightness of tone, adequacy of expression, knowledge of self (self-confidence) as infused into the definition of meaning. He must then navigate between the Austinian critique of expression (as arising from psychology) on the one hand and, on the other, caricature forms of emotivism that separate the content of our words from the emotion “associated” with them. Hence Cavell’s interest in what he calls the “aesthetic” problem. Cavell proposes a theory of meaning that (in a Wittgensteinian vein) connects ethics and aesthetics while returning to the letter of the second Wittgenstein: “It is what human beings say…”16 Wittgenstein and Austin demonstrate the need to take into account, in meaning, everything that is “said”; all the circumstances together. There is no separating, within a statement, what is of the order of expression and what is of the order of description, as if one could break statements down into stabilized propositions and some “additional” force – some psychological stand-in, as pitiful to Cavell as striking a table or one’s chest in order to legitimate or reinforce a contestable or insincere affirmation would be. Cavell criticizes the idea that ethics or aesthetics could be either emptied out of

14 Cavell, 2015, 102–3 15 Austin, 1979, 130. 16 Wittgenstein, PI, § 241, p. 94.

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or contained within an expressive function, a combination of the affective and the cognitive. Turning to literature and to the stage (where ordinary language is brought to life) goes directly against this approach. The problem is semantic, ethical, and political: Cavell denounces a “Manichaean conception” and a “moral philosophy which distinguishes between the assessment of individual actions and of social practices.”17

2 A Different Theory of Relevance Cavell has made it his goal to “reinsert the human voice in philosophical thinking.”18 For him, the goal of ordinary language philosophy is indeed to make it understood that language is spoken, pronounced by a human voice within a “form of life.” It then becomes a matter of shifting away from the question of the common use of language –central to the Philosophical Investigations – to the entirely new question of the relation between an individual speaker and the language community. For Cavell, this leads to a reintroduction of the voice into philosophy, and to a redefinition of subjectivity in language precisely on the basis of the relationship of the individual voice to the linguistic community; the relation of a voice to voices. As Cavell says at the beginning of his first essay, Austin’s idea that “what we ordinarily say and mean may have a direct and deep control over what we can philosophically say and mean”19 carries stakes that go beyond the fixed framework of philosophy of language, and if this idea is often rejected by philosophers (traditional as well as analytic) and considered simplistic or blind to the profound nature of philosophical questioning, it is because such an impression “may stem from a truth about ourselves which we are holding off.”20 The philosophical interest of turning to “what we say” appears when we ask ourselves not only what it is to say, but what this we is. For Cavell, this is the question at the beginning of the Philosophical Inves­ tigations (which begins with a citation from Augustine). But it is also Thoreau (and Emerson, who will take on considerable importance in Cavell’s work), in his attention to the ordinary and the common who underwrites the conceptions of meaning of Wittgenstein and Austin. This is also what Emerson says in a famous

17 Cavell, 2015, 47. 18 Cavell, 2004, 27. 19 Cavell, 2015, 1 20 Cavell, 2015, 2

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remark often cited by Cavell: “Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.”21 This falsity, the hopeless inadequacy and senselessness of our tone and our language, are left unexplained both by the analytic notion of truth and by the correspondence to reality that semantic approaches, today continued by contemporary representationalism, offer. Against these approaches Cavell proposes his owns semantics (which Diamond calls “realistic”), grounded in attention to the adequacy (or inadequacy) of our expressions to ourselves. We would like to call this relevance, which would define an Austinian line of reflection on relevance that could have rivaled the orthodox version: relevance is the adequacy of what one says to what one means – not in relation to a mental content but rather to what counts for one. The task of the philosopher, and notably the philosopher of language, is to question the relevance of philosophy as relevance to oneself: …so that, for example, my doubts about the relevance of philosophy now, its apparent irrelevance to the motives which brought me to the subject in the first place, were no longer simply obstacles to the philosophical impulse which had to be removed before philosophy could begin, hence motives for withdrawing from the enterprise. It was now possible to investigate philosophically the very topic of irrelevance, and therewith the subject of philosophy itself: it is characteristic of philosophy that from time to time it appear – that from time to time it be –irrelevant to one’s concerns…22

For Cavell, there can be no definition of relevance without an examination of what is important. There is no relevance without importance, without an investment in “what counts.” But relevance and worth may not be the point. The effort is irrelevant and worthless until it becomes necessary to you to know such things. There is the audience of philosophy; but there also, while it lasts, is its performance.23 According to Cavell, this is a defining characteristic of “writing the modern”: “The…exercise of criticism is not to determine whether the thing is good that way but why you want it that way.”24 Through the radical association of “the scrupulous exactitude” of artistic desire and “a moral and intellectual imperative,” Cavell redefines meaning through the conjunction of desire, importance, and value. 21 Emerson, 2000, 137. 22 Cavell, 2015, xxxvi 23 Cavell, 2015, xlii 24 Cavell, 1979, 95.

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When in earlier writing of mine I broach the topic of the modern, I am broaching the topic of art as one in which the connection between expression and desire is purified. In the modern neither the producer nor the consumer has anything to go on (history, convention, genre, form, medium, physiognomy, composition…) that secures the value or the significance of an object apart from one’s wanting the thing to be as it is.25

3 The Universal Voice So what then are the criteria of what is important, significant? Our words and concepts are dead without their criteria of use. Wittgenstein and Austin look for these criteria on the basis of their perception of uses. How can one claim to accomplish this? It is this question – of the essential absence of foundation to this claim – that defines the sense of criteria. Hence the importance of the “aesthetic” analysis in “Aesthetic Problems in Modern Philosophy”, which Cavell goes on to develop in his later work. The principles are already laid out here in this examination of the foundation of our agreements – the natural foundation of our conventions – and of my voice within the community. The thought of the ordinary thus consists in searching for means to recognize and find one’s voice; to find agreement in language and the right, fitting expression – but also in finding ways to express inadequacy, unease, disagreement. On what is the appeal to ordinary language based? All that we have is what we say and our agreements in language. The search for agreement (asking “what would you say if…” as Austin does) is based on something entirely different than meanings, or determining speakers’ “common sense.” The agreement Austin and Wittgenstein speak of is in no way an inter-subjective agreement. It is as objective as an agreement can be. But where does this agreement come from? In “The Availability…” Cavell makes the following remark about Wittgenstein, which would go on to have great resonance (Putnam, McDowell, Diamond all take it up): We learn and we teach certain words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response […] of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an

25 Cavell, 1979, 94–5.

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explanation – all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life.’ Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.26

Cavell shows at once the fragility and the profundity of our agreements, and focuses on the very nature of the necessities that emerge from our forms of life. The originality of Cavell in Must We Mean What We Say? is indeed his reinvention of the nature of language, and the connection he establishes between the nature of language and human nature – finitude. It is in this sense that the question of agreement in language reformulates ad infinitum the question of the human condition, and that acceptance of the latter goes hand-in-hand with acknowledgement of the former. The philosophical problem raised by the philosophy of ordinary language is double. First: by what right do we base ourselves on what we say ordinarily? Next, on what or on whom do we base our determination of what we ordinarily say? But – and here lies the genius of Cavell’s questioning in Must We Mean What We Say? – these two questions are but one. The central enigma of rationality and the community is whether it is possible for me to speak in the name of others. The idea of convention cannot account for the real practice of language. Our agreement – with others, with ourselves – is an agreement of voices: for Wittgenstein our übereinstimmen is a “harmonic” agreement. Cavell defines an agreement that is neither psychological nor inter-subjective, and is founded on nothing more that the validity of a voice. My individual voice claims to be a “universal voice”; this is what a voice does when it bases itself on itself alone, instead of on any condition of reason, in order to establish universal agreement. “Aesthetic Problems in Modern Philosophy” puts the question of the foundation of language in these Kantian terms, showing the proximity of Wittgenstein and Austin’s methods to a paradox inherent to aesthetic judgment: basing oneself on I in order to say what we say. Cavell refers to the well-known passage in §8 of the Critique of Judgment. In aesthetic judgment, Kant leads us to discover “a property of our faculty of cognition that without this analysis would have remained unknown;”27 the “claim to universality” proper to judgments of taste. Kant distinguishes the agreeable from the beautiful (which claims universal agreement) in terms of private versus public judgment. How can a judgment which has all the characteristics of being private claim to be public, to be valid for all? Kant noted the strange, “disconcerting” nature of this fact, whose Unheimlichkeit

26 Cavell, 2015, 52. 27 Kant, 2000, 99.

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Wittgenstein took to the limit. The judgment of taste demands universal agreement, and it “ascribes this agreement to everyone.”28 It is what Kant calls the universal voice that supports such a claim; the Stimme heard in übereinstimmen – the verb Wittgenstein uses when speaking of “agreeing.” The question of the universal voice is the question of the voice itself and of its arrogation. When philosophers speak, they use ordinary words in particular ways and claim to speak for all, but nothing about these words says that they will be accepted by others. This is Cavell’s question: how can I know if I adequately project the words I have learned into new contexts? There is an “unfortunate”29 dimension, a dimension of failure, in ordinary language philosophy; an obsession with cases where language fails, is inadequate, inexpressive, inarticulate. Austin’s classification of “infelicities” in his definition of performatives in How To Do Things With Words is the background for Cavell’s analyses. The ever-possible failure of performatives defines language as a human activity, fortunate or unfortunate. One of the goals of ordinary language philosophy will be, then, to determine the ordinary ways in which an utterance can be infelicitous, a failure, inadequate to the real. The ever-present and sometimes tragic possibility of the failure of language and action altogether is at the center of Austin’s conception of language and meaning. Cavell goes further: skepticism runs throughout our ordinary use of language. I am constantly tempted, or menaced, by inexpressivity. Cavell brings together Freud and Wittgenstein in their shared awareness of the impossibility of controlling what we say and mean. Because the breaking of such control is a constant purpose of the later Wittgenstein, his writing is deeply practical and negative, the way Freud’s is. And like Freud’s therapy, it wishes to prevent understanding which is unaccompanied by inner change. […] In both, such misfortune is betrayed in the incongruence between what is said and what is meant or expressed; for both, the self is concealed in assertion and action and revealed in temptation and wish.30 This is why in defining, as he does, ordinary language by the voice, the voice of the I speaking in the name of others – that arrogation that is the mark of all human speech – a new subject, a subject of speech, is not reconstituted. In asking how to mean what I say, Cavell, far from re-establishing subjectivity by defining it as voice, turns the question of private language around. The problem lies not in being able to express what I have “inside me” – thinking or feeling something without being able to say it – but rather the opposite; it is to mean what I say.

28 Kant, 2000, 101. 29 See Bouveresse, 1971. 30 Cavell, 2015, 72.

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Here, Austin enters: to say, as When Saying Is Doing demonstrated, that language is also action does not mean I control language (for as is clear from the central role excuses play in our lives, I do not control my actions any better). This summarizes an intuition of Must We Mean What We Say?: the impossibility of speaking the world masks a refusal to know oneself and to mean. What they had not realized was what they were saying, or, what they were really saying, and so had not known what they meant. To this extent, they had not known themselves, and not known the world.31 And here we have a definition of the ordinary world, the important world, the world of meaning and importance. I mean, of course, the ordinary world. That may not be all there is, but it is important enough: morality is in that world, and so are force and love; so is art and a part of knowledge (the part which is about that world); and so is religion (wherever God is).32

A number of issues arise from this approach to voice. To say that meaning is voice shifts the classical problem of expression to the question of the adequacy between subject and voice. There is also the question of the “WE.” The voice is both a subjective and general expression: it is what makes it possible for my individual voice to become shared. In voice, there is the idea of a claim [revendica­ tion]. The singular claims a shared, common validity.

4 Subject, Expressiveness, and Voice The Philosophical Investigations begin with the quote from Augustine: because, says Cavell, “all my words are those of an other”. 1. Augustine, Confessions, I. 8: When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved toward something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and

31 Cavell, 2015, 40. 32 Cavell, 2015, 40.

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after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.33 Here, we find all the themes of the Investigations: language learning; community; meaning; desire. But, at the same time, the subject, voice, and expression emerge. In the Investigations, speaking is defined in the mode of confession; There is indeed the case where someone later reveals his inmost heart [sein Innerstes] to me by a confession: but that this is so cannot offer me any explanation of outer and inner, for I have to give credence to the confession. For confession is of course something exterior.34 Here, the myth of the private gives way, as Cavell says, to a myth of inexpressiveness. This idea of inexpressiveness – present in those famous passages of the Investigations in which Wittgenstein imagines that I write a sign “S” for my sensation35 – proves to be the very anxiety of expression and meaning; the anxiety of the very naturality of the passage from inner to outer. So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.36

Here Wittgenstein imagines the temptation to, or mythology of, not silence but inexpressiveness. It is as if the passage to the outside were a loss of control over what I mean and thus ultimately as if an inexpressive, “inarticulate sound” were sometimes preferable to an expression charged with meaning. To accept expression is to accept the reality of the (corporal) exteriority of meaning. “The human body is the best picture of the human soul”37 – not because it represents it (and what would that mean?), or possesses it, but insofar as it gives it expression, means it. This – like the redefined inner/outer relation – is part of our form of life (is it what is given), what must be “accepted.” To recognize this inner/outer relation …is equally to acknowledge that your expressions in fact express you, that they are yours, that you are in them. This means allowing yourself to be comprehended, something you can always deny. Not to deny it is, I would like to say, to acknowledge your body, and the body of your expressions, to be yours, you on earth, all there will ever be of you…38

33 Wittgenstein, 2009, § 1. 34 Wittgenstein, 2007, § 558, p. 100. 35 Wittgenstein, 2007, §§260–261, §270. 36 Wittgenstein, 2007, § 261, p. 93. 37 Wittgenstein, 2007, II, iv, p. 178. 38 Cavell, 1979, 383.

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Such recognition of meaning as expression and bodily expression is connected to Wittgenstein’s naturalism; it would mean accepting expression (Ausdruck) as identically inner (it expresses me) and outer (it exposes me). Cavell’s originality indeed lies in his reinvention of the nature of language and in the connection he establishes between this nature and human nature, finitude. It is in this sense that the question of language agreements reformulates ad infinitum the question of the human condition, and it is in this sense that acceptance of this (human) condition goes hand-in-hand with acknowledgment of these (language) agreements. At stake here is acceptance of expression itself: to tolerate being expressive, meaningful. The philosophical problem raised by ordinary language philosophy is thus double. First, as we have seen: by what right do we base ourselves on what we ordinarily say? And next: on what, or on whom do we base ourselves to determine what we ordinarily say? But – and this is the genius of Cavell’s arguments in Must We Mean What We Say? and in The Claim of Reason – these two questions are but one: the question of the relation of the I (my words) to the real (our world). That we agree in language is certainly not the end of the problem of skepticism, and conventionalism is not an answer to the questions asked here. Indeed, for Cavell it is crucial that Wittgenstein says that we agree in and not on language. This means that we are not agents of the agreement; that language precedes this agreement as much as it is produced by it and that this circularity constitutes an irreducible element of skepticism. A solution to the problem of language cannot be found in conventionalism, because convention does not constitute an expla­ nation of the functioning of language, but an essential difficulty. The idea of convention does indeed mean something (in this sense, it is unavoidable): it registers the strength of our agreements and the nature of our capacity to speak together. But convention cannot account for the real practice of language, and it serves instead to prevent us from seeing the naturality of language. As Cavell says about agreement: ...since we cannot assume that the words we are given have their meaning by nature, we are led to assume they take it from convention; and yet no current idea of “convention” could seem to do the work that words do – there would have to be, we could say, too many conventions in play…We cannot have agreed beforehand to all that would be necessary.39

To agree in language means that language – our form of life – produces our understanding just as much as it is the product of an agreement; that in this sense it is natural to us, and that the idea of convention is there at once to mimic and 39 Cavell, 1979, 31.

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to mask this necessity. Here, Cavell’s critique in This New Yet Unapproachable America comes in; his critique of usual interpretations of “forms of life” through the formula “forms of life” (not simply forms of life), the form of life not only in its social dimension but in its biological dimension. Cavell insists on this second (vertical) aspect of form of life, while recognizing the importance of the first (horizontal), social agreement. Discussions of this first meaning (conventionalism) have occluded the force of the “natural” and biological sense of forms of life in Wittgenstein, defined in his mention of “natural reactions,” “the natural history of humanity.” What is given in forms of life are not just our social structures and different cultural habits, but everything that has to do with “the specific strength and scale of the human body, senses and voice.”40 Our agreement (with others, with myself) is an agreement or understanding of voices: our übereinstimmen, says Wittgenstein. That a group of human beings stimmen in their language überein says, so to speak, that they are mutually voiced with respect to it, mutually attuned top to bottom.41 Cavell thus defines an agreement that is not psychological or inter-subjective, and which is founded on nothing other than the pure validity of a voice: my individual voice claims to be, is, a “universal voice.” Claiming is what a voice does when it founds itself on itself alone in order to establish universal agreement – a claim that, as exorbitant as it already is, Cavell asks us to formulate in a yet more exorbitant manner: in place and stead of any condition of reason or understanding.

5 Inexpressiveness In Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell asked how to mean (“mean”: which also means to think, signify) what I say? Cavell reverses radically the examination of “private language.” The problem is not being able to express what I have “in me” –thinking or feeling something without being able to say it (a problem definitively dealt with by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus): there is the ineffable, but it most certainly cannot be thought, nor can it in some way point outside language. The problem is the inverse: not being able “to be in what I say,” to mean what I say. Here, Austin’s teaching enters in again: to say, as Austin did in How to Do Things With Words, that language is also action does 40 Cavell, 1989, 41–2. 41 Cavell, 1989, 32.

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not mean that I control language, as I do (certain of my) actions. This means above all that it is possible for me to not “mean what I say.” I am more possessed by language than I possess it. This point, expressed in A Pitch of Philos­ ophy, makes explicit a profound intuition from Must We Mean What We Say? about the source of skepticism: an impossibility of speaking the world that comes not from any (imaginary) distancing of the world, but from the impossibility or refusal to mean. What they had not realized what was they were saying, or, what they were really saying, and so had not known what they meant. To this extent, they had not known themselves, and not known the world.42

Our (deliberate) distance from the world creates a fantasy: the fantasy of the private, of inexpressiveness. But here, this inexpressiveness becomes the very anxiety of the weight of expression. So the fantasy of a private language, underlying the wish to deny the publicness of language, turns out, so far, to be a fantasy, or fear, either of inexpressiveness, one in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am powerless to make myself known; or one in which what I express is beyond my control.43 The question of the secret and the private is transformed and becomes that of the fatality of meaning, or of my “condemnation” to signification. The problem is thus not meaninglessness or the impossibility of “making sense”, but rather the fatality of expression. Why do we mean anything? The question, within the mood of the fantasy is: Why do we attach significance to any words and deeds, of others or of ourselves? […] A fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness would solve a simultaneous set of metaphysical problems: it would relieve me of the responsibility for making myself known to others – as though if I were expressive that would mean continuously betraying my experiences, incessantly giving myself away; it would suggest that my responsibility for self-knowledge takes care of itself – as though the fact that others cannot know my (inner) life means that I cannot fail to.44

To understand that, as Wittgenstein said, language is our form of life means accepting the naturalness of language, the fatality of signification. This is not easy to achieve. It is from here that skepticism in its various forms is born: the impossibility of accessing the world is a mask for my own refusal to recognize 42 Cavell, 2015, 40. 43 Cavell, 1979, 351. 44 Cavell, 1979, 351.

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it – that is to say, to bear signification, meaning, expression. From here, realism in its various forms is born – my claim to know or theorize the real is a mask for my refusing contact, proximity with things. To mean, or to know what one means, would be first and foremost to place the sentence, to quote Wittgenstein, back in its “country of origin”, its “natural milieu”; to recover the naturalness of language. This was the task of the ordinary language philosopher; as Wittgenstein says, “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”45 But Cavell goes beyond this imagery of a return to home [Heimat]. There is nothing to recover. There is no place like home, as Dorothy says. We are not agents of our language, but to use Emerson’s phrase, “victims of expression”: it is in this sense that we may speak of a law of expression. Thus Cavell makes more precise what was sketched out at the end of The Claim of Reason concerning the essential passivity of the relation to the voice. (It is in recognizing this abandonment to my words, as if to unfeasible epitaphs, presaging the leave-taking of death, that I know my voice, recognize my words (no different from yours) as mine).46

The question is then no longer being able to access language, the community of speakers; it is being able to bear precisely, he says, “the (inevitable) extension of the voice, which will always escape me and will forever find its way back to me.”47 And thus, what is unbearable is not the inexpressible or the impossibility of being expressive (a form of what is called the myth of interiority) – it is expression itself. The phantasm of the private transforms our fear of being public, “the terror of being expressive beyond our means,” and disguises it as a symmetrical fear of inexpressiveness (the idea of “private language”). To mean means support, bear the voice. Meaning and significance imply then the impossible adequacy between a speaker and his or her voice. Here the terror of absolute inexpressiveness AND of absolute expressiveness, of total exposure, come together as two extreme states of voicelessness, which is another way to speak of nonsense within the human form of life. I am led to stress the condition of the terror of absolute inexpressiveness, suffocation, which at the same time reveals itself as a terror of absolute expressiveness, unconditioned exposure; they are the extreme states of voicelessness.48

45 Wittgenstein, PI, § 116. 46 Cavell, 1996, 126. 47 Cavell, 1996, 126. 48 Cavell, 1997, 43.

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References Austin, J. L., 1979: A plea for excuses, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 57, 1956, 1–30. In: Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers, eds. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Bouveresse, Jacques, 1971: La parole malheureuse. Paris, Éditions de Minuit. Cavell, Stanley, 1979: The Claim of Reason. New York, Oxford University Press. Cavell, Stanley, 1981: Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Harvard Film Studies). Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Cavell, Stanley, 1989: This New Yet Unapproachable America. Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Chicago, University Chicago Press. Cavell, Stanley, 1996: A Pitch of Philosophy. Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Cavell, Stanley, 1997: Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago, University Chicago Press. Cavell, Stanley, 2004: Cities of Words. Cambridge, Belknap Press. Cavell, Stanley, 2015: Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2000: Self Reliance. In The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York, The Modern Library. Kant, Immanuel, 2000: Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer. New York, Cambridge University Press. Laugier, Sandra, 2013: Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy, Translated by Daniela Ginsburg. Chicago, University Chicago Press. Laugier, Sandra, 2014: Recommencer la philosophie. Paris, Vrin. Wahl, Jean and Leslie Beck, eds., 1962: La philosophie analytique. Cahiers de Royaumont. Paris, Les Editions de Minuit. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1958: Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford, Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2007: Zettel, A Bilingual Edition, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, eds. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2009: Philosophical Investigations, Revised Fourth Edition, Hacker and Schulte eds. New York, Blackwell.

Jesús Padilla Gálvez

Understanding Regarded as Comprehension of Content Abstracts: The aim of this article is to examine the meaning of the word “understand” from the analytic point of view. The investigation starts with some general considerations on what it means to understand a language. Second, we will explore the view of understanding seen as the a process comparable to a game that takes place within language. Special emphasis is placed on the fact that understanding does not proceed in the same way as a cause-and-effect relationship. The third section deals with the functions words have in our lives and distinguishes between the meaning of a word and its actual purpose. The last two sections are dedicated to the notion of perspicuity which is considered a relevant criterion for understanding. The study contains several examples that show how fallacies arise. Keywords: understanding, comprehension, meaning, content, game, effect, purpose

1 Introduction The aim of this paper is to elucidate the meaning of the verb “understand” and examine its philosophical implications. When seeking the content of the concept, we want to describe the essence of the word, its meaning. To clarify its meaning we shall adopt a new perspective. In line with Wittgenstein, we make the following restrictions: the meaning of “understand” is determined by the place it occupies in grammar.1 The meaning of a word corresponds to the explanation that is given of it. Its meaning arises from the use of the word in language. What must be highlighted is that defining the meaning involves neither an empirical proposition (Erfahrungs­ satz) nor a causal explanation, but is rather based on an established rule of convention or agreement.2 Accordingly, the place of a word in grammar is determined

1 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §90. 2 Wittgenstein says this: “The criteria which we accept for ‘fitting’, ‘being able to’, ‘understanding’, are much more complicated than might appear at first sight. That is, the game with these words, their use in the linguistic intercourse that is carried on by their means, is more involved – the role of these words in our language is other than we are tempted to think. (This role is what we need to understand in order to resolve philosophical paradoxes. And that’s why definitions https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-008

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by its use.3 Grammar relates to language in the same way that the rules relate to a game. The meaning of a word is defined by an explanation of its signification.4 In the secondary literature several authors have dealt with the problem of understanding using different approaches.5 For instance, it was examined in the sense of “knowing how to act in accordance with a rule”.6 Most of the investigations, however, lack the historical context. Whereas the theme of understanding plays an important role in the German philosophical tradition, in the English reception understanding tends to be considered as a topic subordinated to meaning or psychology. As a result, the contours of the problem disappear. This article aims to describe understanding in the historic context in which it emerged. Wittgenstein was not interested in investigating the operational mode of language, viewed as a psycho-physical organism, since this would amount to a mere description of phenomena such as memory, associations, etc. Those characterizations would only constitute a further, separate linguistic act located outside a “calculus”. He was rather interested in figuring out the characteristic features of such “calculus”. A speaker can only describe a language game or a calculus by using a hypernym that prevents him from being distracted by examining every single case. Wittgenstein seemed to be interested in the content of a sentence as forming part of a whole calculus. To illustrate this, he described the example of a chess game in which one piece is replaced by the colour word “red”. As such, the word “red” is determined by the position it has in the game, including its shape and size, whether its colour is pure or mixed, darker or brighter, and whether there its colour changes or remains unvaried, etc. The conclusions drawn from these specifications are then translated into depictions and actions, all of which are measured and counted. The nexus established by such specifications shall be explained in more detail by another example. Let’s examine the German interjection “Ach!” which may adopt several meanings depending on the context in which it occurs. For instance, “Ach!” may express astonishment, compassion, ironic regret, or it may point to the opposite range of emotions such as displeasure, pain, or denial. A speaker could, for instance, express the following regret “Ach, wie schade!” (“What a pity!”) by which the meaning would be clearly defined.7 But what is its denotation in all the other language games in which this expression can be used?

usually aren’t enough to |74| resolve them; and even less so the statement that a word is ‘indefinable’.)” Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §182. 3 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §558. 4 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §295. 5 Stroud, 2011, 294 f. 6 Baker, Hacker, 2009, chapter 6. 7 Wittgenstein, 2009 PI, §16.

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Are they all in line with the use of “Ach!” mentioned in the example above? Based on these considerations, we will examine the meaning of “understand”.

2 What Does It Mean to Understand a Language? What one usually means when one declares that one “understands a language” is that one has learned about its history and that one has acquired certain linguistic skills. This is described in the following quote: The grammar of the word “know” is evidently closely related to the grammar of the words “can”, “is able to”. But also closely related to that of the word “understand”. (To have ‘mastered’ a technique.)8

The explanation rests on the tacit assumption that the symbolism used in language in the form of punctuation marks and letters is essential. As such, there is a fundamental difference between a sentence that is used with quotation marks and one that is used without. Due to Gottlob Frege’s explanatory notes, we have learned to distinguish between the content and the meaning of sentences.9 To understand a language is not so much about becoming familiar with its unknown features, but rather about comprehending the position that a sign has in it. For instance, if an English-speaking person says “Holy Toledo!”, the word “Toledo” does not actually refer to the town of Toledo (of which there are several), but is only a sarcastic remark. In fact, it is used to express one’s irritation or annoyance because of an unbelievable or disturbing issue. In fact, Wittgenstein rejected the arbitrary ascription of associations to words. To illustrate what was said by way of another example, I shall take my first name, which I was given by others. There is a tendency in many people from other cultures to ascribe to the name “Jesús” a religious connotation. What happens is that the combination of five letters plus an accent mark “J-es-u-´-s” triggers the most curious assumptions entailing various kinds of not unimportant consequences. These rest on a pre-rational mythological religious point of view and often lead to the arbitrary censorship of academic articles or conference contributions, the downgrading scientific attainments, or even a gratuitous attribution of viewpoints that I have actually never supported. This is exactly what Wittgenstein criticised, because all such aberrations do not contribute to a better understanding of the use of a word, but rather introduce 8 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §150. 9 Frege, 1892, 25–50.

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an irrational element. An arbitrary association of something outside language does not facilitate understanding. This is because language speaks for itself. Wittgenstein puts it like this: To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to have mastered a technique.10

Understanding a language sometimes appears as if there existed a background on which a sentence gained its meaning. But understanding a language is not a state of consciousness (Bewusstseinszustand) that accompanies a sentence. It can rather be compared to an activity such as mastering a calculus or knowing how to multiply numbers. Augustine’s description of language learning reveals a particular conception of language and how the meaning of words evolve. Wittgenstein objected to this Augustinian view. Undoubtedly, a speaker needs profound language skills to carry out these activities. If one aims to understand an explanation containing, for instance, colours or curves in a plane, one needs to be familiar with the grammatical function of the words “red” or “ellipse” and their relative positions in language. Wittgenstein compared language to a game guided by rules. If a speaker names a colour or a shape, the words used to denote these specifications have distinct grammatical features. The expression “A” in “A is yellow” has a different grammar depending on whether it is used to refer to an object or to the surface of that object. It makes perfect sense to say that an object is thoroughly yellow, but not when referring to the surface only. If one points to an object, one usually makes a reference to it as a whole rather than to individual sub-aspects of it, such as length or colour. Likewise, one may say that to “point to a colour” means to point to a body that has it. Without doubt language interferes with our lives in multiple ways. If we come back to our example of the interjection “Ach!” or think of a word like “perhaps”, one could consider these words as expressions of sensation or feeling. Such feeling, however, must not be confused with the meaning of the word. Whatever the relation of a word to this feeling is, whether or not it was caused by its accompanying the word regularly, as any linguistic experience does, Wittgenstein did not consider these aspects relevant. We are primarily interested in describing a procedure.

10 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §199.

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3 The Procedure Viewed as a Game “Understanding” is not considered a process accompanying activities such as reading a text or listening to music. It is rather an interwoven procedure set against a background of specific circumstances in line with its actual linguistic usage. It is often argued that understanding is of a psychological nature, but this view is misleading. Understanding is a procedure similar to that of translating from one language to another, akin to all propositional attitudes (e.g. thought, knowledge, belief, desire, etc.). Regarding the actual use of a word, Wittgenstein sees something “fluctuating” or “vacillating”, to which he contrasts something solid.11 This appears similar to a painter depicting a changing landscape in the form of a still-life scene. We shall apply Wittgenstein’s conception to Picasso’s artwork, namely the series of women’s portraits he painted. The viewer of these portraits observes each single aspect one after the other without losing the overall perspective. The individual aspects are not depicted as static images, but appear as combined and mutually overlapping details. Once the viewer perceives this image, he has to decode every angle of the painter’s vision which have been captured to create the impression of figures in motion. During Picasso’s times, aesthetic categories had changed fundamentally as perfect beauty was replaced by a growing interest in details. Wittgenstein’s view of language is similar to that of a game that is played according to fixed rules, whereby the rules may undergo change. As such, he compares the language procedure to a game and at the same time he measures language according to the rules of the game. For instance, if a speaker’s purpose is examined from the game point of view, we recognize that his language use is guided by certain rules, namely those of his purpose.12 Accordingly, a speaker assumes a purpose-oriented speech game. He uses language in a fluctuating way by applying certain linguistic rules to his discourse. It is the listener’s task to detect the speaker’s purpose. One could, for instance, say that the use of the word “good” (in an epistemological sense) consists of a number of mutually related games. Wittgenstein calls these “facets of use”.13 At the same time, the interconnection between these facets gives rise to the concept. In this respect, Wittgenstein seemed to have changed his earlier view. He considered these facets as different from physics as its aim is to provide simplified descriptions of natural phenomena, ignoring subordinate 11 Wittgenstein, 2005, BT, 186v, 140. 12 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §132. 13 Wittgenstein says: “So könnte man sagen, der Gebrauch des Wortes “gut” (im ethischen Sinne) sei aus einer überaus großen Anzahl einander verwandter Spiele zusammengesetzt. Sozusagen Facetten des Gebrauchs. Es ist aber gerade der Zusammenhang dieser Facetten, ihre Verwandtschaft, was hier einen Begriff erzeugt.” Wittgenstein, 2000, Item 140, 32.

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influences. One of the novel consequences of Wittgenstein’s position is that we can no longer argue that logic represents an idealized reality that would only be valid for a strict ideal language. One could at most say “we construct an ideal language,” as opposed to ordinary language.14 We are usually talking about a procedure of understanding, a state of understanding, and also of criteria that enable understanding. Wittgenstein criticized the common view that understanding is characterized as a mental process or a state of consciousness in the hypothetical sense. The word “understand” is thereby assigned a certain grammar. What becomes obvious is that the grammar used when describing mental states15 is in some respect considered analogical to that used to describe brain processes. There is, however, a substantial difference between the two special fields, since direct control is assumed to be possible in brain processes. For instance, if we take an example from neurosurgery, one could adopt a cause-effect relationship and imagine a human skull being opened and operated on. As a consequence to this intervention, certain movements are no longer possible.16 However, this view has nothing to do with the immediate perception of the grammar of mental process, which cannot be described in terms of cause and effect. In other words, this relation does not exist in the process of the immediate perception of the grammar of a mental process.

4 Effect and Purpose If it is claimed that the concept of “meaning” is linked to a characteristic sensation when saying a word, then the explanation of the word and its meaning appear as if they were in a cause-effect relationship. We would then regard language from a one-sided standpoint. A speaker using the word “perhaps” may understand its meaning, but it does not automatically enable him to understand its purpose. What is meant by purpose is the function of a word in human life, which is nothing else but the meaning of the word in the same sense as we talk about the meaning a particular event has for one’s life. For instance, one could explain that the purpose of the German interjection “Ha!” is to scare someone off. By knowing its meaning, we don’t necessarily know its purpose and the distinguishing criterion for its use. Purpose is used here in different modes. We might say that the purpose of a person’s action is the explanation that he gives when asked for it. 14 See: Padilla Gálvez, Gaffal, 2011; Padilla Gálvez, Gaffal, 2012. 15 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §180, §577, §588, §662. 16 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §149.

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One may argue that the effect of the exclamation “Ha!” fulfils its purpose. But the explanation of purpose or effect does not correspond to what one considers a sufficient explanation of meaning. A word and its effect cannot be replaced by another word, neither can a gesture be substituted by another gesture. The above-mentioned proposition can be summarized in the following reiterated maxim: “the meaning is what the explanation of the meaning explains”.17 This can be interpreted as follows: a speaker needs to take the explanation of meaning into account. Wittgenstein, however, criticizes the view of a speaker’s requiring a definite purpose in order to produce a certain effect.18 According to this misleading view, the sentences and their words would make up a mechanism (e.g. a psychological one). To illustrate such a mechanism Wittgenstein uses the example of a juke box which contains a roll and certain other devices on which the music is written in some kind of notation (by the position of holes, pins, etc.).19 It is as if these devices gave a command to be executed by the keys and hammers, etc. that produce music. This mechanism reveals that the meaning of the sign is its effect. He asks how this model could be understood if the juke box was in bad shape and instead of a sound produced only hissing and knocking. Could we explain the meaning of signs to be determined by the effect produced by the defective mechanism? In other words, is there a direct relation between effect and meaning only if the mechanism is in good shape? Is this comparable to the effect of a command given to a person who is willing to fulfil it? Is blind obedience, as it occurred in the First World War, the meaning of the command? If so, what would then be the criterion of blind obedience? One might nevertheless object that the meaning of signs is not their effect, but their purpose. It is objected that the purpose is only part of the overall purpose of the juke box – namely to entertain people. But it then turns out that no part of this purpose corresponds to the meaning of the signs. The speaker is only interested in the purpose of these signs within the mechanism of the juke box. To sum up, the purpose of a command is its meaning as far as the purpose is indicated by a rule. Let us consider the following utterances:

17 The original quote in German is this: “[...] die Bedeutung sei, was die Erklärung der Bedeutung erkläre.” Wittgenstein, 2000, Item 140, “Grosses Format”, 25. In German Wittgenstein uses the subjunctive, which shows that the maxim is used as a major premise. 18 Wittgenstein says this: “Must I know whether I understand a word? Don’t I also sometimes think I understand a word (as I may think I understand a method of calculation) and then realize that I did not understand it? (“I thought I knew what ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ motion meant, but I see that I don’t know.”)” Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §938, |p. 53 n.|. 19 Cf.: Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §193.

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(1) “I say ‘go’ because I want you to leave me alone.” (2) “I say ‘maybe’ because I’m not quite sure.” The meaning of the imperative mode “go” is to request somebody to leave a place. The speaker conveys this content as expressed in sentence (1). In sentence (2), the meaning of the adverb “maybe” relativizes the certainty of the statement, indicating that something is uncertain is the sense of “possibly” or “under certain circumstances”. The adverb qualifies the accuracy of the subsequent specification. To sum up, the investigation of whether the meaning of a word is its effect or its purpose or something different is a grammatical investigation.20

5 What Does Understanding Mean? For Wittgenstein the term “understand” is closely related to the concept of “surveyability” or “perspicuity”.21 He was not interested in the psychological processes which accompany a sentence, but rather in an understanding of its meaning. In order to understand, let’s say, the grammar of the word “mean”, we have to ask what the criterion is for an expression X to have a certain meaning. Or else, what shall be considered criteria for the meaning of understand? The answer to the question “How is this to be understood?” establishes a connection between two statements. In fact, the query is about the type of nexus or connection that exists among statements. The procedure that Wittgenstein calls “understanding a sentence” –normally expressed in form of a description – is sometimes a translation of one form of symbolism to another. It corresponds to transferring one mode of

20 Wittgenstein says: “(a) “Understanding a word”: a state. But a mental state? – We call dejection, excitement, pain, mental states. Carry out a grammatical investigation as follows: we say “He felt dejected the whole day” “He was in great excitement the whole day” “He has been in pain uninterruptedly since yesterday”. – We also say, “Since yesterday I have understood this word.” ‘Uninterruptedly’, though? – To be sure, one can speak of an interruption of understanding. But in what cases? Compare: “When did your pains get less?” and “When did you stop understanding that word?”.” Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §149. 21 Cf. “A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. – Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.” Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §122.

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representation into another, to making a copy, to copy and paste, to transferring an utterance into a distinct kind of representation. To understand a description then means getting an exact picture of what is described. The process is similar to that of making a drawing according to a description. One may say “I understand this picture, I can paint it.”22 The speaker views the understanding of a sentence as a condition of his ability to apply it. One can say, “I cannot obey the command if I do not understand it” or “I cannot obey until I understand it.” Is it really necessary to understand a command in order to act on it? Of course one has to understand the command to know what to do. Jaroslav Hašek’s novel The Good Soldier Schwejk shows how the soldier continuously misunderstands the meaning of commands and translates them into absurd actions.23 Wittgenstein says this: “A misunderstanding makes it look to us as if a proposition did something strange.”24 As such, one must understand the order to be able to act on it. Here the “must” appears suspicious. If this is a logical “must”, then the sentence is a grammatical remark.25 How long before one obeys must one understand the command? The sentence “I must understand an order before I can act on it” is significant, yet not in a metalogic sense. According to Wittgenstein, “understand” and “mean” are no metalogic terms.26 If “understanding a sentence” meant to act somehow on it, then understanding could not be considered a condition of being able to act in accordance with it. Nevertheless, can a particular act of understanding be the precondition for its compliance. Wittgenstein says this: I cannot execute the command, because I do not understand what you mean. – Yes, now I understand you.27

What happened in between these two statements? A speaker’s command is received by the listener who has to decide how to carry it out. It is all about understanding instructions which are explanations given in language. An adequate execution of a command means nothing else but having learned how to obey it. For example, the command might be given in a familiar language, but with false 22 Wittgenstein, 2000, Item 212, Verstehen, 62. 23 Wittgenstein says this: “... we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were aiming at a particular state, a state of complete exactness, and as if this were the real goal of our investigation.” Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §91. 24 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §93. 25 Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §232. 26 Padilla Gálvez, 2010, 127–148. 27 The original quote in German is this: “Ich kann den Befehl nicht ausführen, weil ich nicht verstehe, was Du meinst. – Ja, jetzt verstehe ich Dich”. Wittgenstein, 2000, Item 212, Verstehen, 74.

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emphasis, and the listener might then be puzzled and not know how to react. After some time, he understands it and can allocate the emphasis to its correct meaning. To comprehend a meaning does not necessarily require that one grasps its abstract sense. In order to elucidate the grammar of the word “understand” Wittgenstein asks when we actually understand it, once we have pronounced it completely or while we are pronouncing it. How long does it take to understand a sentence? If we understand a sentence for an hour, do we always start from ground zero? The sentence is characterized by its grammatical rules.28 If we define the language game of understanding by its rules then the rules belong to its grammar. If a speaker uses the word “understand” meaningfully, does he need to have a definition in mind at the moment of speaking? Wittgenstein does not consider this necessary for one to be able to use it correctly. However, if a speaker is asked to provide a definition of it, then he would certainly be able to give one.

6 Conclusions The aim of this article was to determine the meaning of the word “understand” by resorting to Wittgenstein’s investigations. Understanding is inseparably linked to language. Therefore to understand means to be able to describe a specific content in objective terms. The content has to be decoded by translating it into another symbolism. It is important to recognize the interconnectedness of terms and their nexus within a context. Understanding does not proceed according to the rules of cause and effect, but rather entails perspicuity. Wittgenstein has shown that an incorrect use of analogies may cause confusion. The examples given illustrate that an internalistic perspective of understanding tends to produce fallacies.

References Baker, Gordon P. and Peter M. S. Hacker, 2009: An Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Vol. I. Wittgenstein, Understanding and Meaning. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Fogelin, Robert John, 1976: Wittgenstein. London, Routledge.

28 Wittgenstein says this: “Essence is expressed in grammar.” Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §371.

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Frege, Gottlob,1892: Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik. 100, 25–50. Padilla Gálvez, Jesús, 2010: Wittgenstein’s Criticism against Gödel’s Project of Metalogic. Wittgenstein: Issues and Debates. Frankfurt a.M., Paris, Lancaster, New Brunswick, Ontos Verlag, 127–148. Padilla Gálvez, Jesús, Margit Gaffal, 2011: Forms of Life and Language Games. Frankfurt a.M., Paris, Lancaster, New Brunswick, Ontos Verlag. Padilla Gálvez, Jesús, Margit Gaffal, 2012: Doubtful Certainties. Language-Games, Forms of Life, Relativism. Frankfurt a. M., Ontos Verlag. Stroud, Barry, 2011: Meaning and Understanding. The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 294–310. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1980: Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. [RPP I] Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2000: Wittgenstein‘s Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2001: Philosophische Untersuchungen. Kritisch-genetische Edition. Ed. Joachim Schulte in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, Eike von Savigny and Georg Henrik von Wright. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2005: The Big Typescript (TS 213), [BT], German English Scholars’ Edition C. Grant Luckhardt (Trans.), Maximilian E. Aue (Trans.). Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2009: Philosophical Investigations, [PI], 4th edition, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell.

Margit Gaffal

An Analytic View of Understanding Abstract: The aim of this chapter is to examine the philosophical conditions of understanding. It is based on Wittgenstein’s talk on understanding recorded by Moritz Schlick. The first two sections contain an overview of the meaning of ‘understand’ and the diversity of language games in which ‘understand’ is used, respectively. The third part deals with the mode in which psychological states are expressed and analyses fallacies produced by the combining of scientific with prescientific expressions. The fourth section is dedicated to the nature of ambiguous concepts and the role of grammar. Finally, the question of what it means to understand a piece of art is discussed by comparing visual language to verbal language. Keywords: understand, language games, private language, psychologism, (un)conscious, visual language

1 Introduction In the period from 1929 to 1932, Moritz Schlick maintained regular Privatissima with Ludwig Wittgenstein in Vienna, of which Schlick elaborated detailed transcripts. This investigation is based on a dictation given by Wittgenstein to Schlick in the year 1929. It is known that Wittgenstein participated in several meetings of the interdisciplinary discussion circle Wiener Kreis. There was an éclat at one of the meetings when it turned out that Wittgenstein’s theses had been copied by Rudolf Carnap and then issued by Carnap as his own.1 As a consequence of this incident, Wittgenstein severed contact with the Vienna Circle, but still kept in touch with its founder, Moritz Schlick. In 1922 Moritz Schlick had taken over the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Vienna as successor to Ernst Mach.

1 “Dear Professor Schlick! “(...) This wish was awakened to me this morning by the fact that Carnap’s typescript arrived by post (special edition in “Erkenntnis”). When I was browsing through the script I came across many of my thoughts anonymously pronounced. You know what a strange situation I’m in: I’ve been working a lot during these last four years, not having anything published, but I was continuously making detailed statements about my work. And now I will soon be able to see my own work as a kind of second uplift or plagiarism of Carnap’s. - This is of course very unpleasant for me. (...) (Letter to Schlick, 6.5.1932)” Pichler, 2004, 82. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-009

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This article deals with the prerequisites and diverse facets of understanding as described by Wittgenstein in a dictation to Moritz Schlick entitled “Versteht man einen Satz oder ist es erst ein Satz, wenn man es versteht?”2 (“Does one under­ stand a sentence or is it only a sentence if one understands it?”). First, let’s examine the etymology of the word “verstehen”. The word “understand” goes back to the Latin origin “comprehendere” and “intellegere (intellectus)”, both meaning to perceive and comprehend with sense and mind.3 They include sense perceptions (sensibus) as well as the mentally comprehensible (animo) in the form of figurative notions such as in the expressions ‘to bear something in mind’ or ‘to keep someone in good memory’ (memoria). Ludwig Wittgenstein explored the theme of understanding on several occasions,4 though his considerations sometimes appear incomplete or are interrupted at one instance to be continued later in a subsequent passage. What perhaps makes this transcript special is its detailed and profound analysis of the notion of understanding and how it happens in different fields. Among the topics covered are questions such as whether understanding is considered a process or a state of mind, how understanding takes place in art, or which function “Vorstellung” and “Darstellung” have in understanding.

2 Language Games of Understanding The object of our understanding can be many things, such as the observation of a situation or process or the hearing of linguistically conveyed content. In everyday language ‘understand’ means to grasp a state-of-affairs and understand the context in which this is situated.5 It includes connotations such as to comprehend meaning, interpret a message, intuitively grasp and intellectually pervade a matter. What underlies this conception is the assumption of a definable content that is objectively given and which can be grasped by any reasonable person. Another notion of ‘understand’ refers to an agreement among people due to similar attitudes or perspectives. It means to agree or consent with another person because of convincing arguments or plausible reasons given. We do not

2 Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 1–32. 3 “Comprehendere” means to touch an object, also to seize someone (catch and arrest), to confiscate, intercept a letter, etc. In an abstract sense it means to capture something through words. 4 Wittgestein, PI, §§81, 92, 199, 243, 355, 513, 514, 525–527. 5 Padilla Gálvez, 2009, 57–96.

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encounter any problems to understanding what we consider obvious or selfevident, but run into constraints when confronted with a person’s unintelligible conduct. In this case we are confronted with subjective views of understanding. Due to the possibility of free will and deliberate decision, human conduct cannot be explained by natural laws or strict logical principles. In fact, G. Frege denied humanities the status of a science mainly because the criterion of truth cannot be applied.6 What can be noticed in human conduct are certain regularities and recurring patterns. How can the other’s point of view be understood? Human sciences aim to understand the significance of life-expressions (Leb­ ensäusserungen) and the actions that go along with them. As they deal with the study of personal experience (Erlebnis) they require different research methods than those applied in the natural sciences. The philosophers J. G. Droysen and W. Dilthey viewed understanding as the key concept of the humanities. In the following quote, Dilthey underlined the importance of being able to understand and interpret another person’s life-expressions as prerequisite for research in the humanities: Starting from the experience and understanding of oneself, and in constant mutual interaction among the two, the understanding of unfamiliar life expressions (Lebensäusserungen) develops. Again, it is not a matter of logical construction or psychological dissection, but of analysis following a theoretical purpose. It is intended to determine the yield of understanding others for historical knowledge7.

Philosophy has always occupied a prominent position in the canon of the sciences, as one of its tasks is to examine the concepts and research methods used in the other sciences.8 Therefore philosophical investigations frequently intersect with other disciplines. A brief review shows the overlaps between philosophy and psychology. Around the turn of the last century, psychology was established as an independent academic discipline. Universities founded psychological laboratories where empirical research methods were employed. More specifically, W. Wundt headed the first laboratory at the University of Leipzig (1879). He was interested in the mode in which human beings process information, and assumed

6 Frege explains this in the following quote: “Was man Geisteswissenschaft nennt, steht der Dichtung näher, ist darum aber auch weniger wissenschaftlich als die strengen Wissenschaften, die um so trockner sind, je strenger sie sind; denn die strenge Wissenschaft ist auf die Wahrheit gerichtet und nur auf die Wahrheit.” Frege, 1918, 63. 7 Dilthey, 1992, 79. 8 Hacker, 2013, 1–24.

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that if we managed to describe a person’s lines of thought (Denkwege) we would thereby be able to understand this person. A different approach was taken by C. Stumpf and Th. Lipps, who analysed human behavior by focusing on the exploration of “Erlebnis” (different from “Erfahrung”) as someone’s personal estimation of an event and its repercussions for one’s life.9 Other psychological laboratories were established at the University of Sorbonne (1889) under the direction of A. Binet, and at the University of Graz (1894) with A. Meinong’s first psychological laboratory. At that time, there was a tendency to attribute the study of mental processes to psychology. A controversy between the two disciplines arose when representatives of psychologism pleaded for an investigation of logic and epistemology. They argued that as logic and phenomenology were mentally processed and could be reduced to empirical laws, both disciplines should be assigned to psychology. Despite the fact that philosophy and psychology apply different research methods, both disciplines insisted on the investigation of logical thinking. In this stalement, E. Husserl’s approach proved promising, as he aimed to re-establish the humanities from a phenomenological perspective. His main interest was in epistemology rather than in psychology. He objected to psychologism in that its aim was not to describe the functioning of the human mind but rather to define the procedure that enables us to set up reasonable arguments.10 G. Frege drew a strict line between an individual’s thought (Vor­ stellung) and the objective content of that thought (Inhalt des Gedankens). Only if one puts one’s thoughts into words can such content be examined and determined. In the following quote Frege delimits the scope of psychology: Not everything is imagination. Otherwise psychology would include all sciences or would at least be the highest judge of all sciences. Otherwise psychology would also dominate logic and mathematics. But nothing would create more misunderstanding of mathematics than its subordination to psychology. It is neither the task of logic nor that of mathematics to explore souls and the content of consciousness, of which the individual is the bearer.11

As psychology deals with human experience, its investigations rely on individual’s descriptions in the first-person perspective. However, an introspective view inevitably leads back to the problem of psychologism, as it seems impossible 9 The English language has one expression “experience” , whereas there are two words in German ‘Erfahrung’ and ‘Erlebnis’, each of which has a different connotation. ‘Erlebnis’ points to someone’s experience of an event, where the emphasis is on the personal estimation of its impact on one’s life. 10 Husserl, 1975, Husserl, 1984. 11 Frege, 1918–1919, 74.

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to establish a reliable link between subjective viewpoint and objective evidence. Wittgenstein managed to overcome this difficulty by way of the private­language argument. He defined private language as a language game by which a speaker refers to his inner feelings, tacitly assuming himself to be the only one who knows the exact meaning of his words. He criticized this assumption, because given this premise the interlocutors would never be able to know what the other’s words refer to. This is especially true for psychological terms that are used to point to feelings. In the private-language argument, Wittgenstein emphasized that the meaning of words is learned publicly and is therefore never a private matter. Although a person’s private experience cannot be conveyed directly to others, we have nevertheless learned the way to deal with it. This becomes manifested externally in the form of linguistic behavior. Without doubt each of us has learned to express feelings, such as pain or grief, within a speech community. Altough not everyone expresses feelings in the same way, the similarities among participants of a language community appear greater than the differences. If we imputed words with purely private meanings, we would be unable to know what other persons aimed to say. Wittgenstein illustrated this by the parable of the beetle in the box: Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. – But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? – If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty.12

The interlocutors use the same term without knowing what the other associates with it. By using a private language, one withholds information rather than discloses it. Language games involving private language are prone to create misunderstandings and confusion among interlocutors. Wittgenstein points to the fact that inner feelings become visible when they are expressed linguistically. The way in which someone expresses one’s conduct in language games gives insight into one’s form of life. Wittgenstein puts it in a nutshell when he states, that “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria.”13

12 Wittgenstein, PI, §293. 13 Wittgenstein, PI, §580.

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3 The Description of Psychological States Wittgenstein argues that the mode in which we verbalize our mental states remains mostly opaque, especially when using espressions such as “knowing” (Wissen) and “being able to” (Können). Depending on the context, ‘knowing’ refers to someone’s wisdom, which one can recall from memory. Knowledge is available as interconnected meaningful sentences. It is the function of grammar to govern correct language use, which prevents us from creating nonsensical sentences. Wittgenstein summarizes this in the following quote: At the bottom of this error lies the lack of clarity about the grammar of so-called mental states, such as, especially, of knowledge and ability. “A sentence is only a sentence in a grammatical system” is analogous to “a game action is such only in the system of the game”. The knowledge of multiplication does not stand as a background behind the single multiplication.14

Wittgenstein compares the search for correct meaning to a procedure in which we seem to ascribe a word that he calls a “visible surface of a semantic body” (die sichtbare Fläche eines Bedeutungskörpers), as if we were able to perceive correct meaning as a kind of “shadowy reality” (schattenhafte Wirklichkeit) at the background of a word. In the following paragraph we shall reconstruct Wittgenstein’s counter-argument, given against this metaphysical view of understanding. It starts from first-language acquisition when a child learns the use of words first by way of indicative definition (hinweisende Definition). The caregiver points to an object and says the word we use for it. He puts it like this: Consider the first explanations (if you want to call it that way) given to the child when you say the word “sugar” when pointing to a piece of sugar. It shall not be said here that we give a rule for the use of the word “sugar,” which, as in the previous example, only completes the index of rules. Yes, it becomes obvious here that the use of the word “rule” is fluent. We have to take into acount that in this case the child is not yet able to ask for the meaning of the word. From the indicative explanation of the word follows no other rule of use. Because the indicative explanation is nothing more than a gesture accompanied by sounds.15

14 Am Grunde dieses Irrtums liegt die Unklarheit über die Grammatik der sogenannten seelischen Zustände, wie etwa besonders des Wissens und Könnens. “Ein Satz ist ein solcher nur in einem grammatischen System” ist analog “eine Spielhandlung ist eine solche nur im System des Spieles”. Die Kenntnis des Multiplizierens steht nicht wie ein Hintergrund hinter der einzelnen Multiplikation.” Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 2. 15 “Man denke an die ersten Erklärungen (wenn man es so nennen will), welche man dem Kind gibt, wenn man etwa auf ein Stück Zucker zeigend das Wort “Zucker” ausspricht. Hier wird man nicht sagen wollen, man gebe eine Regel für den Gebrauch des Wortes “Zucker”, welche, wie im vorigen Beispiel, das Regelverzeichnis nur vervollständigt. Ja es zeigt sich hier, daß der Gebrauch

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In this process language appears as a physical phenomenon in which the word functions as a “psycho-mechanical aid”.16 After having experienced a wide range of input over time, the child finally learns how to use the words in different contexts. We acquire knowledge by refining the linguistic structures to describe what we perceive. The same applies to complex knowledge such as in the sciences, where conceptual differentiation, exact terminology, and a precise grammar are pre-requisites for contiuous advancements. On the contrary, a vague mode of expression, indistinct terms, and blurred grammatical structures impede clear thinking and are likely to provoke misunderstandings. Wittgenstein sees the cause of ambiguity and misunderstanding in an inaccurate description of insights. He illustrates this by means of a cube form that can be described in two different ways: It can either be outlined as a wooden cube from an empirical standpoint, or else it can be characterized in mathematical terms. The geometric description explains how points, lines, and angles relate to each other, whereas the empirical proposition is a meaningful statement that requires verification. One is a geometric formula determining the relationship between vertices and constitutes “an arbitrary grammatical rule,” and the other is a proposition that needs to be verified. He advises us not to link the idea of a geometric cube with a metaphysical dimension, that does not exist. He explains this in the following quote: Thus geometry does not speak of the cube, but it constitutes the meaning of the word “cube”, etc. Geometry says, for example, that the edges of a cube are the same length and nothing is closer than the confusion of the grammar of this sentence with that of the sentence “the sides of the wooden cube are the same length”. And yet one is an arbitrary grammatical rule, the other an empirical proposition. If one now notices that the first sentence is not an empirical proposition, one misreads its grammar by supposing that it does not refer to a real cube but to an ideal one, the geometrical cube. This misunderstanding is of exactly the same kind as that which conceives of the possibility as a shadowy reality and the ability to do something as a shadowy action. As a result in geometry we tend to say “two points lie on a straight line can be drawn between two points.”17

The basic misalignment lies in the false assumption that each description would relate to separate objects whereas in fact, both refer to the same cube. An arbitrary substitution of the terms used in each knowledge category is likely to produce

des Wortes “Regel” ein fließender ist. Man muß bedenken, daß das Kind in diesem Falle noch nicht imstande ist, nach der Bedeutung des Wortes zu fragen. Aus der hinweisenden Erklärung des Wortes folgt keine andere Regel des Gebrauchs. Denn die hinweisende Erklärung ist nichts weiter als eine Geste, von Lauten begleitet.” Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 4f. 16 Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 3. 17 Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 6.

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confusion. Linguistic inaccuracies affect clear thinking and complicate further research and analysis. It may lead the scientist on the wrong track because he loses a perspicuous view of the problem.

4 The Ambiguity of Concepts As every single word can be used in different contexts, each word is naturally ambiguous. The meaning the same word adopts in one context may differ significantly from that when used in another context. The same applies to derivations, where the derived term often has little to do with the meaning of the basic morpheme. As we acquire linguistic competence by gradually increasing our repertoir of lexico-grammatical units, we come to know which word combinations are correct and which are grammatically wrong. Wittgenstein has repeatedly pointed to the ordering function of grammar which allows us to distinguish between correct and incorrect use of concepts. A listener understands a sentence because it has meaning, but does not understand another because it is ungrammatical. Wittgenstein puts it like this: We say that grammar determines which word combinations are meaningful and which are not; and on the other hand, however, that grammar is not responsible for any reality, that it is in a certain sense arbitrary. So if a rule forbids me to form a certain word combination, then all I have to do is abandon this rule, as it stands in my arbitrariness, and then it makes sense. (...) On the other hand, the mind immediately strives against it and says that this is unthinkable.18

The rules of grammar function as guiding principles by which we can distinguish meaningful from meaningless sentences. An analysis of the term ‘consciousness’ reveals which uses make sense and which don’t. Wittgenstein has repeatedly examined the meaning of psychological concepts by analysing their syntactic structures. By combining a term from psychology with one from medicine, he demonstrates the limits of the applicability of words. In the present example he reflects on the possibility of suffering from an “unconscious toothache”: Suppose we wanted to use the term ‘unconscious toothache’: I have an unconscious toothache, meaning: I have a bad tooth that does not hurt. This mode of expression may be useful for some purposes. But has one discovered a toothache in a dark place where one would not

18 Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 16.

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have suspected it before? Now, if one distinguishes between a conscious and unconscious toothache, and calls both states, then the word “state” has a different grammar in each case.19

An analysis of the word “conscious” shows its possible uses. The adjective “conscious” has two negations, one that means someone’s unwittingly getting involved in something, and another that points to the state of being “unconscious”. Each of the words is used in completely different contexts. In the first case, unwittingly or unaware is applied to thoughtless actions if one does not know what one has done wrong. For instance, one has acted recklessly and may be unaware of one’s responsibilities, or a person apologizes for not having done something on purpose or intentionally. In contrast, the antonym “unconscious” is a specific term used in psychoanalysis. It stands for content that is not directly accessible to consciousness. S. Freud clearly distinguished the meaning of “unconscious” in psychology from that used in philosophy. He summarized this in the following quote: I say not without intention, in our unconscious, because what we refer to, does not coincide with the unconscious of the philosopher, not even with the unconscious in Lipps. There it is merely used to designate the opposite to the conscious; that there are unconscious psychic processes apart from conscious ones, is the fervently contested and energetically defended finding.20

In addition, he introduced the concept of the pre-conscious (das Vorbewusste), which functions as a shield vis-à-vis the unconscious.21 As such, Freud presented a model of the human soul consisting of hidden or unconscious thoughts and restrained emotions and unconscious intentions of which a person can only be made aware through psychoanalysis. ‘Unconscious’ and ‘not conscious’ (not being aware of something) are used in different syntactic positions, and a confusion of these concepts produces meaningless sentences. The limit of meaning is exemplified in the absurd collocation of an “unconscious toothache”. To label pain as unconscious creates a contradiction, because it is the main feature of pain that it becomes manifest as noticeable physical discomfort 19 “Angenommen, wir wollten den Ausdruck “unbewußte Zahnschmerzen” so gebrauchen: ich habe unbewußte Zahnschmerzen soll heißen: ich habe einen schlechten Zahn, der mich nicht schmerzt. Diese Ausdrucksweise mag für manche Zwecke praktisch sein. Hat man aber damit Zahnschmerzen gleichsam an einem dunklen Ort entdeckt, wo man früher keine vermutet hatte? Wenn man nun zwischen bewußten und unbewußten Zahnschmerzen unterscheidet, und beide Zustände nennt, so hat das Wort “Zustand” in jedem dieser Fälle eine andere Grammatik.” Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 1. 20 Freud, 1972, 582. 21 Freud, 1972, 583.

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that would never remain unconscious. If one assumes a state of consciousness (Bewusstseinszustand), then it must always be made clear which theory this refers to. Terms are ambiguous, and their appropriate use depends on their frames of reference. In this case, the confusion between a psychological and a medical term leads to an absurd statement. The same applies to different terms that have a similar meaning and are therefore used analogously in different contexts. Wittgenstein illustrates this in the example of the concepts “understand” and “mean”. He asks whether there is a difference between the mode in which a statement is expressed and what is actually meant by it. If a person remains vague and unclear, the listener will probably ask, “what do you mean by this sentence?”, whereby he expects an explanation of the content. The expression “mean” signifies that someone’s thoughts are directed towards something, have something in mind, and in this sense the speaker is required to clarify his statement. The following quote deals with the question of how a listener can find out what the speaker actually aims at if he is not sure about the meaning: The term “understand a sentence” is analogously to “mean a sentence”. You can either ask: “what do you mean by this sentence?” or: “do you mean this sentence?” The first question is answered by further sentence, and this is why that question has asked for a further sentence. Meaning in the second sense is like to be serious, in jest; and analogous to this is to say something with conviction or without conviction. Here one can call “conviction” a phenomenon that accompanies the proposition, and indeed for our purposes of conviction one can use the expression of conviction, namely, for instance set the tone.22

‘Mean’ and ‘understand’ involve distinct perspectives and cannot be exchanged arbitrarily since ‘understanding’ takes place in the listener whereas ‘meaning’ points to the speaker’s intended content. If a listener does not understand a speaker’s statement and wants him to clarify his utterance, he may ask: “What do you mean by that?”, or “Are you suggesting that…?” Another notion is addressed in the second instance, when the listener inquires whether the speaker is actually serious

22 “Dem Ausdruck “einen Satz verstehen” analog ist der Ausdruck “einen Satz meinen”. Man kann nun entweder fragen: “was meinst du mit diesem Satz?” oder: “meinst du diesen Satz?” Auf die erste Frage antwortet ein weiterer Satz, und daher hat diese Frage auch nach einem weiteren Satz gefragt. Das Meinen im zweiten Sinne ist etwa etwas im Ernst meinen, im Spaß meinen; und dem analog ist etwas mit Überzeugung sagen, oder ohne Überzeugung. Hier kann man “Überzeugung” ein Phänomen nennen, welches den Satz begleitet und zwar kann man für unsere Zwecke für die Überzeugung den Ausdruck der Überzeugung, nämlich z.B. den Tonfall setzen.” Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 2.

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about what he said.23 The speaker can either respond by explaining what he meant, unless it is in his interest to leave the listener in the dark and abstain from giving further explanations. When the listener is faced with an absurdity, his frame of reference is in doubt. He has to make a quick decision concerning what is referred to in this particluar case and take the whole context of the utterance into account.

5 Understanding Art Let us examine the question of when one can reasonably claim to have understood a piece of art. How can a viewer recognize what a painter intended to express? Which message does a sculptor convey by a particular sculpture? To answer these questions Wittgenstein draws an analogy between verbal language and imagery or visual language (Bildsprache). In the description of a piece of art we have to distinguish between the artist’s peculiar visual language on the one hand, and the viewer’s specific language of art (Fachsprache der Kunst) used to address, identify, and interpret the artistic content on the other hand. He starts from the thought experiment of an artist who plans to paint a picture according to a precise description. Say, the painter may choose from two forms of representation, either a genre picture or a portrait. The genre picture shows everyday scenes of people and their forms of life in a historical context. It is regarded as a moral portrait of people in their everyday environments and their typical working conditions. In contrast, a portrait painter depicting a person’s facial features aims to emphasize the person’s essential characteristics. In this context, Wittgenstein viewed similarities between understanding linguistic expressions and understanding visual art. In art, the mode of representation contains visual cues that enable the viewer to ascribe a motif and its typical features to a stage of art history. For example, we associate a still life, in which objects are arranged on a piece of furniture, with certain aesthetic features and art epochs. Conversely, if we know the characteristic features of a genre but notice that the motif does not coincide with it, we are puzzled and do not understand. As such, we would probably not interpret some unrelated geometric figures as still life. However, if we see Peter Bruegel’s picture “The rural dance” showing a group of dancing farmers in their rustic environment, we would undoubtedly match the art epoch with the motif and recognize it as a picture belonging to a particular

23 Wittgenstein’s question “meinst du diesen Satz?” appears incomplete as “meinen” requires an adverbial complement such as, for instance, “etwas ernst, ironisch oder ehrlich meinen” (mean something serious, ironic, honest).

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genre. So what are the determinants of understanding art? Wittgenstein responds that a mere comparison of the depicted objects with familiar real objects, as in the last example, does not enable us to understand a piece of art. He puts it like this: Now we can say that we see that genre picture the way we do because we have seen and used chairs, tables, etc. countless times. But that only says something about the previous history of that understanding, and previous history is not included in understanding. (...) We are inclined to say that we understand this image because we recognize it as the representation of a house, and this seems to imply that a paradigm outside this picture is involved in this understanding. Then all I can say is that to understand we do not need to compare the genre picture to anything. The comparison with reality is rather a further step of the calculus, which is not made in a shadowy way until we actually carry it out.24

In order to understand a picture, the viewer has to search for aesthetic clues that allow him to decode its content. The art connoisseur knows that certain motifs are related to particular styles, and this knowledge functions as a frame of reference. It involves a perspicuous view of art stages, painting techniques, decorative styles, genres, etc. As such, the art historian is able to decode the painter’s message expressed in a particular arrangement of objects, perspective and spatial representation, symbols depicted, colour shade, etc. According to Panofsky each piece of art consists of three interrelated parts, the materialised form, the theme or subject, and the content to be conveyed. Each work of art is a static testimony of all three elements and a snapshot or record of the era in which the artist lives. Being able to interpret a work of art requires practice in careful observation and assessment as well as background knowledge. Panofsky explains this in the following quote: Therefore, the recreational experience of a work of art does not only depend on the viewer’s natural sensuousness and visual exercise, but also on his intellectual and cultural skills. The completely ›naive‹ viewer does not exist. (...) The ›naive‹ viewer differs from the art historian in that the latter is aware of the situation. He knows that his specific cultural skills are not necessarily in accordance with those of people in another country and from another

24 “Nun kann man wohl sagen, daß wir jenes Genrebild so sehen wie wir es tun, weil wir unzählige Male Stühle, Tische usw. gesehen und benützt haben. Das sagt aber nur etwas über die Vorgeschichte jenes Verstehens aus und die Vorgeschichte ist im Verstehen nicht enthalten. (...) Wir sind geneigt zu sagen, wir verstehen dieses Bild, weil wir es als die Darstellung eines Hauses erkennen und das scheint anzudeuten, daß im Verstehen ein Paradigma außerhalb des Bildes involviert ist. Dann kann ich nur sagen, daß wir das Genrebild beim Verstehen mit nichts vergleichen müssen. Der Vergleich mit der Wirklichkeit ist vielmehr ein weiterer Schritt des Kalküls, der nicht in schattenhafter Weise schon gemacht ist, ehe wir ihn wirklich ausführen.” Wittgenstein, Manuscript, 9.

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era. He therefore tries to achieve alignment by gathering as much information as possible about the circumstances under which the objects of his studies were created.25

This is what Wittgenstein means when he says that we have “to apply a calculus” to a piece of art. Being able to perform such a calculus implies that the viewer uses accurate language to address the peculiarities of artistic theme (sujet), style, colour and motif. To detect the painter’s objective, the viewer needs to take the artist’s epoch into account, his formation and artistry, as well as the target group to which the art work is dedicated. To summarize: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but only if one is appreciative of art and has developed a sense of composition, creative arrangement, expressive form, harmony, proportion, and accuracy.

6 Conclusions We have examined Wittgenstein’s analytical approach to the problem of understanding, as it was exposed in a lecture to Moritz Schlick in 1929. A characteristic feature of this transcript is that it provides a profound analysis of the difference between prescientific and scientific understanding. It is a relevant document concerning levels of scientific knowledge and the lines of argumentation presented at that time. The function of language is to communicate and to exchange meaningful content. This requires a precise mode of expression and the use of accurate terminology. The words used in natural language may adopt a subject-specific meaning if applied to describe scientific content. We have traced Wittgenstein’s search for reliable criteria of understanding with regard to examples from psychology, mathematics, and art. He examined different collocations and revealed erroneous conclusions due to inaccurate representation. The private-language argument shows that the meaning of words is not a private but a public matter. A confusion of concepts from different fields of knowledge produces meaningless expressions. The term “conscious”, used in distinct contexts, reveals the limitations of meaningful collocations. The example of a cube form illustrates that an abstract mode of description makes us susceptible of metaphysical assumptions. When reflecting on the correct interpretation of a piece of art, Wittgenstein recognizes some similarities between word language (Wortsprache) and imagery (Bild­ sprache). The viewer can only understand a painter’s message if he has dealt with genres and painting styles and techniques. This background knowledge forms the

25 Panofski, 1978, 20–21.

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frame which enables the viewer to make artistic judgments. Without knowing the terminolgy he is neither able to describe nor in a position to understand the symbolism used by the painter. A viewer’s requisite know-how will decide whether he understand an artistic creation or not.

References Dilthey, Wilhelm, 1992, [1958]: Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Frege, Gottlob, 1918–1919: Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung. In: Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus. Band I, pp. 58–77. Freud, Sigmund, 1972: Die Traumdeutung, Vol. 11, Studienausgabe, Frankfurt a.M., Fischer Verlag. Hacker, Peter M. S. (2013): Philosophy: Contribution not to Human Knowledge but to Human Understanding. In: Hacker, Wittgenstein: Comparisons & Context, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 1–24. Husserl, Edmund, 1975: Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Text der 1. und 2. Auflage. Hrsg. von Elmar Holenstein. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund, 1984: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Hrsg. von Ursula Panzer. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. Padilla Gálvez, Jésus, 2009: Wittgenstein I. Lecturas tractarianas. Madrid, Plaza y Valdes. Padilla Gálvez, Jésus; Gaffal, Margit, 2017: Diktat für Schlick. Madrid, Apeiron. Panofsky, Erwin, 1978: Sinn und Deutung in der bildenden Kunst. Köln, Dumont. Pichler, Alois, 2004: Wittgensteins Philosophische Untersuchungen. Vom Buch zum Album. Amsterdam, Rodopi. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2009: Philosophische Untersuchungen. Philosophical Iinvestigations. translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Rev. 4th ed. by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Manuscript: Versteht man einen Satz oder ist es erst ein Satz, wenn man es versteht. Moritz Schlick Nachlass, Inv.- Nr. 183/D.3. Undat, pp. 1–32.

Michel Le Du

Can We (Really) Put Ourselves in Other People’s Shoes? Abstract: This chapter aims at displaying the various possible interpretations of the well-known phrase, “putting oneself in another person’s shoes.” Obviously, one need not become what might once have been referred to as a ‘primitive’ in order to understand the so-called primitives. Nevertheless, an anthropologist has to adopt the natives’ point of view if he or she is to grasp their understanding of the world and how it shapes their conduct and decisions. Accordingly, with the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Clifford Geertz, this essay tries to elucidate that in which such an adoption consists. Keywords: understanding, generalisation, concept, meaning, description, rationality, common sense

1 Distance and Participation The objectivity versus participation controversy started with Malinowski’s publication of his book The Argonauts of the Western Pacific.1 Malinowski introduced the idea of a participant observation. Here is one of his most quoted statements: The role of the ethnographer is to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of the world.2

The notion of participation has stirred up many debates, as scientists do not all agree about how far such participation should go. Some authors have gone as far as claiming that making field observations implies the sociologist’s involvement in the activity he observes. If such an allegation is correct, becoming (at least for a period of time) a factory employee, if one is concerned with the study of factory employees, is the advisable procedure. At least, one can agree that mixing the correct proportions of observation and participation is the central issue here. Clifford Geertz took over this issue and claimed that although ethnology is “highly participant”, it involves distance at the same time. As he doesn’t believe

1 Malinowski, 2014. 2 Malinowsk, 2014, 25. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-010

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in a “transcultural, spiritual identification” between the scientist and his informants, his point is that what we need is a version of Verstehen devoid of Einfühlung. Georg Simmel, in his Problems of the Philosophy of History, pointed out that “you don’t have to be Caesar to understand Caesar”.3 Similarly, Geertz’s claim is that “you don’t have to be one (=a native) to know one”.4 “The trick,” he adds, “is not to get yourself into some inner correspondence of spirit with your informants”.5 Einfühlung is often described as an imaginative and emotional capacity, allowing us to put ourselves in others’ places. Our capacity to pity someone or to be happy for someone is not in question here. What we are concerned with is whether this capacity is able to provide us with knowledge. Although it’s obvious that understanding a proposition and understanding a person are two different things, this doesn’t prove that our understanding of other people involves a distinctive cognitive faculty. In fact, over time, social scientists have become more and more suspicious of empathy and have confined it to, at best, a heuristic role. In other words, understanding has ceased to be a psychological concept and has become an epistemological notion. In that respect, Geertz’s perspective is quite in keeping with a methodological evolution which one can trace back to Max Weber’s contributions.6

2 “Clinical” Generalisation versus Nomological Generalisation In one of his most celebrated papers, Clifford Geertz says that “the analysis of culture… is not an experimental science in search of laws but an interpretative one in search of meaning”.7 He is more specific in a further passage:

3 Simmel, 1977, 231. 4 Geertz, 1983, 57. 5 Geertz, 1983, 58. 6 Weber insists that the categories used in sociological explanation (like profit motive) are not psychological categories. People with very different psychological features can carry the pursuit of profit through. (This claim is central to his paper “Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie”). On the epistemological/semantic turn of the concept of understanding, see von Wright, 1971. 7 Geertz, 1973, 5.

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The essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities ... Not to generalize across cases but within them. To generalize within cases is usually called, at least in medicine and depth psychology, clinical inference.8

The distinction between across cases and within cases is not crystal clear. The idea seems to be that while nomological generalisations cover very different kinds of objects (the law of attraction applies to the tides as well as to the planet’s movements), clinical generalisations remain within a certain kind of process and lead to the elaboration of types. Moreover, although an ethnological description must be made “from the native’s point of view”, it is not simply an extension of the native’s version of the events, as it places them within “an intelligible frame”. By saying that our descriptions of other peoples’ symbols are “actor-oriented” he means that: The description of Berber, Jewish, or French culture must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine Berbers, Jews or Frenchmen to place upon what they live through, the formulae they use to define what happens to them. What it does not mean is that such descriptions are Berber, Jewish, or French.9

Geertz refers to a story which took place in Morocco a century ago involving a Jewish peddler, a Berber chief and – as Morocco was under the control of the French administration at that time – a French civil servant. As the description doesn’t simply record the perception of the situation by the Jewish man, the Berber chief, or the French serviceman, it is general in scope. Even if the pattern of such a description doesn’t fit any other event, it is still general in that sense, although “general” must mean here something different from “nomological”.10

8 Geertz, 1973, 28. 9 Geertz, 1973, 15. 10 It is important to see that no description can be made without a typology, without concepts. There is no problem with the idea that a concept may (for contingent reasons) apply only to one entity or situation. To use a fregean example, “Moon” with a capital letter is a proper name but “moon of the earth” is a conceptual term, although it applies only to one celestial body. Similarly, a description can fit only one thing and still be general, as it inevitably includes at least one conceptual term. Nevertheless, the very nature of such concepts remains unclear. Many epistemologists of social sciences (see, for instance, Veyne, 1984) consider anachronism a major risk to historians and, consequently, conclude that the concepts used have to be historicized. It would be, for instance, a mistake to describe thinkers from the Middle Age or the Renaissance as “intellectuals” in the current French sense of the word. Other thinkers contend that the scientific explanation of human societies can include trans-historical categories. Such categories have very little chance to make sense from the agents’ point of view, but this doesn’t prove that they fail to be “clinical”.

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3 “Experience-Near Concepts” versus “Experience-Distant Concepts” Geertz borrows this distinction from the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut. Here is a quotation displaying his understanding of this distinction: An experience-near concept is, roughly, one that someone – a patient, a subject, an informant – might himself naturally and effortlessly use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine … An experience-distant concept is one that specialists of one sort or another  – an analyst, an experimenter, an ethnographer, even a priest or an ideologist – employ to forward their scientific, philosophical or practical aims.11

This quotation calls for the following remarks: 1. The distinction between distant and near concepts is largely a matter of degree. 2. This distinction also depends on cultural roots. “Caste” is an experiencedistant concept for a Frenchman, but not for an Indian (“boson” or “space-time curve” are experience-distant concepts for almost everybody). Geertz’s general thesis is that (1) ethnologists have to “grasp concepts that, for other people, are experience-near” and (2) “to do so well enough to place them in illuminating connection with experience-distant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general features of social life”.12 (1) explains why the ethnologist’s experience, on the one hand, and his informant’s experience, on the other hand, can never fully overlap. People use experience-near concepts spontaneously and do not even see their experience as shaped by concepts, except on occasions (this is congruent with Wittgenstein’s idea that there is a vast amount of things we understand “instinctively”, without any interpretation). In such cases the verb “to understand” denotes a capacity or a disposition.13 On the contrary, the ethnographer uses the natives’ experience-near concepts thoughtfully and reflectively in the course of interpreting their actions and attitudes. This leads to the conclusion that the ethnographer does not (and cannot) experience what the natives experience, but he can grasp what they “perceive with” or “by the means of” or “through”. Accordingly, in a weak sense, he can still be said to put himself in the place of others.

11 Geertz, 1983, 57. 12 Geertz, 1983, 58. 13 See, for instance, Wittgenstein, 1979, 114.

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4 Subjective Meaning versus Theoretical Perspective The subjective meaning is the meaning the actor sees (or can see, if helped properly) in his own actions and decisions. The theoretical significance is the frame within which a specialist sees an action, for theoretical purposes, regardless of whether the actor is aware of it or not. This distinction is kindred to the one made by Wittgenstein between different uses of the word “rule” : a rule can be applied by an agent but can also be the model used by an observer to describe a behaviour (=“objective” sense of the word “rule”).14 Here is an illustration of this distinction. A woman enters into a room and a man nods his head forward. The subjective meaning of such a posture seems to be that he is being polite and greeting her. An evolutionary biologist might add the following theoretical significance: such an action is rooted in primitive behaviours one can also observe among animals. For instance, when a deer bends its head forward, it signals that it submits itself to another deer. The confusion between subjective meaning and theoretical perspective sneaks in when one contends that ethnological research allows us to conclude that the man in our example is subservient to that woman. Although it is interesting to see such a social behaviour within a larger frame, this does not allow us to conclude that the action we mentioned secretly expresses subservience. Moreover, this confusion overlooks first-person authority: the man is supposed to “know” that he is simply being polite, in other words, is supposed to have a glimpse of the subjective (and social) meaning of his action. So, we can conclude that although the connection between the subjective meaning and the theoretical significance can be “illuminating”, to use Geertz’s word, they are different in nature. However, sometimes the two are not foreign to each other, and this happens when the connection between them is logical. The very use of the word “experience-distant concept” straddles the border between these two cases. Here is an illustration of such a situation: the word “liquidity preference” is a technical concept of economics, introduced by John Maynard Keynes. In many respects, it’s an experience-distant concept, but an economist can observe a discussion between businessmen, turn to them and tell them that they have a strong liquidity preference. Contrary to the man nodding his head in our previous example, they might approve this technical description and say, for instance: “Yes, you put it exactly right”. Accordingly, here the use of the experience-distant concept is illuminating not only for the specialist but also for the agents (= the businessmen). In 14 See, for instance, Wittgenstein, PI, 2001, § 82.

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other words, in this case, the experience-distant concept remains within the scope of subjective meaning: the actors could have used the word “liquidity-preference” for the purpose of describing their experience, if it had belonged to their cognitive tools. The reason for this is that this concept has logical connections with concepts businessmen spontaneously use, like money, interest, profit etc.15 The point is that the very use of the word “experience-distance concept”, without further specifications, inclines us to overlook the fact that a concept can be illuminating, in such a context in two different ways.

5 Thick versus Thin Description A description is “thick” when it mentions features of the context. A description is thin when it involves no such reference. Gilbert Ryle propounded this distinction.16 Geertz borrows it and connects it to his concept of culture. Culture, he says repeatedly, is context. Culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviours, institutions or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context within which they can be intelligibly – that is, thickly – described.17

Let us examine the thick/thin difference with the help of a couple of examples: 1. We see someone sleeping under a tree. We do not need to mention any feature of the social environment to understand that we are observing someone who sleeps (however, the person might be pretending to sleep, but this is another story). In other words, if the person is indeed sleeping, this is not something we discover thanks to our knowledge of the context. 2. We see a group of foreign people performing a ritual. This raises questions: Are they really performing a ritual? Is it not that they are simply playing? If indeed it’s a ritual, is it a religious one? The observation of the context, hopefully, can provide us with evidence supporting one of these answers.

15 Winch, 1958, III, 6. 16 Cf.: Ryle, 2009, 494–510. 17 Geertz, 1973, 14.

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6 Comments Geertz discusses extensively one of Ryle’s examples. Someone is winking. Winking is not simply a movement. It is a social act, not simply a physiological reaction. It is intentional. One may wink to alert someone. Maybe one is attending a boring meeting and the wink is a signal that it’s time to sneak out. It may also be a way to fool some innocent person by making her believe that there is an ongoing conspiracy. These descriptions of someone winking are typically thick descriptions. On the other hand, if the description boils down to saying that the person is contracting her eyelid, it is a thin description. In fact, even the description of the smallest social events can involve big concepts borrowed from social and political theory (modernisation, development etc.). For instance, an employee attends a company meeting and feels free to wink and to sneak out. This could be considered a side effect of a new organisation, as the employees feel now free to do things they wouldn’t have considered doing before; these organisational changes, in turn, can be interpreted as a part of an ongoing process of modernisation, as well as an aspect of the firm’s development. The more a description involves such concepts, the thicker it is, and the more it tends to become an interpretation and, gradually, an interpretation of a society as a whole. It is important to notice that a description doesn’t need to use theoretical concepts to be thick, as the wink example shows very well. Wink is an experience-near concept. Nevertheless, in using it, we cross the border of thick description. This shows very clearly that the thick/thin distinction is not identical to the experience-near/experience-distant distinction. And, as we will see now, the very idea of thick description finally leads us to the view that the concept of context, in turn, has two different meanings.

7 Weak versus Strong Concept of a Context Let us illustrate this distinction with the help of two examples: 1. In a small village in Brittany lives a peasant who plans to buy some new equipment. As he also wants to get a bit of advice, he goes to the local retailer’s office. They chat, and on the next day, they go together to the wholesaler to choose the machine fitting the peasant’s needs. The wholesaler then delivers the machine to the retailer’s office. The retailer receives ten percent of the transaction. In other words, the peasant accepts paying more for something he could buy directly from the wholesaler at bargain price. Why? Why does he agree to what seems irrational behaviour?

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Here, referring to the context dispels this apparent irrationality. The word “context” is taken in what I call a “weak” sense, and strangeness is only apparent. One has to understand that the peasant knows very well that he will need advice and further help in the future from his retailer, as his new machine will necessarily have to be serviced. By giving extra money to the retailer, he buys security for the future. A Parisian bourgeois who buys his car from a Peugeot retailer instead of making a deal with a car broker does the same thing: despite appearances, the two behaviours illustrate the very same pattern of thought. For that reason, the observer can conclude that if he had been at the peasant’s place, he would have adopted the same policy. Accordingly, there is nothing insurmountable here in putting oneself in the peasant’s shoes. 2. “Context” is taken in a stronger sense when strangeness persists and cannot be dispelled. Peter Winch borrows from Alasdair McIntyre the following example: Some aborigines hold a stick and say “this is my soul” and describe themselves as “dead” after losing it. MacIntyre considers this behaviour “thoroughly incoherent”. Obviously, in such a case, we cannot put ourselves in the aborigines’ place. Winch answers that: He (= MacIntyre) is presumably influenced by the fact that it would be hard to make sense of an action like this if performed by a twentieth-century Englishman or American … But it doesn’t seem to me so hard to see sense in the practice, even from the little we are told about it here.18

Of course, someone saying this while walking along the Champs Elysées would be considered a madman. But seen in the appropriate context, the whole behaviour makes perfect sense. Nevertheless, saying that, in the same situation, we would act as the aborigines do would be pointless, as we cannot really make sense here of the very idea of being in the same situation. If, contrary to all supposition, we could adopt the aborigines’ pattern of thought, this would mean that our very nature as social beings has changed. The only possibility here is to build analogies with reactions and practices that we can find within our own culture, but we do not know at the outset in which direction we should look for such analogies. Winch, in regard to the previous example, imagines a housewife whose wedding ring falls into the kitchen sink. Her trouble is not motivated by the price of the jewel. The ring is invested with symbolic value, and wearing it is a way of enacting something

18 Winch, 1973, 45.

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about committment, love, the meaning of life, etc. We cannot put ourselves in the indigenes’ place, but we can put ourselves in the housewife’s place. And understanding the housewife is a springboard to understanding the indigenes. We can even easily guess how irrational thoughts can pop up in the lady’s mind under such circumstances (she might think, for instance, for a while that a tremendous threat hovers over her and her spouse).

8 Rationality and Common Sense Peter Winch makes a distinction between the sheer concept of rationality and the various conceptions of rationality one can find in various cultures. In fact, different ways of being rational can already be found within our culture (believing in something without the smallest shred of evidence would be irrational from a scientist, but not necessarily from a religious man). In other words, we cannot imagine a language devoid of the concept of humidity but not of the concept of rationality. Nevertheless, criteria of rationality can be vastly different. Why? Geertz suggests an answer. Common sense is not what the mind cleared of all cant spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions – that sex is a disorganizing force, that sex is a regenerative gift, that sex is a practical pleasure – concludes.19

We could easily add other examples to the list, as Geertz himself does: Incest causes leprosy; a man may be killed in war or hunting as a result of his wife’s infidelities; etc. These beliefs look astonishing to us, at least as much as the aborigines’ attitude towards the stick. Nevertheless, for the Zande and other communities mentioned by Geertz, they have an “everyone knows” flavour. Geertz’s main idea is that common sense is not a lumen naturale one can exert when all conventions have been discarded, nor a sheer emanation of the given but, as his title suggests, a cultural system (like art, religious beliefs etc.). In other words, common sense is an historical product among others. Accordingly, it’s better to say that there are different common senses, although the common sense view of common sense contends that it is natural. Now, if we combine Geertz’s view with Winch’s approach, we can suggest that (1) indigenes do have the concept of rationality and (2) are not, generally speaking, more irrational than we are but (3) that there (their) common sense is 19 Geertz, 1983, 84.

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different from our (ours). This is why it is often difficult to put ourselves in their place and to grasp what they perceive “through” or “by means of”. Nevertheless, we are not devoid of tools in that respect, as the following passage by Geertz very well demonstrates. Short of simply inventing new terms which, as the point is to characterize the familiar not to describe the unknown, would be self-defeating here, one can only stretch old ones in the way the mathematician does when he says a proof is deep, a critic does when he says a painting is chaste, or a wine connoisseur does when he says a Bordeaux is assertive.20

Geertz, of course, refers here to what is familiar to the indigenes. And his suggestion seems to be that, in order to gain insight into what the Zande or the Nuer consider familiar and natural, we have to devise what Wittgenstein would have called secondary meanings.21 Accordingly, our own capacity to introduce this kind of semantic innovation is the key to our understanding of foreign common senses. And this is the reason why, in addition to being an epistemological concept, understanding can be considered a semantic one, even when it is directed to foreign communities and practices.

References Geertz, Clifford, 1973: Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture, in: The Interpretation of Culture, New-York, Basic Books. Geertz, Clifford, 1983: Native’s Point of View, in: Local Knowledge, Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New-York, Basic Books. Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2014: The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Oxford, Benediction Classics. Ryle, Gilbert, 2009: The Thinking of Thoughts: What is ‘le Penseur’ Doing?, in: Collected Papers, vol. 2, Oxford, Routledge, 494–510. Simmel, Georg, 1977: The Problems of the Philosophy of History. New-York, The Free Press. Veyne, Paul, 1984: Writing History, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press. Von Wright, G. H., 1971: Explanation and Understanding, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Winch, Peter, 1958: The Idea of a Social Science, London, Routledge. Winch, Peter, 1973: Understanding a Primitive Society (1964), in: Ethics and Action. London, Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1979: Cambridge Lectures 32–35, Oxford, Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2001: Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell.

20 Geertz, 1983, 85. 21 Cf.: Wittgenstein, PI, 2001, II, xi.

Severin Schroeder

God, Lions, and Englishwomen Wittgenstein on Understanding People Abstract: Wittgenstein shows that understanding is a capacity, and cannot be accounted for by mental representations of what is understood. But if a person’s understanding or thinking cannot be accounted for by occurrences of mental representations, then understanding that person cannot be a matter of knowing what is going on inside him or her: what representations he or she has in his or her mind. That, I argue, is the point of Wittgenstein’s famous and frequently misunderstood saying, “If a lion could talk we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” Our inability to understand a strange creature would not be overcome if that creature could speak and lay open to us on the mental operations inside its mind. Finally, I explain in what way understanding other people is not an entirely intellectual affair, but also has moral and aesthetic dimensions. Keywords: understanding, representation, thinking, strange creature, moral, aesthetic Gott, wenn er in unsre Seelen geblickt hätte, hätte dort nicht sehen können, von wem wir sprachen. If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.1 Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen. If a lion could talk we wouldn’t be able to understand it.2 Es ist für unsre Betrachtung wichtig, daß es Menschen gibt, von denen jemand fühlt, er werde nie wissen, was in ihnen vorgeht. Er werde sie nie verstehen. (Engländerinnen für Europäer.) It is important for our approach, that someone may feel concerning certain people that he will never know what goes on inside them. He will never understand them. (Englishwomen for Europeans.)3

1 Wittgenstein, PPF, §284. 2 Wittgenstein, PPF, §327. 3 Wittgenstein, CV 84 (MS 137, 71; 9.7.1948). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-011

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1 The Inner-Object Conception The concept of understanding occurs in Wittgenstein’s writings first and foremost with respect to language. Understanding is discussed as a correlative to meaning and explanation. Wittgenstein argues against the idea of understanding as an inner process or occurrence – a mental representation of what is understood. Locke presented the view that words have meaning if they are accompanied by a mental image ‘in the mind of him that uses them’.4 Understanding would then require that the same words be associated with the same images in the mind of the hearer. A  little reflection shows, however, that what comes before our minds when we understand a word – a picture, or mental image – cannot determine or constitute our understanding of the word; for the same mental image can accompany the hearing of a word in two people when they understand the word very differently.5 They may, for example, both imagine an Alsatian, when one of them takes the word in question to mean ‘dog’, while the other understands it to mean ‘Alsatian’. Similarly, the same mental image can accompany our understanding of completely different words, which we know to be different in meaning: the word ‘winter’ may make me see the image of a snow-covered street, but the same image may come up in my mind when I hear the words ‘snow’ or ‘Advent’. On the other hand, very often when I use or understand the word ‘winter’ no such mental imagery occurs.6 Mental images are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of understanding. Conceding that our words are not always accompanied by mental images, one may still be inclined to insist that understanding must consist in some sort of mental representation, whatever it may be. When I understand that something is the case, it would appear that the object of my understanding must somehow be represented in my mind. And the same applies to other intentional states: what I remember, intend, desire, or fear must, surely, be represented in my mind when I have that memory, intention, desire, or fear – at least while I am conscious of it. Not so. To show that this natural assumption of some form of mental representation is just a prejudice, Wittgenstein invites us to consider cases of instantaneous understanding (or remembering, intending, etc.) –: A writes a series of numbers down: B watches him and tries to find a law for the sequence of numbers. When he succeeds he exclaims: “Now I can go on!” – So this capacity, this understanding, is something that makes its appearance in a moment.7

4 Locke 1690, 3.2.2. 5 Wittgenstein PI, §140. 6 Cf. Wittgenstein PI, §449. 7 Wittgenstein PI, §151.

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I want to remember a tune and it escapes me; suddenly I say “Now I know it” and sing it. What was it like to suddenly know it? Surely it can’t have occurred to me in its entirety in that moment! – Perhaps you will say: “It’s a particular feeling, as if it were there.”8 There is no doubt that I now want to play chess, but chess is the game it is in virtue of all its rules (and so on). Don’t I know, then, which game I want to play until I have played it? Or are all the rules contained in my act of intending?9

This is what I call the paradox of the instantaneous experience of complex contents: The contents must all be there in a flash, for I can correctly avow that at a particular moment I have understood, intend, expect, or remember. But then again, the contents are not all there in a flash, for I am not really aware of all the details: all possible uses of the word; all numbers of an arithmetic series; all notes of a melody; all rules of chess; they are not all before my mind at the same time. This is particularly obvious in the case of understanding an arithmetical series, where the object of understanding is literally infinite. Understanding is a capacity, typically a long-term capacity. As such it is not something of which one is continuously conscious. I understand some French and I understand how to play chess, but I am not continuously thinking of these abilities. There is no constant awareness of one’s abilities. They are not enduring occurrences in one’s consciousness. However, the first appearance of an understanding is often experienced as а sudden insight (‘when the penny drops’, at it were). Wittgenstein gives this example: B tries to understand the series of numbers A is writing down: 1, 5, 11, 19,… Suddenly B realises that the next number must be 29.10 What, in this case, is the understanding? Different things may happen, none of which seem necessary or sufficient. In particular, saying the formula to oneself is not enough, since one may be given the formula and not know what to do with it.11 So what more is required to make it an instance of understanding? Obviously, it is also required that one is in fact able to continue correctly. But how can one be so sure beforehand that having the formula in one’s mind will enable one to continue correctly? Is it perhaps a matter of induction, that is, of reasoning from past experience: ‘Whenever in such a situation a formula occurred to me I could correctly continue the series. Now a formula has occurred to me. So, I shall be able to continue correctly’? Not exactly. It may indeed be a matter of past experience, but not of reasoning from past experience. The utterance ‘Now I can go on’ is not the expression of such reasoning, nor

8 Wittgenstein PI, §184. 9 Wittgenstein PI, §197. 10 Wittgenstein PI, §151. 11 Wittgenstein PI, §152.

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would one offer such reasoning to justify one’s confidence. On the other hand, one’s past experience and proficiency in dealing with algebraic formulae may well be a cause of one’s confidence on this occasion; and it may be a reason for others to trust one’s confidence.12 But as far as my current experience in such a situation is concerned, all I can say is that a formula has occurred to me and now I’m confident that I can go on. The important point to note is that my awareness of the formula does not imply an immediate awareness of all its applications. The applications are not contained in the formula. The paradox of the immediate experience of complex, or even infinite, contents resulted from a mistaken, but very natural, idea of a mental process or occurrence. It is extremely tempting to envisage mental occurrences as comprehensive representations: that must somehow contain everything the mental representation is about or directed at. That kind of mental representation would be astonishing enough where what we have in mind is fairly complex – as with the rules of chess, which appear to be represented in our momentary desire to play chess13; but it becomes patently impossible when we mean or understand an infinite arithmetical series. At first glance it may seem that such infinity could conveniently be represented by a short formula, but then it becomes clear that our meaning or understanding the formula would have to contain how the formula was to be applied in an infinity of instances (to forestall an infinity of possible misunderstandings) – which again, appears to make such meaning (or understanding) a mind-boggling feat. So, how can the mind perform such a feat? It cannot. The truth is that no such marvellously rich representation occurs; and it is an error to think that it needs to occur for meaning (or understanding) to be possible. That is the dissolution of the paradox of the immediate experience of complex, or even infinite, contents. Understanding is a capacity (or the acquisition of a capacity), which – contrary to a deep-seated philosophical prejudice – is not, indeed cannot be, accounted for in terms of mental representation. For whatever mental representation you might envisage, it would always need to be complemented by an understanding of how to interpret or apply it.14

12 Wittgenstein PI, §179; §324. 13 Wittgenstein PI, §197. 14 Wittgenstein, PI, §§139–40. For a more detailed account of Wittgenstein’s critique of the inner-object conception, see Schroeder 2006, 181–220.

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2 Understanding Others A corollary of the inner-object view of the mind is that the thinking and feeling of others are processes inside them, hidden from our view. This natural philosophical picture is reflected in various commonly used spatial metaphors that present understanding people as seeing what is inside their minds. That is the target of the first of three quotations, from which I derived my title: If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.15

The claim here is not that God could not know whom we were speaking about – of course he could, he’s omniscient. It is just that, in many cases, such knowledge could not be derived from an inspection of our mind: it could not be read off the words and images going through our minds when speaking. As explained before, the contents of what we think, intend, or mean can never be comprehensively present in our consciousness. If I say “I meant him”, very likely a picture comes to my mind, perhaps of how I looked at him, etc.; but the picture is only like an illustration to a story. From it alone it would mostly be impossible to conclude anything at all; only when one knows the story does one know the significance of the picture.16

This brings out the limit of the spatial metaphor of the inner realm. When somebody says something that you don’t fully understand, because it is not very clearly expressed, perhaps ambiguous or very vague, and you ask for an explanation (‘What exactly do you mean?’), the answer will typically not be something that was already there, fully formulated but not said out loud, in the person’s consciousness. Therefore, even a god-like look into the privacy of your interlocutor’s consciousness would not give you the answer to your request for clarification. Consider again the example of someone saying ‘Let’s play chess!’ and suppose I have come across various regional versions of the game: small variations in some of the rules, and I wonder which one he meant. It is not only unlikely that while making his suggestion he mentally rehearsed all the rules to himself, thus disambiguating which type of chess he meant, it is quite impossible: you cannot run through all the rules of chess in the three seconds it takes you to ask the question. So, again, my interlocutor will normally be able to say which version he meant, but it will not be a matter of just saying loudly what he had already said or visualised to himself quietly in foro interno. 15 Wittgenstein PPF, §284. 16 Wittgenstein PI, §663.

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3 Reasons and Causes When it comes to understanding human behaviour – why somebody has done something – the inner-process account of the mind leads naturally to a causal construal of agential reasons. Understanding why he did it we are then inclined to construe as what caused him to do it. And the causes we look for are, again, occurrences in the mind. Wittgenstein emphatically rejects this view, arguing for a conceptual distinction between reasons and causes. A person’s reason for acting is what he can honestly present to explain and justify his behaviour, which is very often not something he did say to himself before acting. Thus there exists a categorial difference between a reason and a cause: while the latter is an occurrence, the former is not: it is the possible exercise of a capacity to explain. By looking into our minds and observing mental occurrences causing our behaviour, God would not see our reasons. However, having discussed this topic elsewhere,17 I shall not pursue it further in this paper.

4 Wittgenstein’s Lion From the person who expresses a wish to play chess, without having a comprehensive representation of the game in his mind, we move to Wittgenstein’s famous lion dictum: If a lion could talk we wouldn’t be able to understand it.18

This remark has been the object of much bewildered and controversial debate19; quite needlessly. For almost all the positions taken in this debate – even the views of distinguished Wittgenstein scholars – are due to the fact that people cannot resist the temptation of treating the sentence as an aphorism, that is, a saying that is to be interpreted on its own without any context. Such an aphoristic reading is taken to its extreme by Philippe de Lara who declares the lion sentence to be intentionally ambiguous: ‘true, false and nonsensical’, depending on which of the possible and equally licit interpretations one chooses.20 17 Schroeder 2017. 18 Wittgenstein PPF, §327. 19 Cf. Sandis 2012. 20 de Lara 2005, 135–7.

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To begin with, Wittgenstein’s remark has been taken to be an empirical claim about lions – and then criticised as uninformed by zoologists that find feline communications perfectly understandable.21 But as Constantine Sandis observes, Wittgenstein was as little interested in lions as Thomas Nagel was in bats.22 His concern was with the problem of understanding creatures we find alien. If a lion’s behaviour is perfectly intelligible to you, think of (or imagine) some other kind of animal that you do find strange and unintelligible. Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker interpret the ‘initially mystifying’ lion remark to mean that: any ‘form of life’ accessible to lions, given their natural repertoire of behaviour and their behavioural dispositions, is too far removed from ours for any noises they might emit to count as speech.23

Hence, any speaking lion we might imagine (e.g. in a fairy tale) ‘is really a human being “in the shape of a lion”’.24 Although the point is a plausible one, it is unlikely to be what Wittgenstein meant to convey by his remark. True, there is an inconsistency in the antecedent, but counterfactual conditionals are often to be taken with a pinch of salt.25 Indeed, we often say perfectly understandable things based on per impossibile conditions. Consider: (1) If I were you, I would stop smoking. To point out in response that there is an inconsistency in the idea of one person being another would be missing the point of this remark (which has nothing to do with the criteria of personal identity). And if, in a philosophical context, one wanted to make the point that two concepts are incompatible, it would be very misleading to combine them in the antecedent of an explicitly counterfactual conditional, unless the consequent was a patent and logically independent falsehood. Thus, one could perhaps convey the claim that time travel was logically impossible by saying: (2) If you could travel backwards in time, you might just as well be a married bachelor. But one could hardly hope to convey it by saying, for example: (3) If you could travel backwards in time, you would not be able to reach the 18th century.

21 e.g. Bekoff 2000, 38. 22 Sandis 2012, 141. 23 Baker & Hacker 1985, 186; n.1. 24 ibid. 25 Cf. Sandis 2012, 146.

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A slightly different reading of the lion remark has been offered by Hanjo Glock: On a charitable reading, it means that if lions had a feline language of complex growls, roars, etc., we could never come to learn it. Why? Because their form of life, and their behavioural repertoire, are so alien to us.26

However, the focus of the lion remark appears to be psychological, rather than linguistic understanding.27 Wittgenstein writes: ‘we could not understand it/ him [ihn]’ (referring back to the lion), rather than ‘we could not understand his language’. Moreover, attributing to the lion an incomprehensible and unlearnable language would contradict Wittgenstein’s view that noises that we could not learn to understand we could not call a language.28 In fact, Wittgenstein’s concern in the lion remark is not with linguistic understanding, just as he is not particularly interested in zoological details, and his remark is not as mystifying as people think. The enigma is easily resolved, the point becomes quite clear, once we stop treating it as an aphorism and instead consider it in its context. To begin with, an earlier version of the remark makes it clear what kind of difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein has in mind: Wenn der Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen. Er wird uns durch ein gewisses Benehmen ein Rätsel, rätselhaft.29 If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him. He becomes an enigma, enigmatic to us through a certain kind of behaviour.

That is to say, it is not the language that produces the enigma, but certain aspects of lions’ behaviour that are very alien to us. Think, for example, of a male lion taking over a new pride and killing all male cubs. But as noted before, the zoological details are not Wittgenstein’s concern. The lion is merely a randomly chosen example of an animal that struck Wittgenstein as rather alien: behaving very differently from humans and therefore difficult to understand. Next, we apply to this case the philosophical picture of understanding that Wittgenstein is concerned to attack (which is under discussion in the passages surrounding the lion remark): the idea that understanding is seeing what is going on in somebody’s mind. On this account, failure to understand somebody would mean: being unclear or ignorant about what is going on in their mind. Hence,

26 Glock 1996, 128. 27 Cf. Sandis 2012, 148. 28 Wittgenstein PI, §207. 29 Wittgenstein, MS 167, 12v-13r.

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failure to understand a lion would be due to our not being able to see what is going on in its mind: not being able to see the lion’s thoughts underlying its behaviour. To attack that picture, Wittgenstein presents a little thought experiment. If what it takes to understand the lion is that the lion’s inner thoughts get somehow expressed, let’s assume that a lion could do so by expressing its thoughts in words. In that manner: what’s inside is brought out, made public. Now, with the contents of the lion’s mind expressed in words, we should be able to understand it. But we don’t! The externalisation, the making public and perceptible to us what is in the lion’s consciousness would not make the lion’s behaviour any less odd or enigmatic. (If, for example, you find it strange that a lion should kill all the male cubs sired by other males, it would hardly help your understanding to hear him say: ‘Right, now I’m going to kill all the male cubs sired by my predecessor!’) That the lion remark is concerned not with language, but with the philosophical picture of understanding others as perceiving what’s inside them, is made perfectly clear by the elucidating continuation of the remark in MS 137 (published in Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol.1): 190. If a lion could talk we could not understand him. 191. Even if someone were to express everything that is ‘within him’, we wouldn’t necessarily understand him. 192. So he gets angry, when we see no reason for it; what excites us leaves him unmoved. –…30

Understanding somebody is not seeing what’s going on in his/her mind. Thus, the lion remark turns out to be just a variant of the God remark: There it was God entering someone’s mind; here it is a lion expressing the contents of its mind. In neither case does seeing inner dialogue provide understanding. Moreover, in MS 137 the lion remark is preceded by a note in square brackets with a reference to another remark which it is meant to elucidate. Such, then, is the arrangement at the next stage of revision (in MS 144, the manuscript underlying the Typescript 227 that Elizabeth Anscombe published as Philosophical Investigations Part II): Wittgenstein introduces the lion remark by the following: “I can’t know what is going on in him” is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not obvious.31

30 Wittgenstein, MS 137, 96a-97b; LW I §§190–2. 31 Wittgenstein PPF, §326.

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This once more indicates the point of the lion remark: namely, to put pressure on the philosophical picture of understanding others as seeing what is going on inside them. To put it like that is only a picture, a metaphor for not understanding, not an explanation of why we don’t understand. It is comparable to saying that something you don’t understand is ‘a closed book to you’.32 To summarise: it is not a speaking lion as such that is incomprehensible; rather an ordinary lion is Wittgenstein’s example of a creature alien to us, and his point is that our understanding would not be helped if that lion could speak and thereby lay open to us what’s going on inside its mind.

5 Strange People (Englishwomen) Finally, before the remark just quoted from MS 144 Wittgenstein placed an extended version of the third of my thematic quotations (the one about Englishwomen): We also say of a person that he is transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards our considerations that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. One learns this when one comes into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even though one has mastered the country’s language. One does not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We can’t find our feet with them.33

The analogy with the lion remark (which follows a little further down the page) should now be obvious. Again, it concerns strange creatures we find incomprehensible (since, apparently, Wittgenstein felt at a loss to understand Englishwomen). Is this, as the philosophical picture under discussion suggests, because we don’t know what is going on inside their minds: what they are saying to themselves in foro interno? No, as the parenthesis says explicitly: that is not the reason why such people are enigmatic to us. Even if, god-like, we could eavesdrop on all their inner monologues – or if, like the lion, they frankly uttered to us everything that went through their minds (and Wittgenstein also notes that we have mastered their language) – even then, we’d still find them enigmatic. We can’t find our feet with them. What then is the problem? What is this kind of understanding that eluded Wittgenstein in the case of Englishwomen? in what does it consist? 32 The corresponding German idiom is even more picturesque: ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln (a book with seven seals). 33 Wittgenstein PPF, §325.

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A remark quoted earlier gives us an idea of the kind of behaviour he has in mind that we would find incomprehensible: So he gets angry, when we see no reason for it; what excites us leaves him unmoved. …34

Such unfamiliar reactions we don’t understand. Is that because such anomalous reactions take us by surprise? That may be part of the problem,35 but there is more to it. Wittgenstein continues as follows: So he gets angry, when we see no reason for it; what excites us leaves him unmoved. – Is the essential difference that we can’t foresee his reactions? Couldn’t it be that after some experience we might know them, but still not be able to follow him?36

Even a good knowledge of the causal regularities that govern somebody’s behaviour may not be enough for understanding. An amusing example of this is provided by the Monty Python sketch ‘Buying a bed’ (1969). Trying to buy a bed in a department store, a young couple encounter some exceedingly eccentric sales assistants. Mr Lambert, for example, reacts to every utterance of the word ‘mattress’ by putting a bag over his head. When his colleagues stand in a tea chest and sing Jerusalem, he takes it off again. We are given to understand that this is a very regular and predictable series of events. So Mr Lambert’s behaviour is not at all unpredictable, and yet, as Wittgenstein puts it, we are not able to follow him. This part of his behaviour remains utterly incomprehensible. What more is required for understanding someone’s behaviour? One obvious answer is: finding it reasonable. We understand people when we are able to rationalise their behaviour; when we see how what they do is sensible in the light of their aims. Failure to do so can be due to our own limitations. The reasons that guide someone’s actions can be too complicated for the onlooker to understand (e.g., what people at the stock exchange do would remain incomprehensible to a child). Alternatively, some behaviour may not only appear unreasonable to an uninformed bystander, but just be unreasonable – whimsical, neurotic, or downright mad – like putting a bag over your head whenever you hear a certain word. Addiction provides more realistic examples. An alcoholic should stop drinking after the third glass, say, knowing full well that otherwise the consequences will be unpleasant, but is unable to control himself. Such behaviour is  not understandable as  reasonable intentional action; although, no doubt, we can

34 Wittgenstein LW I, §192. 35 Wittgenstein MS, 173, 38v. 36 Wittgenstein LW I, §192.

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investigate and come to understand the causal mechanisms that drive an alcoholic’s behaviour. Understanding as discerning reasonable human behaviour is thwarted whenever somebody’s behaviour, in the grip of a pathological condition, becomes unreasonable. However, beside predictability and rationality there is yet a third aspect to understanding that Wittgenstein’s considerations bring out. Those 1930s Englishwomen he was struggling to understand were presumably neither unpredictable nor outright irrational or akratic. They would not, like alcoholics, act contrary to their interests. They would not have certain aims, know how to achieve them, and yet fail to do so. What then would make them enigmatic to Wittgenstein? We don’t understand people if, given their aims, they do not take suitable steps to achieve them, or if they do what they know is not conducive to their well-being. That is irrationality, e.g. of compulsive behaviour. But we also fail to understand people who set themselves odd aims or have abnormal likes, preferences and inclinations. Such cases show that understanding people is not always a correlate of their rationality. Understanding people can also be a matter of familiarity or affinity and our ensuing ability to get on or feel at ease with them: He is incomprehensible to me means that I cannot relate to him [mit ihm verkehren] as to others.37

This is a concept of psychological understanding that goes beyond a purely intellectual achievement. You may be able to explain what motivates certain people and yet not be able to interact with them as with others, due to a difference in tastes or inclinations. Thus, people who do not share a similar sense of humour struggle to understand each other: ‘They do not react properly to each other’.38 Suppose, my interlocutor makes a somewhat odd remark: slightly absurd, slightly bawdy. I may understand well enough that it is intended to be humorous, but if it doesn’t strike a chord in me – if I just find it childish, insipid or offensive – I cannot play along in my reply. A certain kind of rapport proves impossible between us. Inasmuch as I don’t appreciate his sense of humour, I do not fully understand him (‘How can he find that funny?!’). Consider again Wittgenstein’s description of an incomprehensible person: So he gets angry, when we see no reason for it; what excites us leaves him unmoved. …39

Or, we may add, vice versa, that what we find outrageous leaves some people indifferent, and what they find wonderful strikes us as uninteresting. Anger can 37 Wittgenstein LW I, §198. 38 Wittgenstein CV, 95e. 39 Wittgenstein LW I, §192.

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be an expression of moral indignation, and it is easy to imagine such disagreements: what appears morally indifferent to some is shocking to others. Excitement can be an expression of aesthetic appreciation; and most artistic styles and their developments are exciting only to a relatively small group of connoisseurs, leaving most people unmoved. This, in short, is an important observation implicit in Wittgenstein’s remarks on psychological understanding, although one he merely touched upon without ever developing and explaining it in further detail. Understanding other people is not an entirely intellectual affair, but has moral and aesthetic dimensions as well. To understand others can mean to be able to rationalize their behaviour – to see how, given their aims, it is reasonable. It can also mean to be able to foresee their responses, partly because of their rationality, but partly because we are sufficiently familiar with their dispositions. But in this latter case of familiarity with non-rational dispositions, we can speak of ‘understanding’ in a yet more demanding sense, namely: that we are able ‘to follow’ others in their dispositions. In this sense, ‘I understand you’ means not just: ‘I know that this is what you would do given your preferences and inclination’, but more than that: ‘I could imagine doing the same myself’. Thus, to understand others in this emphatic sense (brought out by some of Wittgenstein’s remarks) is not just an intellectual achievement, but requires some fundamental aesthetic and moral agreement: a sufficient affinity in one’s tastes and attitudes.40

References Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S., 1985: Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity: Vol 2 of an Analytical Commentary of the Philosophical Investigations (§§ 185–242), Oxford: Blackwell. Bekoff, M., 2000: Animals Matter, Boston: Shambhala. Glock, H-J., 1996: A Wittgenstein Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell. de Lara, Philippe, 2005: L’expérience du langage: Wittgenstein philosophe de la subjectivité, Paris: Ellipses. Locke, John, 1690: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford: OUP, 1979. Marques, Antonio & Nuno Venturinha (eds.), 2012: Knowledge, Language and Mind: Wittgenstein’s Thought in Progress. Berlin: de Gruyter. Padilla Gálvez, Jesús & Margit Gaffal (eds) 2017: Intentionality and Action, Berlin: De Gruyter. Sandis, Constantine, 2012: ‘Understanding the Lion For Real’, in: Marques & Venturinha, 2012, 138–161. Schroeder, Severin, 2006: Wittgenstein: The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle, Cambridge: Polity.

40 I am grateful to Harry Tomany for his comments on this paper.

184 

 Severin Schroeder

Schroeder, Severin, 2017: ‘Reasons and First-Person Authority’, in: Padilla Gálvez & Gaffal, 2017, 123–138. Wittgenstein, Ludwig CV: Culture and Value. Revised Edition, ed.: G.H.von Wright, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Wittgenstein, Ludwig LWI: Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 1, eds.: G.H.von Wright & H. Nyman, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Wittgenstein, Ludwig MS: Unpublished manuscript, numbered in accordance with G.H. von Wright’s catalogue in: ‘The Wittgenstein Papers’, in his: Wittgenstein, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Wittgenstein, Ludwig PI: Philosophical Investigations. Fourth Edition. Edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Wittgenstein, Ludwig PPF: ‘Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment’, in: PI.

Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Works Bibliographical information regarding the edition used is given in the list of references attached to the relevant chapter. When a reference is to a numbered remark, this is indicated by a ‘§’; otherwise reference is to a page ‘p.’. Abbreviations used to refer to works of other philosophers are given in the individual lists of references. BB BT CE CV DB EPB GT LC LE LWPP I LWPP II NB NFL OC P PG PI PO PPO PR PTLP RC RFGB RFM RPP I RPP II TLP WLPP Z

The Blue and Brown Books The Big Typescript (TS 213) ‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’ Culture and Value Denkbewegungen: Tagebücher 1930–1932, 1936–1937 Eine Philosophische Betrachtung (Revision of parts of The Brown Book) Geheime Tagebücher Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief ‘(Wittgenstein’s) Lecture on Ethics’ Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1 Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2 Notebooks 1914–1916 ‘Notes for Lectures on “Private Experience” and “Sense Data” ’ On Certainty ‘Philosophy’ (in BT/TS 213) Philosophical Grammar Philosophical Investigations (Part two is referred to as PI II, pg. nr.) Philosophical Occasions Private and Public Occasions Philosophical Remarks Prototractatus: An Early Version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Remarks on Colour ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 2 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Psychology 1946–1947 Zettel

References to Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts are by MS and TS number following the G. H. von Wright catalogue in Wittgenstein, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982; reprinted with an addendum in PO. CL EL FB GB

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters, ed. Brian McGuinness and G. H. von Wright. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein–With a Memoir, by Paul Engelmann, trans. L. Furtmüller, ed. Brian McGuinness. Familienbriefe, ed. M. Ascher, B. McGuinness, and O. Pfersmann. Gesamtbriefwechsel, ed. B. McGuinness, M. Seekircher, and A. Unterkircher.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-012

186 

 Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Works

LO LRKM WC WE

Letters to Ogden, ed. Charles K. Ogden and G. H. von Wright. Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G. H. von Wright. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911–1951, ed. Brian McGuinness. Wittgenstein–Engelmann: Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen

Notes taken by others AWL LC LFM LSD MA MWL NTW VW WL WLPP WVC

Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1932–3, ed. Alice Ambrose. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939, ed. Cora Diamond. ‘The Language of Sense Data and Private Experience’ (p. xiii) Unpublished: Wittgenstein’s lectures 1932–3 from the notes of G. E. Moore, Cambridge University Library G. E. Moore Archive, ref: ADD 8875, 10/7/7 ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures 1930–33ʹ, G. E. Moore’s notes from Wittgenstein’s lectures ‘Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein’ The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle, Gordon Baker ed. Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–32, ed. Desmond Lee. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Psychology 1946–47, ed. Peter Geach. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness (p. xiv).

Index ability 14, 15, 53, 58, 62, 79, 118, 142, 184 Absicht. See intention act 15, 22, 23, 33, 34, 35, 59, 62, 73, 74, 75, 81, 83, 90, 91, 103, 104, 113, 118, 136, 143, 168, 170, 184 action 32, 37, 59, 63, 83, 84, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 123, 127, 131, 136, 140, 143, 149, 155, 166, 167, 183 activity 3, 13, 53, 73, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 138, 163 analysis 3, 4, 72, 76, 77, 97, 103, 104, 110, 119, 126, 148, 149, 154, 155 Anscombe, G. E. M. 109 anthropology 95, 101 Aristotle 15, 51 assertoric force 24, 44, 52 Augustine 92, 128, 138 Augustine’s picture of language 107 Augustinian view 138 Austin, J. L. 22, 32, 33, 34, 35, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131 autobiography 2, 81, 88 Bach, K. 18, 23, 24 Baker, G. P. 107, 179 behaviour 60, 83, 90, 108, 111, 112, 113, 150, 167, 170, 178, 181, 183, 185 Bekoff, M. 177 belief 1, 47, 54, 59, 100, 171 Bermes, Ch. 2, 96, 98, 105, 106 Bolzano, B. 30, 36, 37, 38, 40, 59, 60 Bouveresse, J. 127 brain 140 calculus 136, 138, 158, 159 causal 35, 178, 183, 184 causal explanation 135 Cavell, S. 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133 certainty 1, 6, 98, 141 colour 23, 136, 138, 159 commitment 3, 98, 102, 105 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-013

comprehension 2, 3, 15, 23, 35, 59, 63, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 79 conduct 4, 149, 151 consciousness 95, 155, 175, 177 content 2, 18, 24, 26, 32, 33, 36, 39, 40, 42, 47, 73, 86, 115, 119, 122, 135, 136, 137, 141, 144, 148, 150, 155, 156, 159, 175, 176, 177, 181 cultural philosophy 89, 95, 96 cultural practices 2, 83, 95 culture 2, 89, 90, 91, 96, 97, 98, 101, 105, 137, 168, 171 Davidson, D. 14, 28, 38, 53 definition 1, 35, 110, 122, 144 de Lara, Ph. 178 demonstratives 17, 18, 23, 63 Derrida, J. 30, 91 Descartes, R. 43 description 3, 85, 96, 107, 142, 165, 168 Dilthey, W. 2, 69, 81, 95, 149 disposition 14, 166, 185 doubt 33, 70, 75, 138, 151, 157, 175, 183 Dretske, F. I. 47 Dummett, M. 14, 28, 58 effect 35, 42, 45, 85, 120, 140, 144 emotion 122, 136, 156 epoché 97, 102 Erkennen 158 essence 15, 135 Evans, G. 24, 27 example 2, 6, 7, 9, 17, 20, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 54, 58, 59, 60, 77, 78, 111, 113, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144, 153, 155, 156, 160, 167, 168, 169, 171, 174, 180, 183 experience 15, 73, 75, 84, 98, 111, 121, 150, 166, 167, 176 explaining 38, 81, 84, 114, 157, 185 explanation 3, 7, 15, 29, 37, 72, 75, 78, 79, 98, 99, 100, 135, 137, 138, 140, 143, 157, 174 explanation of meanings 140, 141

188 

 Index

expression 2, 71, 73, 82, 83, 85, 113, 114, 115, 138, 156 external relation 82, 89, 90, 102, 151, 179 fact 1, 2, 3, 17, 20, 41, 48, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 92, 97, 108, 111, 112, 137, 142, 164, 171, 178, 180 fluctuating 139 form of life 111, 113, 116, 123, 131, 132, 151 form of representation 157 Frazer, J. 2, 96, 97, 99, 103 Frege, G. 19, 20, 32, 39, 86, 137, 149, 150 Freud, S. 28, 127, 155, 160 Gadamer, H.-G. 13, 14, 91 Gaffal, M. 3, 105, 140, 145, 160, 184 game 1, 3, 113, 135, 136, 138, 139, 175, 177, 178 Glock, H-J. 178 grammar 77, 78, 110, 136, 138, 140, 144 – function 3, 152, 154, 155 grammatical explanation 138 Grice, H. P. 21, 27, 37, 45, 49, 53, 60 Hacker, P. M. S. 57, 107, 179 Hašek, J. 143 Heidegger, M. 71, 87 Henrich, D. 89 hermeneutic 1, 2, 29, 42, 59, 60, 81, 95, 96, 98 history 86, 88, 137 human actions 127 human sciences 1, 85, 88, 89, 91, 149 Husserl, E. 2, 34, 69, 72, 73, 74, 95, 150 idealism 139 identity 14, 19, 20, 87 image 116, 139, 174, 177 indexicals 17, 18, 19, 32, 40, 41, 42, 63 inner-object 174, 177 intentio. See intention intention 2, 11, 17, 20, 35, 36, 37, 59, 73, 81, 83, 128, 149, 174 – al actions 183 – al acts 81 – al language 17, 73, 128 – al object 73, 97 – al proposition 119

intentionality 73 – of perception 72 interminability 90 internal relation 3, 82, 87, 88, 121, 144 interpretation 1, 2, 4, 42, 53, 69, 86, 90, 96, 98, 99, 100, 109, 131, 160, 169, 178 Jesus 137 Kant, I. 40, 81, 105, 126, 127, 134 Kaplan, D. 30 Kemmerling, A. 27 Klev, A. M. 10 knowing 2, 4, 8, 11, 13, 20, 32, 35, 41, 54, 111, 117, 140, 151, 152, 183 – how 138 knowledge 1, 16, 25, 34, 46, 55, 58, 88, 103, 120, 121, 152, 153, 154, 159, 160, 164, 177, 183 Künne, W. 1, 5, 14, 19, 21, 47, 51, 53, 60, 66 language 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 20, 21, 29, 32, 38, 41, 50, 56, 58, 72, 77, 79, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 118, 121, 123, 127, 128, 130, 132, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 153, 160 language-game 1, 3, 111, 112, 113, 136, 143–144, 151 Laugier, S. 3, 115 Lebenswelt 2, 103, 104, 105, 106 Le Du, M. 4, 163 Lepore, E. 19 Lichtenberg, G. C. 7 lifeworld 2, 103, 104, 105 Locke, J. 174 logic 39, 78, 88, 108, 110, 120, 139, 150 magic 100, 102, 103 Marques, A. V, 3, 107, 111, 114, 183 mathematics 159 mean 8, 32, 150, 153, 157, 159, 160 meaning (of a word) V, 2, 3, 8, 12, 70, 86, 115, 135, 138, 140, 142, 144, 151, 159, 174 meinen. See mean Meinong, A. 150 mental 4, 124, 150, 174, 176, 178 – acts 81

Index 

 189

– process 102, 112, 113, 139, 140, 176 – state 140, 142, 152 Merleau-Ponty, M. 104 metaphor 6, 31, 50, 51, 53, 54, 177, 182 mind 4, 24, 26, 53, 54, 70, 81, 82, 116, 121, 144, 148, 156, 170, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183 misunderstanding 2, 7, 23, 34, 35, 45, 52, 78, 151, 153 Moore, G. E. 22, 24

proposition 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 37, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 108, 110, 111, 115, 119, 120, 122, 140, 143, 153, 164 psychology 149, 150, 155, 159 purpose 3, 14, 15, 44, 46, 61, 62, 74, 83, 86, 127, 139, 140, 155, 167 Putnam, H. 120, 125

natural attitude 102, 103

rationality 4, 60, 126, 171, 184, 185 reason 1, 7, 12, 13, 37, 39, 40, 43, 47, 52, 53, 60, 75, 77, 92, 126, 131, 167, 170, 172, 176, 178, 183 reference 2, 3, 4, 23, 25, 84, 86, 87, 92, 95, 97, 98, 101, 112, 114, 138, 156, 158, 168, 181 Reinach, A. 34 representation 109, 142, 158, 159, 176 Ricœur, P. 83, 87, 89, 91 ritual 99, 100, 168 rule 2, 9, 39, 75, 78, 79, 102, 105, 113, 114, 135, 138, 139, 141, 144, 155, 167, 175, 177 Russell, B. 39

object 1, 22, 23, 24, 52, 70, 72, 77, 82, 83, 84, 90, 91, 96, 112, 118, 122, 125, 128, 138, 141, 148, 152, 158, 159, 165, 174, 175, 178 objectification 2, 89, 90 oneself 2, 74, 81, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 124, 126, 128, 170, 175 ostension 25 Padilla Gálvez, J.  V, 3, 105, 140, 143, 145, 148, 160, 183, 184 perception 7, 19, 72, 116, 121, 125, 140, 165 performance 35, 73, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105 performative hermeneutics 2, 3, 95 Perry, J. 17 perspective 1, 3, 25, 73, 93, 110, 135, 139, 148, 157, 158, 164 perspicuity 3, 142, 144 phenomenological perspective 150 phenomenology 1, 73, 95, 103, 150 philosophical investigations 70, 71, 78, 79, 108, 109, 123, 128, 149 philosophy of mind 117 Picasso, P. 139 picture 30, 70, 75, 77, 88, 108, 111, 157, 158, 174, 181, 182 Plato 15, 42, 59 practice 3, 44, 45, 47, 52, 62, 79, 80, 83, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 116, 159, 170, 172 pre-given 98, 102 primitive cultures 99 private language argument 159

Quintilianus, M. F. 37, 49

Sachverhalt 1 Sandis, C. 179 Schlick, M. 3, 147, 159 Scholz, O. 84 Schroeder, S. 4, 51, 173 Searle, J. R. 34, 49, 53 self 87, 89, 99, 120, 122, 127 self-understanding 2, 81 sense 1, 2, 6, 16, 27, 33, 36, 37, 47, 59, 63, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 83, 85, 91, 92, 98, 100, 104, 108, 110, 121, 126, 130, 133, 138, 140, 148, 155, 156, 170, 184, 185 sentence 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 28, 31, 32, 34, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 62, 64, 86, 97, 98, 128, 133, 136, 137, 141, 152, 154 Siebel, M. 33 state of affairs 1, 34 state of consciousness 138, 139, 156

190 

 Index

Strawson, P. F. 6, 22 super-rules 105 surveyability 142 symbol 75, 91, 100, 158, 165 symbolism 72, 137, 142, 144, 159 Tatsachen 96 Taylor, Ch. 89 Toledo 32, 38, 137 Tractatus logico-philosophicus 108 truth 14, 18, 20, 22, 31, 32, 36, 40, 41, 43, 47, 52, 54, 55, 124, 149, 176 understanding V, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 95, 107, 115, 135, 147, 163, 164, 170, 172, 173 utterance 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,

30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 82, 83, 127, 141, 142, 157, 183 vacillating 139 Valéry, P. 5, 13, 56, 57, 58, 64 Vorstellung 150 Wittgenstein, L. V, 2, 3, 6, 13, 14, 36, 39, 46, 50, 58, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 95, 107, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 151, 152, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 167, 172, 173 Zweck 155

List of Contributors Prof. Dr. Wolfgang KÜNNE Universität Hamburg Philosophisches Seminar Von-Melle-Park 6 D-20146 Hamburg (GERMANY) e-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Jocelyn BENOIST Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne UMR 8103 - Institut des Sciences Juridique et Philosophique de la Sorbonne Centre de Philosophie Contemporaine de la Sorbonne (PhiCo) UFR de Philosophie 17 rue de la Sorbonne F-75005 - Paris (FRANCE) e-mail: [email protected] http://edph.univ-paris1.fr/benoist.html Prof. em. Dr. Emil ANGEHRN Philosophisches Seminar Universität Basel Steinengraben 5 CH-4051 Basel e-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Christian BERMES Lehrstuhl für Philosophie Universität Koblenz-Landau Institut für Philosophie Bürgerstraße 23 D-76829 Landau (GERMANY) e-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. António MARQUES Instituto de Filosofia da Nova Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas Universidade Nova de Lisboa Av. de Berna, 26,4º Piso 1069-061 Lisboa (PORTUGAL) e-mail: [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110613384-014

Prof. Dr. Sandra LAUGIER Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Institut universitaire de France UFR de philosophie. 17 rue de la Sorbonne, escalier C, F-75005 Paris (FRANCE) Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la Sorbonne (UMR8103 CNRS-Panthéon Sorbonne), 9, rue Malher F-75004 Paris (FRANCE) e-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Jesús PADILLA GÁLVEZ  Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales San Pedro Mártir, s/n E-45071 Toledo (SPAIN) e-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Margit GAFFAL  Universidad Complutense, Madrid Departamento de Filología Inglesa, I Avenida de Filipinas, 3 E-28003 MADRID (SPAIN) e-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Michel LE DU  Département de philosophie UFR ALLSH AMU-Université d’Aix-Marseille Centre Gilles-Gaston Granger (UMR 7304) F-Aix-Marseille (FRANCE) e-mail: [email protected] Prof. Dr. Severin SCHROEDER Department of Philosophy Whiteknights Campus, HumSS G68 University of Reading Reading RG6 6AA (UNITED KINGDOM) e-mail: [email protected]