Essay 13

This essay is due Tuesday, 12/04. Instructions are as usual.

A Wittgensteinian concept which has thrown a surprisingly long philosophical shadow in light of his spare usage of it is that of a form of life:

19. It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle.—Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no. And innumerable others.——And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

23. But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?—There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call "symbols", "words", "sentences". And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.) Here the term "language-game" is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.

241. "So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?"—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

Part II i. One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? And why not?

A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after to-morrow?—And what can he not do here?—How do I do it?—How am I supposed to answer this?

Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of a language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life. (If a concept refers to a character of human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write.)

Part II xi. ...Even then it might always be said: "True we can never know what the result of a calculation is, but for all that it always has a quite definite result. (God knows it.) Mathematics is indeed of the highest certainty—though we only have a crude reflection of it."

But am I trying to say some such thing as that the certainty of mathematics is based on the reliability of ink and paper? No. (That would be a vicious circle.)—I have not said why mathematicians do not quarrel, but only that they do not.

It is no doubt true that you could not calculate with certain sorts of paper and ink, if, that is, they were subject to certain queer changes—but still the fact that they changed could in turn only be got from memory and comparison with other means of calculation. And how are these tested in their turn?

What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life. (pp. 225-6).

Given how little he says about forms of life, it is perhaps unsurprising that philosophers have read so much into it. Nevertheless, it is a curious notion. Reflecting on our close study of Wittgenstein this semester, what shall we make of it? What is Wittgenstein trying to convey with "a form of life"?