The Limits of Language in their Consequences

‘It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus),’ wrote the later Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) in his Philosophical Investigations. It shows a remarkable shift in linguistic view compared to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of his youth, when he wrote ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein investigated the possibility of a logical basis for language with unifying principles. His early focus was on uniformity, logicity and transparency. He abandoned this pursuit when he understood that the ambiguity and pluriformity of linguistic usage and claims of meaning should be looked upon as essential characteristics of language rather than flaws. On the relationship between language and reality, the early Wittgenstein has been of decisive importance in forming the positivist programme of objective science, because of the premise that the results of empirical observation can be expressed in language in an objective way. With the later Wittgenstein, attention shifted to the function of linguistic usage in a specific context: ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’. The key question became what could a language user do with language: in other words, in which way could he or she act by it. In law, this led to a contextual approach. Think, for example, of the conclusion of an agreement through offer and accept ance. Offer and acceptance were long considered to be utterances that either did or did not give a proper description of the will of the parties. The result was a fairly ineffective search for the parties’ supposedly true intention. If offer and acceptance are seen as speech acts, as promises that are under the circumstances considered as binding and enforceable pledges, then the attention shifts from the intention of the parties to the context in which they have acted. This chapter discusses some consequences of a positivist approach to language for law and the humanities, to serve as a backdrop for Chapters 4 and 5, which focus on Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities and on the Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg's asylum poetry.