In the last two years of his life, Ludwig Wittgenstein^§MS2.1.1a lived in Cambridge with Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband, Peter Geach, both former students of his, both of whom were to become influential Analytical Philosophers in their own right. On Wittgenstein’s death in 1951, Anscombe was appointed his literary executor. She went on to translate his second major work, Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953, then other papers.

In 1969, with G.H. von Wright and Denis Paul as co-editors and translators, Anscombe collated and translated some texts of Wittgenstein’s written in the last year and a half of his life, twenty sheets of loose pages he had left in her house, and fragments of his notebooks. The title she gave them was startling: On Certainty. Or, at the very least, this is a startling title given the overall tenor of Analytical Philosophy, with its focus on minutely detailed logical argument, where the ordinary, assertive language of things and their relations meets less-than-ordinary formal, textual, propositional reasoning. This was the territory that had been worked over by Frege,^§MS1.2a Russell, Whitehead,^§MS1.2.2c the Vienna Circle,^§MS1.1.3i Wittgenstein,^§MS2.1.1a and Austin^§MS2.3.1a – notwithstanding their nuanced differences.

Analytical Philosophy eschews world-encompassing philosophies that tackle the meaning of the human, the natural, or the historical – typically of the “continental” variety, from Hegel, to Marx, Husserl, and Derrida. Instead, the Analytical movement adopted a frame of reasoning grounded in the logic of language. At times it is quasi-mathematical, affording it an aura of assertiveness about the nature of things. It works in an objectifying technics that reads at times like science. Something as straightforward as certainty in a world beyond its immediate, self-referential calculation – this is outside the usual frame of reference of Analytical Philosophy. The essentials of meaning are to be found in language and its propositional logic; there were no certainties outside of this.

Wittgenstein had in these final years of his life returned to a 1925 article of G.E. Moore’s, “A Defense of Common Sense.” Moore had been the professor with whom Wittgenstein had been annoyed in 1913 because Cambridge University would not grant him a BA for an early version of the Tractatus.^§MS2.1.1a Then Moore was on his committee in 1929 when he was awarded a Ph.D. for the now-published version – where the proceedings ended with Wittgenstein slapping Bertrand Russell and Moore on the shoulder, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.”^§MS2.1.1d

Moore’s argument in the article ran along these lines. There is nothing to refute a commonsense view of the world that things in the world exist, independent of our thinking or naming them. So, for instance, “There exists at present a living human body, which is my body” is a commonsense statement that does not warrant any attempt to doubt. And the expression “‘The earth has existed for many years past’ is … an unambiguous expression.”²²² But when Wittgenstein had attended Russell’s class at Cambridge he had refused to admit Russell’s assertion that there was not a rhinoceros in the room.^§MS2.1.1a The Tractatus had reiterated his commitment to all discussable meaning being located in the propositional logic of language, beyond which, there was only mystery.

But by the end of his life, Wittgenstein had softened his view. In Philosophical Investigations he introduces several main ideas that he admitted disrupted the basic propositions of the Tractatus. “It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of 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.)”²²³

One of his new ideas was that words only roughly classify concepts. Logicians had oversimplified things, finding a clarity in words and their relations that does not in truth exist.

Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games.” I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? – Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’” – but look and see whether there is anything common to all. – For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! … And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing …

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and crisscross in the same way. – And I shall say: “games” form a family.²²⁴

And a second main idea: that the otherwise slippery meanings of words can only make sense to the extent that they are embedded in “forms of life.”²²⁵ Then a third major thought, connecting back to the first, that language is itself a game, where these forms of life are enacted.²²⁶

We could imagine a language in which all statements had the form and tone of rhetorical questions; or every command the form of the question “Would you like to…?” Perhaps it will then be said: “What he says has the form of a question but is really a command,” – that is, has the function of a command in the technique of using the language. (Similarly one says “You will do this” not as a prophecy but as a command. What makes it the one or the other?) …

But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? – There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols,” “words,” “sentences.” And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten … Here the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.²²⁷

Wittgenstein was now conceding to a far greater extent than before that much of meaning is constituted outside of language. Meaning is framed in forms of life, where assertion, question, and command – ideas within a frame of reference that we call conditionality – are forever slip-sliding into each other, the one ever ready to become the other, and even in some moments of life the one masquerading as the other. Life makes sense of language, not language of life. The sense of language is often not congruently true to life; indeed its “truth” is often the reverse.

Nevertheless, in Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein still frequently falls back into his old language-centric self. “It is only in language that I can mean something by something.”²²⁸ “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”²²⁹ “If ‘X exists’ is meant simply to say: ‘X’ has a meaning, – then it is not a proposition which treats of X, but a proposition about our use of language, that is, about the use of the word ‘X’.”²³⁰ “You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language.”²³¹ (No, you learned the concept pain when you experienced it for the second and subsequent times. The concept is not just the word, but the bodily experience to have felt it once and then again.)

On Certainty is startling because, even though Philosophical Investigations shows Wittgenstein nudging away from language-centrism, he has until now mainly stayed bound to language and its games. Now at last, we have a certainty that goes beyond language and mind.

Take the moon, for instance: “Everything that I have seen or heard gives me the conviction that no man has ever been far from the earth. Nothing in my picture of the world speaks to the opposite.”²³²

Suppose some adult told a child that he had been on the moon. The child tells me the story, and I say it was only a joke, the man hadn’t been on the moon; no one has ever been on the moon; the moon is a long way off and it is impossible to climb up there or fly there … But a child will not ordinarily stick to such a belief and will soon be convinced by what we tell him seriously …

If we are thinking within our system, then it is certain that no one has ever been to the moon. Not merely is nothing of the sort ever seriously reported to us by reasonable people, but our whole system of physics forbids us to believe it.²³³

This brings us back to forms of life that include not only language but a whole host of other forms of meaning. “I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness” – in language or logic, for instance – “nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.”²³⁴

“My convictions … form a system, a structure.”²³⁵ They are a “definite world picture … learned … as a child.”²³⁶ This is something that “stands fast for me and many others.”²³⁷ “Only the accustomed context allows what is meant to come through clearly.”²³⁸ Then “My life consists of being content to accept many things.”²³⁹ And finally, “If you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words, either.”²⁴⁰

At last, we can agree with Wittgenstein about the ordinary, socially constituted, pictured, embodied, materially felt, holistic experience that is meaning. But, rather than leave this to vaguely specified “inherited backgrounds” or “forms of life,” we want to use our grammar to trace the sources of these meanings in history and to parse their forms and functions in and beyond language: the pictures in life and mind, the embodied experiences, the visceral experiences of object, space, and sound – and of course also, the forms and functional limits of our texts and speech. We want to account for the traffic between these forms of meaning, without needing to privilege any. We also want to say that assertion, requirement, and possibility are always predicated on the likelihood at any moment of the one slipping into the other, if that hasn’t happened already.

Wittgenstein was at his philosophical and architectonic best with doors.^§MS2.1.1b

“I am leaving the room because you tell me to.” “I am leaving the room, but not because you tell me to.” Does this proposition describe a connexion between my action and his order; or does it make the connexion? Can one ask: “How do you know that you do it because of this, or not because of this?” And is the answer perhaps: “I feel it”?²⁴¹

Or, as we would say in our parsing of this transposition between speech and object, this is a matter of requirement or not.

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²²² George Edward Moore, 1925 [1959], “A Defence of Common Sense,” pp. 106–33 in Philosophical Papers, London, UK: George Allen and Unwin, pp. 33, 36.

²²³ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953 [2001], Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, §23.

²²⁴ Ibid., §66–67.

²²⁵ Ibid., §17.

²²⁶ Ibid., §7.

²²⁷ Ibid., §21, 23.

²²⁸ Ibid., footnote, p. 16e.

²²⁹ Ibid., §43.

²³⁰ Ibid., §58.

²³¹ Ibid., §384.

²³² Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1969, On Certainty, translated by D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, New York, NY: Harper and Row, §9.

²³³ Ibid., §106, 108.

²³⁴ Ibid., §94.

²³⁵ Ibid., §102.

²³⁶ Ibid., §167.

²³⁷ Ibid., §116.

²³⁸ Ibid., §237.

²³⁹ Ibid., §344.

²⁴⁰ Ibid., §114.

²⁴¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953 [2001], Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, §487.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 253–256. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Elizabeth Anscombe’s Compilation of Wittgenstein Notes, "On Certainty" §MS2.3.2a