The echo of the Tractarian saying versus showing distinction in the later rule following considerations
2.172 A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays it…
4.121 Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it. [Wittgenstein 1961]
For what we thereby show is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”. [Wittgenstein 2009 §201]
Introduction
The paradigmatic role of the saying-showing distinction in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerns the representational powers of pictures and propositions. The account of representation apparently articulated cannot, somewhat paradoxically, be put into words but something relevant can be shown. On ‘resolute’ interpretations, however, the distinction itself is part of what has to be jettisoned when the insight offered in the book is finally understood, an aspect of the ‘ladder’ to be thrown down. On a traditional reading, the distinction is what permits something substantial still to be conveyed even when the ladder is thrown down. On an elucidatory reading, such as McGinn’s, the distinction survives as an aspect of the continuity between the earlier and later Wittgenstein though McGinn offers as an example of that continuity only epistemic matters from On Certainty which is only of indirect connection to representation itself.
In this chapter, I discuss an analogy between the saying-showing distinction as it seems to apply in the Tractatus – whether or not it survives as genuine insight – and the rule following considerations in the Philosophical Investigations. But even in this latter context, difficulties remain.
On one approach, the rule following considerations highlight the gap between what can be set out in any explanation of a rule and what – philosophically – one took to be conveyed. Examples of deviant interpretations serve as the equivalent of ringers in arguments for epistemological scepticism. And hence so much the worse for ‘saying’. One response is a radical form of scepticism – Kripke’s meaning scepticism – in which there is less to rule following than previously thought. Another (eg Brandom) is to fill the gap between what is said and what is understood by invoking a layer of norms underpinning explicit rules implicit in practice. This suggests a role for the saying-showing distinction with norms merely shown in implicit practices underpinning what can be said, explicitly. Neither approach, however, fits what Wittgenstein himself says.
A third response is to deny that there is any necessary gap between an explanation and what is understood. The regress of interpretations only threatens on the assumption that the expression of rules ‘stand there’ like a normatively inert signpost and offer normative guidance only under an interpretation. This response undermines the suggestive argument for a distinction between saying and showing but, nevertheless, one remains at the heart of representation. The content of a rule, such as one governing application of a word, grounds out in particular judgements. For example, there is no further explanation of the fact that ‘blue’ applies to light and dark blue but not to green than that this is our natural practice. It depends, in Stanley Cavell’s fine phrase, on our whirl of organism. The content of our concepts is thus given by our practice. This is the aspect of the ‘logic’ of representation that has to be shown in the later Wittgenstein.
Saying and showing in the Tractatus, very briefly
On first appearance, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerns the representational powers of thought and language. Drawing inspiration from the practice in French courts to depict road-traffic accidents using models, the Tractatus seems to explore the idea that thought and language latches onto the world through a modelling, or more generally, picturing relation.
In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally. (As when in the law-court in Paris a motor-car accident is represented by means of dolls, etc.) [Wittgenstein 1979: 7]
Like the courtroom model, elements in language stand for elements in the world and their relations as set out in language – or in thoughts expressible in language – mirror those of the worldly correlates. Such a general approach – massively refined and extended throughout the body of the book – promises to shed light on such phenomena as that thoughts and utterances can be false as well as true, they can depict situations – putative facts – that do not obtain. Language is also generative: grasp of finite words and a grammar enables a speaker to understand an infinite number of novel sentences and, on this picture, thus know what would be the case if they were true.
But one consequence of the account – assuming for the moment that it is, as it first seems, an account – is that it best fits the relation of statements, thoughts or propositions to contingent facts. Logical statements such as tautologies and contradictions have to be accommodated as limit cases of the structures that enable the expression of contingent claims but resulting, strictly, in nonsense. Given the account of what is expressed by statements setting out contingent claims, tautologies and contradictions do not say anything, though their logical form is shown.
One consequence of this is that the very articulation of the conditions of possibility of the representational powers of language and thought, which seem to express the necessary structural isomorphism of language and world, runs counter to the account of sense that is, apparently, designed to deal with contingent claims. If the account of language apparently set out in the Tractatus were true, one consequence of that would be that the expression of that account in the Tractatus would be violate the bounds of sense and would be meaningless. As though to accommodate just that dawning realisation, the penultimate remark runs:
6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. [Wittgenstein 1961]
In fact, however, the idea that aspects of what makes the representational powers of language and thought possible cannot be stated runs throughout the work. For example:
2.172 A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays it.
2.173 A picture represents its subject from a position outside it. (Its standpoint is its representational form.) That is why a picture represents its subject correctly or incorrectly.
2.174 A picture cannot, however, place itself outside its representational form.
2.18 What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it—correctly or incorrectly—in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality.
4.121 Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it. [Wittgenstein 1961]
In other words, a distinction between saying and showing runs throughout the seeming account of representation. Taking pictures as models, the one thing a picture cannot depict, the Tractatus suggests, is its own means of depiction. To do that, it seems, would be for it to pick itself up by its own bootstraps.
This brief account has been hedged about with ‘seeming’s and ‘apparent’s because of an exegetical controversy inspired by the difficulty just outlined and which can again be very briefly summarised. On a traditional approach, the conflict between the attempt to set out, in book form, an account of how representation is possible and the realisation that such an attempt undermines itself is uneasy and forces Wittgenstein to add to §6.54 the final comment:
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. [ibid]
But on the traditional interpretation, while silence may be the proper conclusion of the exploration of representation, something really has been learnt along the way about how language and thought hook onto the world, something that pertains to the picturing relation misguidedly apparently described. Although strictly nonsensical, the account of the picturing relation gestures at a kind of metaphysical truth. Of this approach, Frank Ramsey memorably said that what cannot be said cannot be said and cannot be whistled either. Such an approach helps explain Wittgenstein’s later return to the same questions with a different style, at least, of philosophy.
More recently, a ‘resolute’ reading has pressed the idea of continuity between the earlier and later Wittgenstein, the latter being explicit that nonsensical utterances are simply utterances that lack sense: no use has been given to some particular combination of symbols [eg Conant 2000, Diamond 1991]. There is no paradoxical nonsensical sense. Nonsense cannot be used to encode any truths, effable or ineffable. Reading this view back into the Tractatus, it denies any notion of the communication of truths about the forms of representation via ‘substantial’ nonsense. The Tractatus serves as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a philosophical venture. The correct conclusion from §6.54 is that, aside from itself and a few other framing propositions, the whole of the book collapses into nothingness. On this view, the distinction between saying and showing is not an insight but part of the house of cards to be collapsed.
More recently still, Marie McGinn has defended a third ‘elucidatory’ view [McGinn 1999 and 2001]. Very roughly, she attempts to preserve much of the content of the Tractatus while also accepting that nonsense really is nonsense. While it is a mistake to attempt to offer an account of how language and thought can represent the world as though from a perspective outside language and thought, the Tractatus can be used to shed light on representation from within. Hence, she argues that the saying-showing distinction can be defended as an aspect of how we need to think about representation from within it. Further, she argues that this distinction is an aspect of continuity with the later Wittgenstein though the example she offers concerns hinge propositions in On Certainty rather than claims more directly about the nature of representation.
In the rest of this chapter I will explore a reason to think that the saying showing distinction is a feature of the later Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules in the Philosophical Investigations.
The prompting problem in the Philosophical Investigations
To set out the role of the saying versus showing distinction in the later Wittgenstein, I will start with a familiar scenario from the discussion of rule following. Wittgenstein has an extended discussion of teaching a pupil to continue a mathematical series correctly. At one point, he imagines a pupil who ‘judged by the usual criteria… has mastered the series of natural numbers’ and is then taught to continue series of the form 0, n, 2n, 3n, etc. for arbitrary values of n
Then we get the pupil to continue one series (say “+ 2”) beyond 1000 – and he writes 1000, 1004, 1008, 1012.
We say to him, “Look what you’re doing!” – He doesn’t understand. We say, “You should have added two: look how you began the series!” – He answers, “Yes, isn’t it right? I thought that was how I had to do it.” —– Or suppose he pointed to the series and said, “But I did go on in the same way”. – It would now be no use to say, “But can’t you see…?” – and go over the old explanations and examples for him again. In such a case, we might perhaps say: this person finds it natural, once given our explanations, to understand our order as we would understand the order “Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000, and so on”.
This case would have similarities to that in which it comes naturally to a person to react to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction from fingertip to wrist, rather than from wrist to fingertip. [Wittgenstein 2009 §185]
In this example, the pupil reacts in a divergent way (as far as we are concerned) to the explanations offered of how to continue and Wittgenstein suggests one possible way of making sense of this: that the pupil understands the explanation in a systematically divergent way. In a word he uses a little later, the pupil appears to have acted under a divergent interpretation of the expression of the rule.
The example may seem to present a problem only of third person epistemology: of conveying or understanding from an explanation of a rule how to go on. But a problem also attaches to the understanding of the person doing the explaining.
“But I already knew, at the time when I gave the order, that he should write 1002 after 1000.” – Certainly; and you may even say you meant it then; only you shouldn’t let yourself be misled by the grammar of the words “know” and “mean”. For you don’t mean that you thought of the step from 1000 to 1002 at that time – and even if you did think of this step, still, you didn’t think of other ones. [ibid §187]
The more fundamental issue is not just the epistemology but rather in what understanding the series can consist, given that a proper understanding has to rule out divergences of the sort postulated. But if, to be successful, an explanation of a rule has to be correctly interpreted then any expression of the interpretation might be subject to divergent understandings. It does not seem to matter whether the explanation is explicitly stated in a symbolism or by examples such as the first few numbers of the series.
“But how can a rule teach me what I have to do at this point? After all, whatever I do can, on some interpretation, be made compatible with the rule.” – No, that’s not what one should say. Rather, this: every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning. [Wittgenstein 2009 §198]
Any interpretation has to be specified and the original dilemma is still in play for this. Earlier in the Investigations, Wittgenstein introduces a yet simpler idea: signposts.
A rule stands there like a signpost. – Does the signpost leave no doubt about the way I have to go? Does it show which direction I am to take when I have passed it, whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country? But where does it say which way I am to follow it; whether in the direction of its finger or (for example) in the opposite one? – And if there were not a single signpost, but a sequence of signposts or chalk marks on the ground a is there only one way of interpreting them?... [Wittgenstein 2009 §85]
If one understands which way a signpost points then one knows it points in the direction of the ‘finger’ not the other way. But one might have taken it to point the other way. The signpost does not take a viewer by the throat as Achilles suggests that logic will take the Tortoise by the throat [Carroll 1905]. So it can seem that the signpost points only under an interpretation. But in what would grasp of such an interpretation consist? In this case, the most obvious candidate would be a mental image of a signpost with an indication of which way it points. How? By yet another mental signpost, perhaps?
This case makes the problem clear. In this key respect (which way it points), the inner signpost is no different from the outer one. If the outer signpost needs an interpretation then so will the inner one. And that threatens a vicious infinite regress, stopping short of completing which will leave the subject with no understanding of which way any of the – inner or outer – signposts point. It will leave no understanding short of impossibly completing the infinite series of sign-posts because for any sign-post all one knows is that if the next higher order sign post points left then so does this one and if it points right then so does this one, but as yet, one does not know which way that higher order sign points. For it, an equivalent conditional applies with respect to the yet higher signpost.
I suggest that the apparent gap in the example of §185 and thereabouts between what can be put into words by the teacher and how the pupil subsequently acts suggests one place to locate a saying-showing distinction in the later Wittgenstein. But, as I will argue, this is a mistake.
Different responses to the prompting problem in the Philosophical Investigations
Whatever their subtler differences, some broad distinctions can be drawn in responses to the prompting problem along a particular spectrum.
One type of response is to concede the apparent sceptical implication of Wittgenstein’s hypothetical case and to conclude that less is communicated or understood in an explanation of a rule than is typically, pre-philosophically, taken to be the case. In different ways, Saul Kripke and the earlier Crispin Wright take this line. According to Kripke, the correct conclusion to draw from what looks to be the starting point for an epistemological scepticism concerning the idea of shared grasp of rules is not that knowledgeable access to those facts is impossible but, rather, that there are no such facts. According to Wright, the applications made supposedly in accord with rules in fact shapes those rules [Wright 1986]. Rules are plastic to ongoing use. On such a view, the apparent gap between what is said in explanations of rules and what is understood is solved by radical pruning of what is understood. The idea that a rule is something that can be understood but which also determines ongoing use, sets a determinate standard for subsequent applications, is simply given up.
There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict. [Kripke 1982: 55]
Such a response does not support a saying-showing distinction, however. While it suggests that there may be disturbing limits to what turns out to be sayable, there is insufficient resource in what is shown as well.
A second type of response to Wittgenstein’s discussion is much more promising. It is to conclude that there are limits to what can be made explicit in an explanation of a rule but that the potential gap between what can be explained and what can be understood is plugged by something implicit. Robert Brandom takes this view. He argues that the regress of interpretations suggested by Wittgenstein highlights the role that applying any such interpretation correctly in situ must play.
No sequence of interpretations can eliminate the need to apply the final rules, and this is always itself subject to normative assessment. Applied incorrectly, any interpretation misleads. The rule says how to do one thing correctly only on the assumption that one can do something else correctly, namely apply the rule… Absent such a practical way of grasping norms, no sense can be made of the distinction between correct and incorrect performance-of the difference between acting according to the norm and acting against it. Norms would then be unintelligible. [Brandom 1994: 21]
Hence, according to Brandom, Wittgenstein’s argument shows the reliance of explicit statements of rules on something implicit: their application in practice.
Norms that are explicit in the form of rules presuppose norms implicit in practices…Norms explicit as rules presuppose norms implicit in practices because a rule specifying how something is correctly done (how a word ought to be used, how a piano ought to be tuned) must be applied to particular circumstances, and applying a rule in particular circumstances is itself essentially something that can be done correctly or incorrectly. A rule, principle or command has normative significance for performances only in the context of practices determining how it is correctly applied. [ibid: 62]
In support of this, he cites a passage that serves as a kind of diagnosis and conclusion of Wittgenstein’s discussion.
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule. The answer was: if every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule, then it can also be brought into conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. That there is a misunderstanding here is shown by the mere fact that in this chain of reasoning we place one interpretation behind another, as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another lying behind it. For what we thereby show is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”. [Wittgenstein 2009 §201]
The appeal to norms implicit in practices halts the regress below the level of what can be explicitly stated. As McDowell critically summarises, Brandom presents a picture: ‘in which, below the level at which speech can be described by saying which concepts are made explicit in it, it can be described as subject to norms specifiable in terms that do not require an understanding of the idea of explicitly expressing this or that concept’ [McDowell 2009: 97]. Brandom’s project – in Making It Explicit and elsewhere – is to give an account of this implicit level.
It must be possible to make sense of a notion of norms implicit in practice-which participants in the practice are bound by, and can acknowledge being bound by-without appeal to any explicit rules or capacities on the part of those participants to understand and apply such rules. [Brandom 1994: 26]
This is a challenge because, on Brandom’s view, the examples of divergent ways of going on exemplified by the pupil learning a mathematical series show that there is more to following a rule than exemplifying just any regularity. Hence ‘Such practices must be construed both as not having to involve explicit rules and as distinct from mere regularities’ [ibid: 29].
Brandom is not the only interpreter of Wittgenstein to suggest a gap between what can be said explicitly and what is implicitly understood. The sociologist Harry Collins suggests that the gap is plugged by a form of tacit knowledge [Collins 1985]. Charles Travis draws a distinction from the philosophy of thought and language between singular thoughts such as object-dependent thoughts and non-singular thoughts such as descriptive thoughts to suggests a gap between prior explanations of a rule and the object-dependent or singular understanding of it one might have when faced with a potential instance.
Some thoughts are only available to us given suitable acquaintance with our environment… One may only so understand them if one is suitably acquainted with things being as they then were. It is to things so being that one must be responding in having that understanding. An understanding thus unavailable to someone before a given time I will call novel (for that person at that time), and an understanding available anyway, even when that other one was not (or if it were not) prior relative to that novel one... [Travis 2006: 130]
The issue it raises is how prior understandings can require novel ones. [ibid: 131]
Travis plugs this gap between two sorts of thought with ‘parochial sensibilities’.
In speaking to our fellows we speak to those expected to share (enough of) our parochial sensibilities, and to apply these in understanding what we say (in the ways they do). [ibid: 138]
Construing Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule following as suggesting a gap between what can be explicitly expressed in explanations and what is implicitly understood in rule-governed practice might suggest a role for a distinction between saying and showing in the later Wittgenstein.
The problem with that assumption, however, is that the arguments to the effect that the content of a rule cannot be said also counts against what can be shown. If the regress of interpretations counts against linguistic explanations of rules it also counts against practical explanations. Any finite stretch of practice could be subject to an infinite number of diverging interpretations as the example of deviant pupil suggests.
More generally, any reading of Wittgenstein that postulates, and then attempts to plug, a gap between explanation and understanding threatens the normativity of meaning since the same gap that seems to open up between teacher and pupil would also apply to intra-personally between an understanding at one moment and its application the future.
“But do you really explain to the other person what you yourself understand? Don’t you leave it to him to guess the essential thing? You give him examples a but he has to guess their drift, to guess your intention.” – Every explanation which I can give myself I give to him too. ¬ “He guesses what I mean” would amount to: “various interpretations of my explanation come to his mind, and he picks one of them”. So in this case he could ask; and I could and would answer him. [Wittgenstein 2009 §210]
This passage provides a route to the third response to the prompting problem which is to deny that there is a gap between explanation and understanding. A clear example is John McDowell’s paper ‘How not to read Philosophical Investigations: Brandom’s Wittgenstein’ quoted above [McDowell 2009].
McDowell offers an alternative view of the role of regress of interpretations to Brandom’s claim that it is the first stage of an argument to locate normativity implicitly in practice, below the level of what is explicit. McDowell highlights Wittgenstein’s use of the example of a signpost pointing in a particular direction as an example of a rule or the explicit expression of a rule: ‘A rule stands there like a signpost’ [Wittgenstein 2009 §85]. McDowell suggests that the danger of this image is that ‘“stands there” suggests a conception according to which the rule, or its expression, considered in itself, is normatively inert’ [McDowell 2009: 100]. Once that has been assumed, it can seem that what tells people which way to go is not the signpost itself but the signpost under an interpretation. But this initiates a regress because whatever serves as an expression of the interpretation of the signpost will also seem to stand there ‘like a signpost’ and be similarly normatively inert.
The moral of the regress of interpretations according to McDowell is that:
We learn that it is disastrous to suppose there is always a conceptual gap between an expression of a rule and performances that are up for assessment according to whether or not they conform to the rule, a gap that is made vivid by saying the expression of the rule stands there… We must not acquiesce in the idea that an expression of a rule, considered in itself, does not sort behaviour into performances that follow the rule and performances that do not. [ibid: 100-1]
This, according to McDowell, is the moral of §201: ‘there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”’. For those who are party to the relevant practices, there is no gap between the expression of the rule and being told which way to go. The signpost, not merely the signpost under an interpretation, points the way. On this account, the regress of interpretations is stopped before it can start. But it is stopped at the level of what is explicit. For signposts, the relevant rule or norm is the indicated direction in which one should go not some lower level norm expressible independently of that explicit rule.
This third approach to Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule following undermines one reason to think that the saying-showing distinction might apply to the later Wittgenstein: the assumption that the regress of interpretations, and the example of deviant responses to explanations of rules, places limits on the what can be made explicit or said and thus has instead to be shown. Despite initial appearances, the role of showing to complement saying is not, however, located in the supposed gap between explanation and understanding. On a proper reading of Wittgenstein, there is no such gap. In the final section, I will suggest where the distinction might lie.
Saying and showing in the Philosophical Investigations
As described earlier, on the account of language and world seemingly set out in the Tractatus, elements in language – names – stand for elements in the world and the relations as set out in language – or in thoughts expressible in language – mirror those of the worldly correlates in virtue of a shared pictorial or logical form. Names stand in, or go proxy, for objects of some form. Philosophical Investigations §§1-64 consider the possibility of establishing word-thing links through ostensive definitions. Ostensive definitions are, however, like any explanations of linguistic rules in that they could be misinterpreted. Only in the context of a great deal of stage setting is the content of the definition determined. This point is not made to undermine the pre-philosophical role of ostensive teaching using samples. Any explanation of meaning might be misunderstood but that does not undermine such explanation. Ostensive definition, however, cannot provide the foundation for language apparently presupposed in the Tractatus (modulo the earlier comments about its proper interpretation) because it would presuppose further meaning-related necessary stage setting.
What role then do samples have in ostensive definition? Wittgenstein suggests that the connection between a word and a sample is made within language. Samples play a role within the realm of representation rather than crossing between representation and what is represented.
What about the colour samples that A shows to B: are they part of the language? Well, it is as you please. They do not belong to spoken language; yet when I say to someone, “Pronounce the word ‘the’”, you will also count the second “‘the’” as part of the sentence. Yet it has a role just like that of a colour sample…; that is, it is a sample of what the other is meant to say. It is most natural, and causes least confusion, if we count the samples as tools of the language. [Wittgenstein 2009 §16]
[W]e explain that “sepia” means the colour of the standard sepia… This sample is an instrument of the language, by means of which we make colour statements. In this game, it is not something that is represented, but is a means of representation. [ibid §50]
Suppose someone asks what colour sepia is and, selecting a paint sample card, one says ‘This is sepia’. Such a comment is meta-linguistic. It is about the system of representation. The sample is not just an instance of sepia but serves – is being used here – as a representation of other instances of sepia in the world. Both the word and the sample serve as devices of representation: both have to be applied according to rules. To apply the sample, one compares it with, for example, particular flowers and judge of those that look sufficiently similar in the right lighting that they are ‘this colour’, perhaps indicating the sample. Hence one can also say that they are ‘sepia’, using that word.
In a different context, for example a quiz, one might say of an unlabelled paint card that it is sepia and that would be a judgement about that part of the world, about that instance of colour, not the system of representation. In this second context, the paint card is not being used as a sample and counts instead as a part of the represented world.
Returning now to the saying-showing distinction. Suppose that one did want to say to what colour the word ‘sepia’ applies in such a way as to cross the divide between representation and represented. One might say that sepia is a reddish-brown. But such an act of saying only gets one so far because one is still relying on a prior grasp of the meaning, the worldly application, of those words. One might hold up a sample of sepia. But if so, again, that presupposes grasp of how to use a colour sample to represent colours. For example, one shouldn’t hold it up in the dark or strongly coloured light, or compare it with objects by taste or size. How then can we articulate the connection between words that represent and things represented? All attempts at saying stay on the side of the system of representation when what was wanted was to bridge the gap between representation and represented. That they stay on the side of representation/representing is indicated by the fact that one needs to know how to use them in accord with a rule. By contrast, represented instances merely sit there and ‘take it’.
The way the gap is bridged is shown not said in the application of words to things in utterances that do not express rules. It lies in the unfolding practice of either directly applying a sample to objects such as flowers and judging that that is the same colour, that is: sepia, or by just saying of things by a reckoning of the eye that they are sepia. Such comments are not about the system of representation but about the world. But they show the method of representation in the ongoing practice of application.
The fact that there is something to be shown is made vivid by Wittgenstein’s examples of pupils who get rules wrong despite everyday explanations, such as the pupil who continues a series that a teacher had tried to indicate via an ordinary explanation of the plus 2 rule, 1000, 1004, 1008 etc. Their ongoing practice would show a different system of representation, whether or not it is coherent to us. They may agree with all our explanations, but they go on a different way. That helps illustrate that something substantial is being shown by our going on as we do, in the contrast with them.
Despite the widespread significance attached by commentators to the deviant pupil, there is a complication here. As Jonathan Lear argues, it is at least open to question what sense we can make of this example and others like it, such as the tribe who sell wood by area rather than volume [Lear 1982, 1984, 1986]. They may not actually be alternatives available for us.
But these counterfactuals cannot for us express real possibilities; for the notion of people being other minded is not something on which we can get any grasp. The possibility of there being persons who are minded in any way at all is the possibility of their being minded as we are. [Lear 1982: 386]
To the extent to which the brief sketches Wittgenstein offers might, under greater critical scrutiny, collapse into nonsense then they do not offer a substantial contrast and if that contrast is necessary to suggest the role of showing, so much the worse for showing. But other, more mundane, examples suggest themselves.
In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein considers the case of light and dark shades of blue.
There is something remarkable about saying that we use the word “strain” for both mental and physical strain because there is a similarity between them. Should you say we use the word “blue” both for light blue and dark blue because there is a similarity between them? If you were asked “Why do you call this ‘blue’ also?”, you would say “Because this is blue, too”. One might suggest that the explanation is that in this case you call “blue” what is in common between the two colours, and that, if you called “strain” what was in common between the two experiences of strain, it would have been wrong to say “I called them both ‘strain’ because they had a certain similarity”, but that you would have had to say “I used the word ‘strain’ in both cases because there is a strain present in both”. Now what should we answer to the question “What do light blue and dark blue have in common?”? At first sight the answer seems obvious: “They are both shades of blue”. But this is really a tautology. So let us ask “What do these colours I am pointing to have in common?” (Suppose one is light blue, the other dark blue.) The answer to this really ought to be “I don’t know what game you are playing”. And it depends upon this game whether I should say they had anything in common, and what I should say they had in common. [Wittgenstein 1958: 133-4]
Such a case is a good example of a view ascribed to the later Wittgenstein: the ‘autonomy of grammar’ exemplified in passages such as:
We have a colour system as we have a number system.
Do the systems reside in our nature or in the nature of things? How are we to put it? - Not in the nature of numbers or colours. [Wittgenstein 1981 §357]
Just as samples are best thought of as part of the system of representation rather parts of the represented world so systems of concepts are not susceptible of a kind of realist explanation that their distinctions are dictated by distinctions brutely present in the world. And hence there is a role for an anthropological perspective on representational practices to chart the distinctions thereon [cf Lear 1986]. These distinctions are shown by the ongoing practices of speakers and thinkers in making the judgements they do, applying the rules they follow. They are, in Stanley Cavell’s famous description an aspect of the ‘the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life’’:
We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of book of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, senses of humour and of significance and of fulfilment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation – all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life’. Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying. [Cavell 1969: 52]
The worldly distinctions that correspond to a system of representation is shown by what we do.
This, however, suggests a nuanced role for the saying-showing distinction in the later Wittgenstein only partially mirroring its apparent role (on a traditional reading) in the Tractatus. The relation between language and the world is shown in ongoing practice which shows, to an anthropological perspective, the relation between a system of representation and what is represented. Any attempt to say in what that relation consists remains within the system of representation, forging connections from word to other words or words to samples, which are themselves best thought of as linguistic entities (because their use as samples presupposes rules of representation). But this is not to say, as some interpretations of Wittgenstein claim, that there is any gap between an explanation of the rules that comprise the representational system and what is understood that showing fills. The saying-showing distinction is distinction of perspectives rather than an attempt to communicate in mysterious way strictly ineffable insights.
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