The Blue and Brown Books

Quite a good stuff on its own!

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However, in general, when something is widely regarded as being of good quality, it usually indicates that it has met or exceeded the expectations of a significant number of people.

So, the next time you come across something that is described as "quite a good stuff," it might be worth taking a closer look and seeing if it lives up to the hype.

A fun and illuminating romp through logic, language, and philosophy awaits the reader.

It's true that this isn't an easy read. Some passages are awkwardly phrased and needlessly obscure. The transition from one topic to another isn't always as smooth as one would hope. You might wonder what Wittgenstein is trying to achieve with all those language games and what his overall point is. However, you sense him摸索 in the dark, attempting to reach something important. There are indeed flashes of insight that will amaze or at least surprise you.

In both the Blue and Brown Books, Wittgenstein focuses on language. He believes that philosophical problems arise when ordinary language is applied to cases and situations it wasn't intended for. Therefore, the way to solve them is to analyze how language is used and clarify what philosophical problems and their numerous answers are really saying. "To show a man how to get out you have first of all to free him from the misleading influence of the question" (Brown, 169). In this process, he touches on not only applied linguistics and logic but also cognitive psychology, the philosophy of the mind, and metaphysics. At the same time, he offers, in a haphazard way in my opinion, solutions to intractable philosophical problems like solipsism, the problem of personal identity, the meaning of a word, qualia, and others.

Some of the insights in these two notebooks are obscure and perhaps of no interest to the general public, but they are still interesting in their implications. For example, the difference between logical and physical impossibility; the philosophical observer effect where observing one's own cognitive processes interferes with the processes themselves; the problem of rules ("is a rule incompletely explained if no rule for its usage has been given?" "We need have no reason to follow the rule as we do. The chain of reasons has an end" (Brown, 143)); the method of externalizing cognitive processes to demystify what might be happening in the mind (a method used by Daniel Dennett in his seminal Consciousness Explained); and most importantly, the nature of generalization where no specific examples belonging to the same generalized/conceptual category share exactly the same attributes (e.g., "We find that what connects all the cases of comparing is a vast number of overlapping similarities, and as soon as we see this, we feel no longer compelled to say that there must be some one feature common to them all" (Brown, 87)).

For such a dense philosophical work, both notebooks are, relatively speaking, a quick read. Or at least it's a lot more accessible than his austere Tractatus, a book that's basically impenetrable (but beautiful in its own mysterious/mystical way, especially the end) unless you figure out what all those technical terms Wittgenstein uses really mean (and for that you probably need a guidebook or a teacher to help you).

One important feature of these notebooks is that Wittgenstein's celebrated "language games" appear for the first time. The Blue Book mentions them almost incidentally, but in the Brown Book, they play a prominent role in elucidating language problems. He creates tribes and fantastic scenarios involving language use, slightly adjusting the premises each time to uncover facts and conclusions about language that may not be immediately obvious. Most of them are strange, illuminating, and actually fun to read (hence the name, "game" I suppose).

But the language games are just the result of the same obsession that pervades the Blue Book too: analyzing and acknowledging subtle degrees and fuzzy boundaries. So, against those who are inclined to argue for clear-cut definitions of words, he says in the Blue Book: "Many words…don't have a strict meaning. But this is not a defect. To think it is would be like saying that the light of my reading lamp is no real light at all because it has no sharp boundary" (Blue, 27). It is in this spirit that he repeatedly proclaims in both notebooks the difficulty of precisely pinpointing one common difference between two concepts/words/meanings because none of them have clear boundaries. Thus, concepts like "voluntary" and "involuntary" actions or "believing" and "not believing" can be different and also similar in countless ways depending on the circumstances: "the pair 'believing'/'not believing' refers to various differences in different cases (differences forming a family), not to one difference, that between the presence and the absence of a certain mental state'" (Brown, 152).

In the same way that language games stipulate intermediary cases to analyze language, the Blue and Brown Books sort of form intermediary steps in Wittgenstein's philosophy between his earlier Tractatus and his mature and almost complete work, Philosophical Investigations.

Overall, as the blurb on the back promises, this is a good introduction to Wittgenstein's later work. And I now feel more prepared to tackle his monumental Philosophical Investigations. Definitely recommended.

I always held the view that Wittgenstein was merely a pretentious rich kid.

However, this book has completely transformed my perception of what a philosopher's aim should be. Indeed, I stated it clearly - SHOULD.

This work is widely regarded as a revision or redirection of his Tractatus, and it is fascinating in several aspects:

Firstly, it offers a peek into how one can (or tends to) modify their philosophy over the course of a lifetime - essentially altering it while still maintaining the general framework.

Secondly, the Blue Book is essentially a less complex transcript of a lecture series, while the Brown Book is a more rigorous treatment intended for text. It is interesting to observe the adaptations in style, language, and depth based on the medium.

Finally, this book truly emphasizes the power and utility of 'plain language' philosophy.

In any case, I am glad to have read it, and I look forward to revisiting it at some point in the future.

I only read the blue book (so the first half), but this was a revolutionary experience for me.

I discovered that I agreed with over 95% of what he was stating regarding how we utilize language. Additionally, I tentatively believe that I largely concur with him regarding the implications of those findings for dissolving philosophical problems. However, I'll need to engage in a great deal more thinking and reading of objections to gain a more solid understanding of the ideas.

Reading this was incredibly enjoyable. I found myself completely enamored with Wittgenstein's style. His absence of explanatory background makes it extremely difficult to determine when he is attempting to reinforce a point already raised and when he is striving to progress to something slightly novel. I'm not at all certain of my interpretations of him, but I do think I managed to extract some real value from it (and this is supposed to be his easiest material after all!).

What he was saying towards the end about identity/egoism struck me as the most controversial. I can perceive how his arguments would undermine the concept of identity/self, but I'm not entirely sure if they justify going as far as I felt he was inclined to. I don't know. I'm super excited to read more of his work.

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These studies and the work they gave rise to, Philosophical Investigations, are commonly regarded as a refutation of the author's previous major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, I view the Blue and Brown Books not so much as a refutation but rather a correction of the system of thought at work in the Tractatus.

That earlier work, as I understand it, contains some rather strange and troubling implications and assumptions. At times, it seems that Wittgenstein is suggesting that once linguistic information is understood, it cannot be refuted, as if our ideas about things never change or as if a statement could never be doubted. It's as if lying or misunderstanding were not common occurrences, and we shouldn't consider such situations when examining the nature of communication and knowledge. The Blue and Brown Books, on the other hand, brilliantly address these concerns about the line of thought in the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein argues that if we are to understand the workings of language, we must not ask "what does 'x' mean?" but rather "how does 'x' mean?" Signs, he asserts, can only function according to the rules imposed by a linguistic system. Unfortunately, the rules of our grammar have the effect of misleading us about the true nature of language. Our grammar constantly operates metaphorically, and these metaphors are so ubiquitous that we speakers have come to take them as literal identifiers. For example, the statement "I think of 'x'" implies that the sign is a translation of something in our heads that exists analogously to the sign. This leads us to believe that there must be an intermediary step between thought and expression.

Grammar thus leads us to believe that we can apply a term like "similar" to what our language designates as different. Wittgenstein uses the example of different colors like turquoise, ocean, and blue-green, which are commonly considered "similar" because they are sub-categories of "blue." This implies that there is a unifying concept of "blue" that exists in thought prior to expression. Language then attempts to express this "thought" - the static, abstract truth that precedes it - and this manifests itself in the metaphysical impulse in philosophy.

In place of this inherently futile project, Wittgenstein proposes replacing our concept of "thought" with the expression itself, the sign. Our statements are not attempts to give socialized form to some inner, spiritual truth or some inference to knowledge; rather, they are descriptions of knowledge. Words describe what can be known by revealing themselves. Of course, words have no concrete, unchanging meaning. They demonstrate their meaning within their contextual use, just as the move of a chess piece across a board has a specific significance within the context of an individual match. Thought, the use of language, can describe how it functions but can never explain why it functions the way it does.

The question remains, however, how language, which shows its functionality through its very implementation, can be used to intentionally mislead about things other than its own nature. Wittgenstein's radical response is that lying is not entirely possible in the sense of completely deceiving another person. A lie never completely misleads precisely because it is understood by the addressee, whether or not the addressee believes the statement to be true. No matter what the speaker's intention, they have necessarily revealed themselves to the addressee through the act of meaning that they perform. The speaker has made their "move." To truly mislead the addressee, the speaker would have to adopt a private language - another inherently self-defeating project.

Still, the fact remains that the term "lying" can be successfully used. What do we mean when we describe a statement as a lie other than the way we feel when we make a statement we consider to be "untrue" as opposed to what we feel when we make a statement we consider to be "true"? Such feelings, and the gestures and tonalities that sometimes accompany them, Wittgenstein calls "modes of expression." But these "feelings" - these "truths behind the lies" - can only be conveyed through more words. So, what about the private - the emotional and sentimental? Where do they fit in thought? On these topics, it seems, we must remain silent.

I consider the Blue and Brown Books to be a masterpiece of philosophical execution. They are incredibly inventive in their models. However, I'm not convinced that they are as groundbreaking as some might claim. In shifting his focus from the irrefutability of the understood to its implementation, it seems to me that Wittgenstein presents a different perspective on the philosophical landscape of the Tractatus rather than an entirely new one.

Also, Wittgenstein essentially argues that meaning is composed of arbitrarily applied signifiers that only attain meaning within the systematic play of context. This sounds a lot like the ideas put forward in Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, which was published twenty years before the writing of these studies. However, in providing a clear and level-headed response to the question, "If language is the source of all knowledge, can thought still conceivably precede expression?" in the form of "conceivably, but not necessarily," Wittgenstein offers a model of how to approach the subject that makes unnecessary the theoretical bickering over how to follow the implications of Saussure's work that characterized much of the "structuralist vs. post-structuralist" controversies.

A significant value of reading these books lies in the repeated realization that many traditional philosophical problems are actually vacuous. When people describe Wittgenstein's work not as typical philosophy but rather as a form of therapy, I now have a better understanding at another level. He doesn't offer many positive points directly but instead attempts to uproot our intuitions that certain positive points make sense. These books involve Wittgenstein applying his insight that semantic meaning is constituted by use (within a language game) to a series of examples. The application follows a rather formulaic pattern; by a third of the way into the book, one can predict how it will unfold for all the other examples. From my recollection, reading the Philosophical Investigations was much more exciting and enlightening; it had a greater variety of points and examples to present (though I could be mistaken as it's just from my memory). However, the repetition in the Blue and Brown books is very beneficial for receiving Wittgenstein's edification. His view is radically new and goes against all common philosophical intuition, so it requires a great deal of drilling to overcome these common intuitions. (After reading this, I'm aware that I'll need a lot more time to think about philosophical problems differently and truly internalize this message).

So Wittgenstein's overall points are as follows: (1) Philosophical problems are presented linguistically; they identify certain phenomena and pose questions about them. (2) Such identification of phenomena amounts to referring to or describing those phenomena using certain words, which are based on certain parts of speech. (3) Often, these parts of speech schematize our understanding of these phenomena in a way that gives rise to certain problems or paradoxes, or certain types of questions. (4) These questions turn out to be vacuous or meaningless once we realize that these parts of speech are based in certain language games; these parts of speech can only be accurately used under specific circumstances to deal with only certain phenomena, based on those games.

For instance, the mistake of transferring a schema from its original home or language game into a foreign, philosophical context occurs when philosophers ask "Does the future or the past exist?" This question presupposes that temporal tenses (future and past) are treated like physical objects, whose existence we can question. But this is inappropriate. Temporal tenses are nothing like physical objects in nature; objects that are subject to the question of existence necessarily exist over temporal durations. Time is not an object but a precondition for the experience of objects. This kind of mistake is similar to asking what the weather is like inside a thought or whether an emotion has passed its expiration date and is no longer "edible." In other words, Wittgenstein criticizes philosophers for constantly making category mistakes. The questions that can be coherently asked about a given phenomenon are determined by our ordinary language and common experience regarding that phenomenon. We ask about the weather when we are about to go outdoors; this question pertains to the outdoors, not to thoughts. Likewise, when we ask about whether something exists, this question pertains to objects, not to time.

Wittgenstein applies this insight about the context-relativity of meaning to a wide range of philosophical issues. Some highlights include questions about skepticism regarding other minds, what it means for something to possibly exist or that something can happen (modality or possibility), what it means to will for something to happen (volition or agency), and what it means to grasp a meaning or understand a rule (learning). In all cases, Wittgenstein's approach and conclusions are the same, and it is highly repetitive, but for the good reason of allowing the lesson to truly sink in.

I would recommend this to anyone who has read the Philosophical Investigations and wants to see the ideas introduced there played out in more concrete detail. Those ideas are indeed made clearer here. But they are not really expanded upon in any significant way; so if a reader feels that they've grasped the main ideas in that earlier work, I don't think there's a real need to read the Blue and Brown books.

A side note about some concerns I have: after reading this, I finally realized that Wittgenstein's account of semantic meaning is not unique to language at all. Any physical artifact, bodily gesture, or object or event that is embedded in a practical activity (based on forms of life) has "semantic meaning" by virtue of the same considerations Wittgenstein raises with respect to linguistic meaning. For example, in Wittgenstein's case of builders, the foreman says "Slab!" to a worker, and in the context of this language game, this expression has the semantic meaning of "Bring me a slab." But likewise, the slab itself has "semantic" meaning in that it is to be used in making the building, that it is to be passed to the foreman, etc. Everything that humans encounter (linguistic utterances or physical objects) within the context of a practical activity gains meaning that is determined by the conditions of that activity.

This is a concern because I had always assumed that Wittgenstein's insight was truly about language itself. His insight is rather about meaning more generally. The impression that it is about language is due to the fact that Wittgenstein's main purpose is to deflate philosophical problems, which are always presented linguistically. So all of his examples are about language. But the account he gives of linguistic meaning is inherently general or broad to such an extent that it does not pertain uniquely to language. The only reason this concern matters to me is that I'm interested in thinking about where linguistic meaning uniquely comes from, not just meaning generally. To address that question, Wittgenstein provides a starting platform but does not take you any further.

After reading the final word of this book, I gently closed the cover.

I then sat the book on the table next to me, and a strange inspiration began to stir within me.

Before I knew it, I was penning the first poem of what would eventually become "Dwelling".

This book had such a profound impact on me, especially as a language weirdo.

It opened up a new world of words and emotions, allowing me to express myself in ways I never thought possible.

The beauty and power of the written word truly amazed me, and I was eager to explore this newfound inspiration further.

As I continued to write, I felt a sense of fulfillment and joy that I had never experienced before.

"Dwelling" was just the beginning of my journey into the world of poetry, and I couldn't wait to see where it would take me.