Goldstein’s book is interesting and, quite probably, a good introduction to Wittgenstein for those who care less about philosophers’ biography than about what he thought. A few positive points and a general remark before I go to a detailed examination. It is certainly a good idea to present the whole of Wittgenstein’s work as an integrated whole, more than two or more disjoint pieces. Ditto for the connections drawn between his life and his work, since we had with Wittgenstein one of the few cases in which his approach to issues was often an offshoot of his personality, and occasionally, even a pure matter of taste (see, e.g., his comments on art and music.) This goes as well for the pride of place given to the philosophy of mathematics: it was a central concern for Wittgenstein throughout his active life.

I suggest that the main criticism to be leveled against Goldstein’s approach is that it goes against what I take to be a deep penchant in Wittgenstein to have philosophy utterly unaffected by empirical considerations, be those psychological, linguistic, or physical in the sense of physics. Goldstein’s book is devoted to the totality of Wittgenstein’s work and is intended as an introduction readable by those endowed with the patience to sort out the rather obscure parts of Wittgenstein’s writings. Goldstein’s strategy is to maximize the share of charitable interpretation, ignoring lapses (p. ix) and it is probably the best one can do with a corpus of varying value. It is well known that Wittgenstein himself was less than enthusiastic at the prospect of seeing his notebooks published. Some of the contents are almost an intellectual code. Goldstein did well in looking up the manuscript sources to try to achieve the best fit between possible interpretations and the actual context in which W’s remarks have to be placed. The book pursues a line of tracing Wittgenstein’s development along four areas, called method, meaning, mind, and mathematics respectively. A final chapter presents some rather speculative attempts at understanding what his subject’s personality and character had to do with his views. The last chapter draws on the intimation at the time of TLP (Tractatus Logico-philosophicus) to the effect that the essence of the work is ethical, in spite of the paucity of ethical theories presented, debated, or otherwise discussed. Goldstein dismisses Wittgenstein’s claim: "nobody has just remarked how silly it is’ (p. 187). Queer, indeed, that someone as aware as Goldstein of the subtle twines of language could not notice that someone may never say, utter any word about X and her only point is X (e.g. by stating platitudes about temperatures, I may actually issue an order to open windows…)

The parts that are weakest, in the view of this reviewer are the ones used to snipe at Fodor’s language of thought hypothesis, (see pp. 60 and ff.), or else to support independent views (such as the much publicized connectionist revolution.) Similar remarks may apply about what is possibly the most controversial part of Wittgenstein’s late doctrines, his views on mathematics. Here I shall confine myself to the remark that Wittgenstein simply did not understand what exactly is the conceptual change brought about by the Godelian results, and consequently much of what he wrote (and not published) is vitiated by a strange reliance on a form of non-Millian empiricism. Other detailed criticisms can be leveled against Goldstein’s valiant attempt to defend and develop Wittgensteinian views. It is my view however that much of Wittgenstein’s suspicions about "inner objects" (representations, rules, and the like) is in fact one of the many forms of strange dualism, so that evidence about, say, digestion has to be taken at face value, including from anatomical observation. Evidence about minds, however and for reasons that are purely rooted in philosophical dogmatism, have to be screened according to some criterion or other. In that sense Wittgenstein is a behaviorist and it seems to me futile to save him from the charge. Facing the psychology and the kind of speculative thinking he was facing, behaviorism could well the best option. It is not now, in that respect his lessons are less interesting now than during last century. Similarly his linguistics is far more primitive than anything we have now, partly because like many philosophers he thought there was a key to epistemology in the philosophy of language.

Where Goldstein excels is in his dealing with the notoriously obscure Tractatus. There one finds the first interesting use of truth-tables for logical and philosophical purposes, and whether or not one agrees with the dim assessment both Wittgenstein (after listening to L.E.J. Brouwer as it appears) and Goldstein (see, e.g. p. 25) of that work, it remains the clearest expression of Wittgenstein’s notion of language. It is a notion of language far removed from the modern notion of natural language, in its tractatrian version since it excludes even simple syntactical devices like question forming, in the Investigation phases because it isn’t with a ghost that we understand anything about comprehension or indeed language acquisition (strange as it seems there isn’t a developmental phase in which people play slab/brick language-games in Wittgenstein’s sense.) However one sees the issue it won’t do for Wittgenstein to pin our theories on empirical facts about languages. I would predict that Wittgenstein facing the Chomskyan revolution would have thought it was not talking about languages (even less about forms of life) but about phonological transformations that with luck a parrot could perform.

The last chapter is the most original in Goldstein’s treatment. Wittgenstein emerges as someone who perhaps did not have ethical theories, but did something very ethical, he changed his life and his personality. To an extent we (or I at least) would be very skeptical in attributing to other philosophers, Wiitgenstein’s actions are relevant in judging his own theories. A philosophy useful for something ought to be useful to changing oneself. Goldstein quite correctly points out how Wittgenstein managed to transform himself from the snotty child of the grand Viennese family into someone who could die in peace telling everybody he had a wonderful life.

Adrian Palma was educated in the UK, Italy, Germany and France before doing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Indiana University. He is currently a researcher at the Center for Research in Applied Epistemology (CREA) in the École Polytechnique, Paris, and is also at the University of Technology in Compiegne, France. His main interests lie in the intersection between philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind.

Categories: Philosophical