9/21/2012 Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

by Kyle VanderWerf

This week's Philosophy Club topic is Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories, specifically those found in Philosophical Investigations. In this book, he tries to answer various philosophical questions by examining how human language works. He focuses on language because he believes it's the only tool we currently have to answer philosophical questions, so looking at how it functions can lead to all kinds of insights. At philosophy club, we'll discuss, evaluate, and criticize how he uses his philosophy of language to consider the question, “Is the color red that I see the same as the color red that you see?”

First, consider two construction workers, A and B, who have a very simple language. When A says “slab!” B hands a slab over to A, when A says “brick!” B hands over a brick, and so on. The combination of the words of the language that are used, and the actions that accompany them, are what Wittgenstein terms a “language-game.”

Wittgenstein argues that all languages are fundamentally similar to the construction worker language. That is, the purpose of a language is to influence how people act. All languages serve an accompanying “language-game.” A word doesn't have any meaning outside of the context of the rules of action that are associated with it in a given language-game. So how do you learn what words mean? Other people teach you using whatever methods work to get you to act correctly according to the rules of the language-game.

So for a word or phrase to have any meaning in a language, it must correspond to rules for action that people can empirically evaluate. In other words, people have to be able to tell you if you're using a word incorrectly. For example, if I took my cat out for a walk, and told my friends I was walking my dog, they could observe my pet to determine that it's a cat and not a dog, giving them justification to tell me I'm using the word “dog” incorrectly.

Let us now look at the word “qualia.” According to many philosophers, this word refers to raw feelings or sensations, aka subjective experiences. For example, the sensation of pain, and the experience of seeing the color red, are both qualia. Let's just examine pain for a moment. Most people in pain exhibit outward symptoms, such as crying or yelling. However, if the inner sensation of pain always corresponds to these symptoms, then the word may as well just refer to the symptoms themselves, since the rules for action are the same in either case. The sensation of pain itself is irrelevant to the language-game, so you can't refer to it directly with words. Furthermore, if someone in pain exhibits no symptoms, and acts the same as they would without being in pain, a word for their feeling would be meaningless, as it would have no rules for action; it would be impossible for someone else to tell if they were using the word correctly.

Thus, the word “qualia” in the English language is either meaningless, or it simply refers to the effects of raw feelings/sensations, and not the feelings/sensations themselves. In fact, Wittgenstein argues that constructing words in a language that actually refer to subjective experiences is impossible. It is therefore impossible to answer the question, “Is the color red that I see the same as the color red that you see?” with the tools we currently have, namely language-games.