Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1933: From the Notes of G. E. Moore

Of Wittgenstein’s philosophical relationships, his relationship with G.E. Moore is the most interesting to me.Moore was a demanding listener — his understanding is methodical, even slow-paced, a paradigm of British analytic philosophical standards. Wittgenstein was enigmatic, cryptic, disarming, and very much skeptical of traditional philosophical thinking.The two had a long history together, although it is usually Russell that historians associate Wittgenstein’s years at Cambridge with. It seems as though Moore and Wittgenstein were constantly on a near collision course, climaxed almost twenty years after these lectures by Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, inspired by his reading of Moore’s responses to epistemological skepticism in A Defense of Common Sense and Proof of an External World.Moore attended Wittgenstein’s lectures and took apparently verbatim notes as Wittgenstein puzzled his way though topics relating to the relation between language and reality, the foundations of logic, meaning and sense, the foundations of mathematics, and even questions about religion, Freud, and ethics.Moore’s notes present Wittgenstein thinking out loud. He often takes a circuitous path through his topic, sometimes even beginning one day’s lecture with some disparaging remarks about his previous lecture and an attempt to get better what he was trying to say.I think the best way to read these lecture notes may be to consult them about topics a reader is especially interested in, to get Wittgenstein’s on-the-fly thoughts — what intrigued him, what puzzled him, what he thought might be a promising direction to go on the topic. They don’t suffice as representing his “finished” thoughts on the topics (if anything ever does). Despite their nature as lectures, with some non-philosophers in the audience, they still read more like Wittgenstein’s own notes and are useful in the way all of his notebooks are, as supplemental material to puzzle through discussions in the Philosophical Investigations, or in some of the assembled pieces edited by Wittgenstein himself, like the Blue and Brown Books.Besides reading these lecture notes in the context of Wittgenstein’s own thought, I think it’s important to read them in the context of other philosophical work going on at the same time, especially the work of Carnap and others in the Vienna Circle. So much of the lectures have to do with how language can relate to the world — how propositions and their truth or falsity relates to what we call reality itself.For Carnap (and others in the Vienna Circle) propositions expressing our perceptual experiences provide the basis for knowledge, with those propositions related to one another through logic. Thus to study the structure of the world, we study formal logic. Logic gives us the fabric in which the world of facts lives.Much of Wittgenstein’s thinking in the lectures appear to have to do with this fabric as well, but the fabric, at least by my reading is something that Wittgenstein calls “grammar.” Grammar may be the theme that runs most consistently through the lectures. By grammar, Wittgenstein seems to mean the rules of language, but not so much the rules for such things as subject-verb agreements, cases, etc., as something more about what is allowed to be said and what isn’t, often by analogy to the rules of a game like chess. For example, it is part of the grammar of the word “sound” that it is allowed to say of a sound that it’s loud or soft, but not that it is green or red.Such rules seem themselves to provide a structure, If not for reality itself (that would be metaphysics, and Wittgenstein eschews metaphysics), for how we think and talk about reality. Thus grammar becomes a key to resolving philosophical difficulties. As he says in the lectures, “When we do philosophy, we give rules of grammar wherever there is a philosophical difficulty.”For example, take Wittgenstein’s discussion of toothaches. What seems the basis for my knowing that I have a toothache is not available to me with respect to the toothaches of others. How do I know that they really do have toothaches, or that what they call a toothache is anything like mine? Maybe in fact, their entire “internal” life — their experiences — are very different from mine. How could I know?Wittgenstein’s discussion revolves around what he calls a “grammatical” difference between the one case and the other. “Grammar” here has to do with what it is permissible and not permissible to think or say. If I say that I can’t feel the other person’s toothache, or that I can’t really know that the other person is really experiencing what I call a toothache, what is meant by “can’t”? It’s not as if I can try and fail, as, for example, I might try and fail to lift a heavy weight — I can’t even get the trying off the ground. Wittgenstein says, “Consider ‘You can’t know so & so’, here the ‘can’t’ is grammatical.”Moore himself confesses to being in a “muddle” about what Wittgenstein means by “grammar” in such discussions. The lecture notes contain, as a kind of appendix, a very short paper presented by Moore in which he tries to express his “muddle,” and then a very short response (within the lectures) by Wittgenstein.I suspect that Moore remained in a “muddle” after hearing Wittgenstein’s response, but Wittgenstein does stress that he really is using the term “grammar” in the same sense as it is used, for example, in expressing rules of subject-verb agreement. He is talking about the use of words — the statement, then that “I can’t know of another’s toothache” is not a statement about reality per se (the toothache-in-itself so to speak) but about our use of words like “toothache” and “know.” It is part of the grammar of such words that the way in which we can say we know of our own toothache (if saying we can be said to “know” such a thing at all rather than just “have” it) is different than the way in which we can say we know of someone else’s toothache. In the one case, we don’t need to cite evidence in support of our claim, and in the other we do (or at least need to be able to).The difficulty we fall into, then, has to do with our thinking that the the “can’t” in a statement like “I can’t know another person’s toothache”, is an empirical one rather than a grammatical one, as if I’ve discovered, as a matter of fact, that this is something I can’t know (where “know” is supposed to be subject to the same rules for citing evidence in both my case and the other’s case). In fact, the difference between how we can be said to know of our own toothaches and how we can be said to know of those of others (or of their own feelings or perceptions in general) has to do with the grammar of words such as “know”, “can” or “can’t”, and the words for the relevant feelings or perceptions (“toothache,” “anger,”, “cold,” etc.).As with so much in Wittgenstein, there is an enigmatic profundity here. And it seems to slip away every time we try to get a firm grasp on it (or it does so for me, and I suspect for Moore as well). In any case, I don’t think I’ve made it especially clear here. But that’s in keeping with the mode in which I think the lecture notes are best read — as engaging in the thinking-through itself, not in gleaning any sort of clear conclusions. Like I said, this is thinking on-the-fly.I’ve said something about how the book should be read. And, in keeping with that, I don’t think this is even remotely the kind of thing to read as an introduction to Wittgenstein’s thinking. Maybe that goes without saying. It’s best read by someone already familiar with Wittgenstein’s thought, who probably still finds themselves trying to clarify their understanding. This is a good place to go to stir things up and get more raw material for thinking.