John Koethe - The continuity of Wittgensteins thought

The main contention of this book is that Wittgenstein's philosophical work is informed throughout by a certain broad theme: the semantic and mentalistic attributes of language and human life are shown or manifested by our verbal and nonverbal conduct, but they resist incorporation into the domain of the straightforwardly factual. This is not a single, well defined principle that Wittgenstein explicitly formulates and defends at each stage of his philosophical development, and at different times certain aspects of it emerge more prominently than others. Thus in the Tractatus the distinction between what can only be shown and what can be described in the language of factual discourse is a sharp one, and comparatively little emphasis is placed on the use of language and human conduct generally; practically the reverse is true in the later writings. Nevertheless, I believe that the idea that meaning and mentality are somehow displayed by our practices had a powerful attraction for Wittgenstein and that it can be discerned, albeit in varying forms, throughout the entire course of his thought.

I have been fascinated by Wittgenstein's work since encountering it as an undergraduate in a philosophy of mind course given by Alasdair Mac Intyre at Princeton thirty years ago and have regularly offered seminars on it in the more than twenty years I have been teaching. In that time I have

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developed certain convictions about how his work ought to be approached that deserve mention. First, it is best revisited at intervals: Wittgenstein's own views about linguistic and mental representation emerge most clearly if one returns to his writings periodically, after thinking about the general issues that concerned him in their own rights, without particular reference to his work. The reason for this, I believe, is that his ideas rarely achieved a settled and final form and are consequently difficult to discern without an independent sense of the range of possible ways of approaching the questions and issues that engaged him throughout his life.

This conviction is related to a second one: the development of Wittgenstein's thought was not linear and consecutive; rather, he comes back to certain ideas and themes repeatedly, sometimes to embrace and sometimes to react against them. Thus in his very last writings we still hear clear echoes of the Tractatus, as when its notion of an internal relation reappears in section 506 of Last Writings on Philosophical Psychology, accompanied by the ambivalent remark, "What is there in me that speaks against this?" Or consider his exasperated observation in section 501 of On Certainty: "Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? You must look at the practice of language, then you will see it." The tone is almost wistful, as though he were reluctantly resigned to the reappearance at this late date of a view very similar to one he had propounded over thirty years earlier.

Wittgenstein's philosophical temperament was a contrary one, leading to a pervasive discontent not only with the views of other philosophers but with his own as well. I therefore do not believe that one can neatly divide his work into earlier, middle, and later periods, discern a steady line of development and refinement running through his voluminous writings, or easily disentangle his own voice from the dialectical interplay that constitutes the famous interlocutory style of the