Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Attending to the Actual Sayings of Things
- 2 The Sense Is Where You Find It
- 3 On Excluding Contradictions from Our Language
- 4 ‘How Do Sentences Do It?’
- 5 On the Need for a Listener and Community Standards
- 6 ‘It Says What It Says’
- 7 Very General Facts of Nature
- 8 Ethics as We Talk It
- 9 Moral Escapism and Applied Ethics
- 10 Reasons to Be Good?
- 11 The Importance of Being Thoughtful
- 12 What’s in a Smile?
- 13 On Aesthetic Reactions and Changing One’s Mind
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Very General Facts of Nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Attending to the Actual Sayings of Things
- 2 The Sense Is Where You Find It
- 3 On Excluding Contradictions from Our Language
- 4 ‘How Do Sentences Do It?’
- 5 On the Need for a Listener and Community Standards
- 6 ‘It Says What It Says’
- 7 Very General Facts of Nature
- 8 Ethics as We Talk It
- 9 Moral Escapism and Applied Ethics
- 10 Reasons to Be Good?
- 11 The Importance of Being Thoughtful
- 12 What’s in a Smile?
- 13 On Aesthetic Reactions and Changing One’s Mind
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Concepts and Natural History
In Philosophical Investigations, Part I, § 415 Wittgenstein gives what appears to be a general characterization of his method in philosophy:
What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; not curiosities, however, but facts that no one has doubted, which have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes.
The remark has no obvious connection with the surrounding remarks. How is it to be understood? How general is its scope?
In this essay I wish to argue that this remark points to quite an important dimension of Wittgenstein's later thought, a dimension that has largely been bypassed or underplayed (perhaps even, as I shall suggest, by Wittgenstein himself). It concerns the importance, for our way of thinking about language, of recognizing the ways in which the language we speak is contingent on the circumstances of our lives.
Wittgenstein makes explicit reference to this theme on only a few occasions. In Philosophical Investigations¸ Part II, chap. xii, there are two remarks that bring to mind the one just quoted, although here Wittgenstein no longer insists that he is doing natural history:
If concept-formation can be explained by facts of nature, shouldn't we be interested not in grammar, but rather in what is its basis in nature? – We are, indeed, also interested in the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature. (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality.) But our interest is not thereby thrown back onto these possible causes of concept-formation; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history – since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes. (PI II, § 365)
I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different, people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize – then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him. (PI II, § 366)
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- Wittgenstein and the Life We Live with Language , pp. 103 - 128Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2022