cora diamond -- how old are these bones

HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?PUTNAM, WITTGENSTEIN AND

VERIFICATION

Cora Diamond and Steven Gerrard

I—Cora Diamond

ABSTRACT Hilary Putnam has argued against philosophical theories which tiethe content of truth-claims closely to the available methods of investigation andverification. Such theories, he argues, threaten our idea of human communi-cation, which we take to be possible between people of different cultures andacross periods of time during which methods of investigation change dramati-cally. Putnam rejects any reading of Wittgenstein which takes him to make aclose tie between meaning and method of verification. What strands in Wittgen-stein’s thought appear to lend support to such a reading? Can we do justice tothe role which method of verification does have for Wittgenstein while retainingour hold on the idea that communication between people is possible despitesubstantial differences in methods of verification and investigation?

Thus it is as if the proof did not determine the sense of theproposition proved ; and yet as if it did determine it.But isn’t it like that with any verification of any proposition?1

I

In this paper I consider a case invented by Hilary Putnam in thecourse of his long-running philosophical debate with Richard

Rorty.2

Back in the seventeenth century, strange bones have been dugup at Whoozie, and someone wonders how old the bones are.We now know that they are over a million years old; we haveused twentieth-century techniques to establish their age. InNewton’s time there were no such techniques. But supposesomeone to have speculated about the age of the bones. Putnamsays that if this person had entertained the idea that the bones

1. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford, 1978),pp. 312–313.

2. H. Putnam, ‘Newton in His Time and Ours: Will the Real Richard Rorty PleaseStand Up?’, unpublished. I refer to this article as NTO.

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were a million years old he would have been right, and if hehad rejected it as absurd, he would have been wrong. (SinceI refer to this speculator many times, I have given him a name:Leibniz.)

Putnam was responding to a suggestion by Rorty that weshould redefine ‘true’ to ‘chime with’ Heidegger’s claim thatNewton’s laws became true through Newton’s work, and thatbefore Newton’s discovery they were neither true nor false.3 Indeveloping Heidegger’s point, Rorty had said that, if the Latinsentence which Newton used in the seventeenth century to statethe principle of inertia had been uttered by someone in the tenthcentury, it would not then have been a truth-value candidate. Itbecame a candidate for being true or false when there developeda set of coherent and useful practices within which there couldbe embedded uses of that sentence to make assertions.4 So, if wefollow Rorty’s recommendation, we should say that the sentence‘The bones found at Whoozie are a million years old’ became acandidate for being true or false during the twentieth century;and it seems then that we should reject Putnam’s claim that, ifLeibniz had said that the bones were a million years old, he gotsomething right.

Putnam recognizes that there is a reply that Rorty might make.If we say of the sentence ‘The bones at Whoozie are a millionyears old’, that it did not become true in the twentieth centurybut was true even back in Leibniz’s time, we are merely paying

3. R. Rorty, ‘Were Newton’s Laws True Before Newton?’, unpublished manuscriptof 8y7y87. For a recent statement of related views, see Rorty, Truth and Progress(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 136–137; for a recent statement of Rorty’s view of what is atstake in the debate with Putnam, see ‘Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace’,Truth and Progress, pp. 43–62. The disagreement with which I am concerned in thepresent essay is related closely to Rorty’s remark there (p. 60) that he can give nocontent to the idea of non-local correctness of assertion, without falling back intosome form of metaphysical realism. Putnam has denied, throughout the debate, thatthe idea of non-local correctness makes sense only if we accept metaphysical realism;hence his claim that the seventeenth century speculator was right involves, as he seesit, no going back on his rejection of metaphysical realism. The material in NTOmakes explicit the tie between the debate with Rorty and questions about Witt-genstein and verificationism. See also Putnam’s discussion of Wittgenstein and verifi-cationism, in ‘The Face of Cognition’, the third of his Dewey Lectures, in Journal ofPhilosophy, 111: 488–517 (1994).

4. Rorty modifies a first, and relatively simple, statement of his view to allow fortranslations, but he retains the idea that Newton’s sentence, uttered in the tenthcentury, would not at that point have been a truth-value candidate.

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a post-Leibnizian compliment to ourselves. But this, Putnamargues, will not do. He is concerned not just with ourtwentieth-century talk about the sentence but also with whatit means for people to communicate with others, even acrossperiods of time in which techniques of investigation changedramatically. The remark Putnam wants to make about Leib-niz, that he was right about the age of the bones, is thenmeant to go further than a mere compliment to Leibniz’ssentence (understood our way).5 What Leibniz thought,guessed, is what we now know to be so. (One might say thathis guess and our knowledge meet.)

II

How does Wittgenstein come in? Putnam explains his responseto Rorty in part by a contrast between Wittgenstein’s views andthose that were ascribed to Wittgenstein by Norman Malcolm.As Malcolm read him, Wittgenstein closely identified meaningwith use in a language-game, and thought of language-gamesas closed bodies of practices. On that sort of reading, every timea new way of verifying a sentence is invented, the sentencechanges in meaning. So Wittgenstein is read as an extremeverificationist.

From the Malcolmian point of view, the sentence ‘Thesebones are at least a million years old’ could not have beenused in the seventeenth century to make the statement that wemake when we use those words today (see NTO, p. 3). Therewere then no practices of investigation within which the sen-tence was embedded. No seventeenth-century language-game,including those in which the dates of past events were deter-mined and the ages of different objects established, had a routeto any sentence like the one about the bones being a millionyears old. Since, in our use of the sentence, we are playingquite a different language-game from any that existed in the

5. It is meant to be incompatible with the idea that Leibniz’s sentence, so far as it isa truth-value candidate, is so only in that we can use it (or a translation of it) tomake an assertion.

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seventeenth century, the sentence now has a different meaning.6

That argument, Putnam says, rests on a tired pseudo-Witt-gensteinian philosophy of language; Wittgenstein himself did notthink that a difference in use, in techniques of investigation,implies that there must be a corresponding difference in meaning.

Putnam uses the contrast between Wittgenstein’s views as heunderstands them and tired pseudo-Wittgensteinian philosophyof language to formulate his question to Rorty. If Rorty is nottrying to return us to something like tired pseudo-Wittgenstein-ianism, if he is willing to allow meaning to be shared by peoplewho do not necessarily share techniques of investigation, thenwhat exactly can be the force of Rorty’s recommendation thatwe treat Newton’s laws as becoming candidates for having atruth-value only through the work of Galileo and Newton? Therecommendation would be tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism if itleads us to deny that we might agree with Leibniz about thebones, and leaves us instead merely taking Leibniz’s sentence andsticking on to it an honorific label of ‘true’ or ‘correct’ or ‘right’.Tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism would leave us and Leibnizspeaking ‘incommensurable’ languages. But if Rorty is not a tiredWittgensteinian, then he will allow that sentences do not changein meaning with every change in technique of investigation. Hewill allow that we do not just recognize the seventeenth-centurysentence as verbally coinciding with a sentence we call true; weunderstand it—uttered then—just as we understand it utteredtoday. Its truth-conditions have not changed; the change ismerely that we now know that it was true. How does Rorty stop

6. There is a slight complication in the argument. I earlier spoke of Leibniz as specu-lating. That is, the sentence as he uses it expresses a conjecture or bet rather than astatement that something is so. In giving the Malcolmian view, I follow Putnam inspeaking of the statement made in the seventeenth century by a use of the sentenceabout the age of the bones. If someone using the sentence in the seventeenth centurywere to be stating, as opposed to guessing, that the bones were a million years old,more conditions would need to be filled in. Perhaps the person takes himself to havebeen told the age of the bones by God in a dream; and so he now asserts ‘They area million years old’. The word ‘statement’ can be used in a more general way to covera wide class of uses of indicative sentences, or a wide class of such sentences them-selves. But the class in question can perhaps be delimited only through the use ofnotions, like ‘truth-value candidate’, that are at issue in the debate between Putnamand Rorty. These problems about statement-making can be avoided; the point Put-nam needs is simply that a conjecture made in the seventeenth century would havebeen correct. The issues about communication, central for Putnam, still arise, andcan be formulated entirely in terms of the idea that Leibniz entertained or in termsof the question that he asked himself about the age of the bones.


short of saying that, if he is not a tired pseudo-Wittgensteinian?And what can be meant by saying that the sentence was not thena truth-value candidate, if it is not meant to deny that under-standing of the situation?

III

Was Wittgenstein a tired Wittgensteinian? That is the questionto which I now turn, because it may help us to understand thequestions about meaning and understanding raised by Putnam.In this section I discuss Putnam’s reasons for denying that Witt-genstein was a tired Wittgensteinian.7

Putnam appeals to one of Wittgenstein’s lectures on belief 8 asa basis for saying that Wittgenstein did not identify every differ-ence in the use of a word with a difference in meaning. The rel-evant passage in the lecture is a striking one, and not altogetherstraightforward. Of two people whose use of words in connectionwith the Last Judgment is very different, Wittgenstein says firstthat you might express that difference by saying that one of themmeans something altogether different from the other; and he thensays that the difference might not show up in any explanation ofthe meaning. The explanation of the meaning would not, that is,be an explanation that was tied to one use rather than the other.Putnam reads this passage as one in which the first remark (theone that ‘you’ supposedly might make, about the two people notmeaning the same) is made by an interlocutor, who is thenreminded by Wittgenstein speaking in his own voice that that isnot how we use the word ‘meaning’: the explanation of meaningis the same; so (this is the implication Putnam sees) we wouldsay that the two people do mean the same.

The lecture as a whole suggests a somewhat different reading.Wittgenstein argues that our ordinary ways of talking aboutmeaning and understanding are no help to us in the kinds of

7. My account of Putnam’s reading of Wittgenstein draws on his ‘Wittgenstein onReligious Belief ’, in On Community, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: Indiana,1991), pp. 56–75; see especially pp. 63–64; a version of this material appears in Put-nam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992), pp. 134–157.

8. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and ReligiousBelief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford, 1966), pp. 53–59.

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cases being discussed in the lecture.9 He does not come down infavour of saying either that the two imagined speakers do or thatthey do not mean the same, just as, later in the lecture, he doesnot come down in favour of saying (in a similar case) either thattwo speakers do or that they do not understand one another. Isuggest that, in the background of the passage to which Putnamrefers, there is an important feature of the use of manyexpressions, namely, that if we are given an explanation of mean-ing, we go on to use the expression in much the same ways; wedo not ride off in different directions. In the case Wittgenstein isdescribing, that normal response to the explanation of meaningis absent. And that is why we have the two contrasting reactionsto the case: an inclination to say, if we think about the greatdifference in use, that the two people do not mean the same, andan inclination to say, if we note that there are not here two differ-ent explanations of meaning, that the meaning is the same.

In a later lecture of the series,10 Wittgenstein spoke about theword ‘death’ and what it means to have an idea of death. Whatis commonly called ‘having an idea’ has a reference to the tech-nique of using the word. It is a public word, tied to a wholetechnique. If someone says that he has his own idea of death, andit is not tied to the public technique, Wittgenstein says that wemight ask with what right he calls it an idea of death. Whatconnection has it with our game? Here, and earlier in this lecture,Wittgenstein appears to be questioning whether we can speak ofunderstanding a word or sentence when we detach the supposedunderstanding from the familiar techniques of our language.

I do not think that these lectures of Wittgenstein’s on beliefprovide clear answers to the question whether or how far or inwhat sorts of context Wittgenstein rejected the Malcolmian viewof language. The lectures are not easy to interpret; and they dealwith cases of religious language, which might well be thought todiffer significantly from the kinds of case at issue between Rortyand Putnam. That is, even if we suppose that the lectures are to

9. This point is indeed made clear by Putnam in ‘Wittgenstein on Religious Belief ’,p. 64. But he does not use it to question, as I should, the reading of the passage aboutdifference in meaning.

10. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, pp. 65–72.


be read as Putnam reads them, they settle at most that Witt-genstein did not then simply identify difference in meaning withdifference in use in all cases. It would still be possible that hetook such an identification to be helpful for a great range ofcases. Putnam notes that his reading of the lectures can be seento be connected with Philosophical Investigations §43, whereWittgenstein says that, for a large class of cases—though not forall—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be definedthus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Whether ornot the use of words in religion provides some of the exceptionsWittgenstein had in mind, there would still be a question aboutwords like ‘gold’ and ‘water’, expressions like ‘how old this is’,and so on. Are such cases meant to be included in the large classof cases in which meaning can be explained as use in the lan-guage? If so, would it then follow, as it might seem to, that ashift in the use of such an expression would be a shift in itsmeaning? Was Wittgenstein a tired Wittgensteinian with respectto those cases?

IV

I shall turn now to an earlier lecture of Wittgenstein’s, whichseems quite verificationist in character. He described a case inwhich there are two chairs which look exactly the same. They aretaken out of your sight and then returned; you are then asked‘Is this the chair on which you sat?’ He says of the question thatin those circumstances it would have no answer, and that itwould have no sense.11 He invited his audience to compare thatcase with the case of two rivers which flow into each other.Which river is it that goes on?

If a brook flows into the Danube, we should be inclined to say itis the Danube that goes on and not the brook. But suppose tworivers join and go on with a new name, then we can say: two havedisappeared and one has no source! You can imagine people whowould say in such cases ‘Well, it is either the same river or it isnot, even though we cannot discover this’. This would be nonsense.

11. Lecture of 18th November 1935. All references to this lecture are to MargaretMacdonald’s notes to it (unpublished), relevant sections of which are included in theAppendix to this paper.

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The point of the comparison is that, in the case of the chairs, asin the case of the rivers, if there is no criterion for having thesame such-and-such, there is no sense in the question whether wehave the same one. The comparison may strike one as utterlyunconvincing. Consider an objection (A. D. Woozley’s) toWittgenstein’s remark about the chair:

It is ridiculous to say that, since we have no way of telling whetherthis is the same chair, there is no sense in asking whether it is. Forwe may go on to try to find a way of telling (e.g., training dogscapable of sniffing out which is the chair that was sat in by some-one, or developing techniques for microscopic examination of theupholstery). We understand perfectly well what it is we are tryingto find a way to determine; otherwise we could not engage in theseattempts to develop techniques for finding out which was the chairyou sat in. It is precisely our understanding of the question ‘Whichis the chair you sat in?’ that guides us in these attempts. So, to saythat the question makes no sense is absurd.12

I shall not try to defend Wittgenstein’s remark about thechairs. I shall instead use it to lead into a discussion of an elementin Wittgenstein’s thinking which is in a sense verificationist (inwhat sense exactly needs to be made clear). We tend to thinkthat verificationism is what the logical positivists held; and so theidea that there is a verficationist element in Wittgenstein lookslike the idea that his views can to some degree be identified withtheirs. That is not what I am claiming, and perhaps it is best tospeak of a ‘verificationist’ element in his thought. There areindeed similarities between some of Wittgenstein’s remarks dur-ing the 1930s and familiar expressions, by logical positivists, oftheir views.13 Even if we consider just those remarks of Wittgen-stein’s, there are important differences in both the ideasexpressed and the larger philosophical aims.14 More important

12. The objection was made in conversation; the formulation of the objection is mine.

13. There is a question how far the 1930s remarks make explicit ideas which arealready present in the Tractatus. One might ask, for example, how far the Tractatusis committed to the idea that ‘He is angry’ means roughly ‘The behaviour of thatbody is similar to the behaviour of this (my) body when there is anger’. See NormanMalcolm, Wittgensteinian Themes (Ithaca, 1995), pp. 88–89; cf. also my ‘DoesBismarck Have a Beetle in His Box? The Private Language Argument in the Tracta-tus’, in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read, forthcoming.

14. See, for example, the conversation with Friedrich Waismann, 9th December 1931,in Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed B. McGuinness, trans. J. Schulteand B. McGuinness (Oxford, 1979), pp. 182–186.


still, we need to distinguish between those, as we might say, ‘veri-ficationist’ ideas in Wittgenstein’s writings of that period, andsomething else, which might also be regarded as a kind of ‘verifi-cationist element’ in his thought. What the ‘something else’ is Ihope to make clear; it may seem to push us towards or into somefamiliar form of verificationism or anti-realism, but should notbe taken to do so. So, I shall be trying to show what a ‘verifi-cationist element’ in philosophical thought can be, which is notidentifiable either with the verificationism of the positivists orwith the ‘verificationism’ of remarks like that about the chair.

In Sections V and VI, I consider a reply, open to Wittgenstein,to Woozley’s objection. By a reply, I do not mean a defence ofthe original remark about the chairs but a response, drawing onthings Wittgenstein says elsewhere, to the ideas expressed inWoozley’s objection.

V

Suppose Wittgenstein asks us to consider two sentences:

(1) ‘I wonder whether this is the same chair as the one you satin yesterday’. (No one knows of any way of distinguishingit from the similar chair next to it.)

(2) ‘I wonder whether Hannibal sneezed six times while cross-ing the Alps’. (I have no idea what it would be like to tryto find a way to tell how many times this happened.)

In reply to the Woozley point that the question about the chairmust make sense, because our understanding of it guides ourattempt to find a technique for answering it, Wittgenstein mightsay that it is the very fact that we do turn to such ways of lookingfor an answer as those mentioned (dogs and microscopic tech-niques) that is the question’s having sense. The question aboutHannibal is different from the question about the chair preciselyin that it has no location within our activities of looking-for-ways-of-establishing-things. The imaginary Wittgensteinian replycontinues: We should not go on to say ‘And therefore the ques-tion about Hannibal is meaningless’, as if that were some furtherpoint, a conclusion to be drawn. It is rather that the two ques-tions are different in the respect just pointed out, and that is a

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respect to which we may give insufficient attention. We want todraw a conclusion about meaningfulness after we are clear aboutthe difference in use. But, if we say that the first question hassense and the second does not, we are merely drawing attentionto the difference.

It is not essential to this reply that we say that the secondsentence has no sense. Here is another way of putting the reply(based on material in the 1935 series of lectures quoted in SectionIV).

If someone says that we might wonder whether Hannibalsneezed exactly six times while crossing the Alps, what such won-dering consists in is his saying ‘I wonder whether Hannibalsneezed exactly six times while crossing the Alps’, and perhapsalso having some state of mind; whereas, if someone says ‘I won-der whether this is the chair you sat in yesterday’, wondering inthis case does not consist only in a state of mind and in saying‘I wonder...’ etc. I might get in touch with a dog trainer whospecializes in the use of dogs in forensic investigations. Our talkabout which chair you sat in is then connected with practices inwhich scent discrimination by dogs is accepted as showing thatone object rather than another was touched by a particular per-son. Whether or not I find a way of telling, there is much that Ido in this case besides saying ‘I wonder’.

VI

We should look further at that reply. What implications has itfor the question whether every change in our techniques of inves-tigation, every new test for the presence of something, results ina change in the meaning of our words? Putnam argues that suchchanges in tests and techniques of enquiry do not appear to usto change the meaning of our words. If we develop a new chemi-cal test for water, we still take ourselves to mean the same as weearlier did by the sentence ‘The stuff in this glass is water’ (NTO,p. 3).

The Wittgensteinian reply that I imagined need have no quar-rel with that phenomenology, with what we are inclined to say.But we should note that the cases in which we may be inclinedto say that the sense of some sentence is unchanged differ signifi-cantly among each other. We shall naturally be inclined to say


that sense is unchanged when we keep on applying our words onthe basis of the same techniques we have been using; but some-times we may be inclined to say that sense is unchanged althoughwe now are applying terms on the basis of newly developed tech-niques. Attention to phenomenology, to what we are inclined tosay, may direct our attention away from such differences betweenthe cases.15 That is not an argument that, whenever we develop anew test, meaning does change. The philosophical aim of drawingattention to the facts here (the fact that the phenomenologicalinclination to say ‘no change in sense’ can be present when thereis a change in how words are applied and present also in othercases in which there is no such change) is to help break the holdof philosophical puzzlement concerning whether the sense has orhas not changed. Say what you like; it may be that you will notwant to go on saying that sense is unchanged when techniquesof investigation change. In fact I think that we may well want togo on saying (in many of the cases in which there is change intechniques) that sense has not changed, for reasons that I shallcome to.

We need first to look at a different matter: the inadequacy ofthe reply I imagined Wittgenstein giving. The trouble with it isnot so much what it says as what it leaves out. It does not makeclear what in Wittgenstein’s thought leads towards exactly thoseviews that Putnam thinks of as tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism.What reasons did Wittgenstein have for saying in many contextsand over many years such things as that sense depends onmethods of enquiry, and that, where we have no idea how wewould conduct an enquiry, we may indeed say the words ‘I won-der whether p’, but the question whether it is the case that p isnonsense or empty? And the reply fails to push far enough thereasons, which also surface in Wittgenstein’s writings, for notsaying that sense depends on methods of enquiry.

15. There are, I think, substantial differences between Wittgenstein and some philos-ophers influenced by him, including John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, over thesignificance of what the latter refer to as phenomenology. Thus, for example,McDowell accepts John Mackie’s description of the phenomenology of our experi-ence of value, that it ‘presents itself as a matter of sensitivity to aspects of the world’Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998), p. 131. Remarks of thatsort (in the context of mathematics) are spoken of by Wittgenstein as the ‘raw mater-ial’ of philosophy, something for philosophical treatment (Philosophical Investi-gations, §254). But I shall not here do more than note this disagreement.

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These problems come up for Wittgenstein in a variety offorms. The things we wonder about may be empirical, likewhether the chair you sat in was that chair there or this similarone. Or they may be mathematical: before there was a proof thatthere was no greatest prime number, we might have wonderedhow many prime numbers there were. We may nowadays wonderwhether every even number is the sum of two primes. The ten-sions within Wittgenstein’s thought about the mathematical casesare similar to those in his thought about the empirical cases (asis clear in the epigraph to this paper). In Section VII, I turnto the mathematical cases, and argue further that my imaginedWittgensteinian reply to Woozley does not go far enough.

VII

Wittgenstein said repeatedly that the sense of what is proved inmathematics is given by the proof. This has, as he recognized, anapparently paradoxical consequence. If I ask, before there is aproof, whether all even numbers are the sum of two primes, thenwhen the proof is given what it proves is not that a certain answerto my original question is correct. That is, when (before I had aproof) I said ‘I wonder whether p’, my sentence ‘p’ does notmean what the sentence ‘p’ at the end of the proof means. There’sincommensurability for you! That the meaning of a theorem isgiven by the proof is stated most uncompromisingly by Witt-genstein during the early 1930s (see, e.g., Philosophical Remarks,pp. 188–189), but he continued to express the view long afterthat. What there is to be said on the opposite side is brought outclearly by Wittgenstein in a discussion of Fermat’s last theorem.16

Now isn’t it absurd to say that one doesn’t understand the senseof Fermat’s last theorem?—Well, one might reply: the mathema-ticians are not completely blank and helpless when they are con-fronted by this proposition. After all, they try certain methods ofproving it; and, so far as they try methods, so far do they under-stand the proposition.—But is that correct? Don’t they understandit just as completely as one can possibly understand it?

16. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford, 1978). The passage(pp. 314–315) comes from some time between 1941 and 1944. I have altered the punc-tuation of one of the quoted remarks to make it correspond more closely to theGerman.


Some further remarks from the same context are also helpfulhere:

But, if I am to know what a proposition like Fermat’s last theoremsays, must I not know what the criterion is, for the proposition tobe true? And I am of course acquainted with criteria for the truthof similar propositions, but not with any criterion for the truth ofthis proposition.

‘Understanding’: a vague concept!...

‘I am going to shew you how there are infinitely many prime num-bers’ presupposes a condition in which the proposition that thereare infinitely many prime numbers had no, or only the vaguest,meaning. It might have been merely a joke to him, or a paradox.

In those remarks we can see that the problems about under-standing a mathematical proposition before we have a proof arequite similar to the problems about talk of the age of the bonesat Whoozie, before we have any method of dating the bones.17

The passage also suggests that my proposed Wittgensteinianreply to Woozley’s argument does not go far enough. To askwhether mathematicians do not understand Fermat’s propositionas completely as one can possibly understand it (i.e., as com-pletely as they will if they discover a proof), is to call into ques-tion the sort of approach that says that what ‘understanding it’comes to can be seen in what mathematicians do, and that whatthey now do is try various methods of proving it. That is differentfrom what they will do with it once there have been developmentsin mathematics (perhaps including unforeseeable shifts in whatare recognized as techniques of proof), and they come to havewhat they recognize as a proof.

(I cannot here discuss the question whether we should identifyany of the remarks in the passage quoted with a Wittgensteinian

17. An important remark of Wittgenstein’s concerns the analogy between ‘math-ematical propositions’ and the other things we call propositions: the analogy dependson treating method of verification (in the case of an experiential proposition) as anal-ogous to method of checking truth (in the case of a mathematical proposition). SeePhilosophical Grammar, p. 366. The implication is that there is then an analogybetween the problems concerning empirical propositions with no method of verifi-cation and problems concerning unproved mathematical propositions, and an anal-ogy between the effect of a new method of verification on the meaning of an empiricalproposition and the effect of a new method of proof on the meaning of a mathemat-ical proposition.

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‘interlocutor’. Whether or not we take this or that point in thepassage to be made in Wittgenstein’s own voice, the remarksindicate the complexity which he recognized the problems aboutmeaning and proof to have.)

VIII

Why did Wittgenstein tie the sense of empirical questions tomethods of discovery, and the sense of mathematical prop-ositions to proofs? His reasons are closely connected to his ideasabout grammar. It is neither necessary nor possible for me togive a full account of how he uses that term; one way he uses itis in exploring the significance of departures from our ways ofusing words. Suppose there were people whose body of practicesof dating things overlapped but in some ways differed from ours.Would they be getting the dates of things wrong, or not exactlydating things but (let us say) snating them? The differencebetween them and us is in the grammar of the expressions used:that is, ‘grammar’ is Wittgenstein’s term for the characterizingfeatures of people’s ways of using an expression, including theirmethods of investigation.18 For the relation between methods ofverification and grammar, see Philosophical Investigations §353:the specification of how we verify a proposition is ‘a contributionto the grammar of the proposition’. Wittgenstein also treats theproof of a mathematical proposition as a contribution to itsgrammar. Think of how the proof that there is no greatest primenumber provides us with a method that we did not have beforefor upsetting any claim that such-and-such is the greatest prime,and in that way changes the available ways of talking. Proofs,then, and new methods of empirical investigation, in that theyalter the ways we establish what is the case, the ways we call intoquestion various sorts of claim, are contributions to the activitiesof using language; they belong (that is) to grammar.

In the 1935 lectures that I quoted earlier, Wittgenstein dis-cussed the ‘arbitrariness of grammar’, though he notes that thatlabel is misleading. He argues that, if we arrange grammar differ-ently, we should not be getting wrong the nature of what we aretalking about; rather, we should be talking about something else.

18. What a ‘characterizing feature’ is is vague; see, e.g., PI §§562–568.


(See also Zettel §320, and Philosophical Investigations §§371 and373.) How we arrange grammar may be practically convenientor inconvenient, but it is not answerable to the nature of thethings we speak about (because not separable from what thingswe are speaking about). In the case of empirical questions, itbelongs to the grammar of a question what techniques there arefor settling such matters. Thus, in a significant sense, what it isabout which we are asking (the ‘age of the bones at Whoozie’) isdependent on techniques of enquiry, on the ways we do settlesuch questions.

We can now see that the Woozley argument concerns the heartof the issue. Woozley said that when we have a question but noway of answering it, what guides our search for a method andour judgment that we have found an appropriate method is ourunderstanding of the question, our grasp of what it is we aretrying to find out. And so, if methods of investigation belong towhat Wittgenstein speaks of as grammar, then (on the Woozleyargument) our grasp of what it is we are trying to find out prop-erly guides us in fixing grammar. That, then, is a clear rejectionof the idea that grammar fixes what we are talking about.

The relation between the Woozley argument and Wittgen-stein’s fundamental ideas can also be seen in Roger White’s‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle’.19 White discusses the conse-quences of Wittgenstein’s view that it is the proof of a mathe-matical proposition that shows us the meaning of theproved proposition. Writing before the publication in Englishof the passages I quoted from Remarks on the Foundations ofMathematics, and before the availability of a proof of Fermat’slast theorem, he argues in more detail just what is argued in thefirst quoted paragraph: that we understand the theorem perfectlywell. He then gives an argument parallel to Woozley’s: he saysthat it is ‘difficult to give a characterisation of the centuries ofresearch devoted to the attempt to prove or disprove thisTheorem on the supposition that the mathematicians wereexploring a thesis whose sense they did not understand perfectlywell’. We ought not to think that there is some philosophicaldoubt about whether we can believe Fermat’s theorem now.

19. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 51 (1977), pp. 169–186; seeespecially pp. 171–173.

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IX

Where are we? Putnam’s idea was that, if Leibniz had thoughtthat the bones at Whoozie were a million years old, he wouldhave been right; and he also argued that it takes a crude pseudo-Wittgensteinianism to deny it. I have been trying to show thekinds of consideration that led Wittgenstein to tie meaning tomethods of investigation. These considerations may indeed seemto support the most radical anti-realist readings of Wittgenstein.I have in mind Crispin Wright’s reading of Wittgenstein, and hisclaim that Wittgenstein’s arguments undercut the idea we have offacts independent of our actual investigations. On a Malcolmianreading what is meant by ‘These bones are at least a million yearsold’ is settled only when we have some means of establishing theage of the bones. The sentence has no meaning until then. Onthe more radical anti-realist reading, the truth-conditions of‘These bones are at least a million years old’ are not settled evenwhen we have techniques for investigating such matters, becauseit is not yet settled how we shall apply those techniques to theparticular case of these bones. What counts as applying thosetechniques in the same way as we have been doing depends onwhat we accept, when the investigation is carried out, as applyingthem in the same way. Until we have actually carried out theinvestigation, what ‘aspects of the world’ count as showing oursentence about the bones to be true or false is undetermined.20

20. See Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics (London, 1980),p. 196; also chap. XI. I shall not here discuss Wright’s reading of Wittgenstein or itsmore recent development. Any criticism of the 1980 reading should, however, takeseriously the textual support it can be given. One cannot argue against it that thereading misses the significance of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the internal relationbetween a rule and its application to a particular case. Wittgenstein himself rejectedthe philosophical attempt to appeal to internal relations to explain what counts asapplying the rule properly. He argued that, after we have introduced the use of ‘red’by an ostensive definition, we could go on to use the word, not (as we do) for manydifferent shades of red, but for top C and the smell of lavender. No internal relationstands in the way of doing so; for if we did call such things red, we should say thatthey are related to the earlier things we called red by the internal relation of ‘beingsimilar in colour’. To say that we call blood and strawberries red, after we have giventhe ostensive definition, because there is an internal relation between the things wecall red is, he said, to give another rule of grammar for ‘red’. What Wittgenstein madeclear (in a lecture on 21st January 1936, part of which is included in the Appendix tothis paper), is that one cannot reply to a reading like Wright’s by the arguments ofG. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker in Scepticism, Rules and Language (Oxford, 1984);he deals specifically with the central point they make on p. 96.


What then are the consequences of this anti-realist reading forthe sameness of beliefs at different times? If, at any time prior tothe actual dating of the bones, you say ‘I believe that the bonesare a million years old’, the most your belief could come to, itseems, is the belief that, when it is fixed what counts as makingthe sentence ‘The bones are a million years old’ true, the sentencewill turn out to express something true. But that is not what webelieve afterwards. (Compare Wittgenstein’s own remarks abouthaving a hunch that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct. He saysthat, since we can extend mathematics so that the conjecturecomes out true, or extend mathematics so that it does not, havinga hunch that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct is having a hunchthat mathematics will be extended so that the conjecture will besaid to be right.21)

I have tried to show that Wittgenstein’s apparent ‘verifi-cationism’ is a matter neither of bad readings imposed on thetexts nor of a view that he took for a few years and left behindas a kind of philosophical temptation of which he had beencured. A ‘verificationist’ element within his thought is tied to hisideas about grammar: grammar as showing what we are talkingabout;22 and the view that grammar shows what we are talking

21. Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 137; see also Philosophical Gram-mar, p. 161. See also the very interesting discussion in Wittgenstein’s lecture on 18thNovember 1946 of the difference between two language-games in which there mightbe said to be conjectures about what someone was thinking. In one game we formconjectures and we then ask the person what he thought; what is said in this gamehas important practical consequences of various sorts. There is another sort of gamein which we might say such things as ‘Queen Victoria may have thought so-and-soas she lay dying’. Is this guessing at what she thought? We might call it guessing atwhat she thought, Wittgenstein says, but we should note that this is a different useof ‘guess’, a different game. (See Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology,1946–47, ed. P. T. Geach (Hemel Hempstead, 1988), p. 274.)

22. It is also connected, in ways I shall not discuss, with his treatment of rules. Myreading of Wittgenstein on the issue of verificationism is different not only from thatof Putnam, but also from that of Peter Winch in Simone Weil: ‘The Just Balance’(Cambridge, 1989). Winch argues that, although Wittgenstein was concerned withthe problems that preoccupied the logical positivists, there is no ‘close kinship’between his view and theirs. But ‘close kinship’ and mere concern with the sameproblems are not the only possibilities. As I read Wittgenstein’s 1935 lectures, hethought it was useful (in connection with problems about personal experience andthe sameness of after-images) to say that a would-be empirical sentence that couldnot be verified had no sense. I should agree with Winch that this should not be readas verificationism of the sort held by the positivists. But I think that there needbe nothing misleading in noting it as an expression of a verificationist element inWittgenstein’s approach to various problems.

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about is not given up after the 1930s. (A good example from wellafter the 1930s can be found in Geach’s notes to Wittgenstein’slectures of 1946–7. Wittgenstein said of describing oneself asremembering having done a calculation in one’s head, that thisuse of the past tense, when someone first comes up with it, ‘is anew use, like the use of the past tense about dreams’, and headded ‘What we mean by memory depends on how the memoryis checked’. This is a new language-game, he said, with a newsense of memory.23)

Putnam is right that Wittgenstein is not properly read as averificationist; but he does not (I think) see how far the ‘verifi-cationism’ is internal to Wittgenstein’s thinking. It is not merelya philosophical temptation, although some modes of expressingit are. And so the reply (within the context of Wittgenstein’s phil-osophy) to the voice of verificationism is complex, and is notmerely a correction of philosophically confused expressions ofverificationism (as Putnam seems to suggest in ‘Wittgenstein onReligious Belief ’.24) I explore these matters further in SectionsX–XII, but I want first to note the relation between my readingof Wittgenstein and two remarks of his already quoted: the epi-graph to this paper, and §353 of the Investigations. The tworemarks in different ways bring out both the importance of thetie between what is meant by a sentence and what justifiesasserting it and the importance of not treating that tie as thebasis for a reductive identification of meaning with method ofverification or with assertability conditions.25

X

It will be useful here to look at another example, resemblingthose we considered earlier. Suppose that we have a methoddetermining whether dogs dream or not. Even if we actually hadsuch a method, it would not determine the content of their

23. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, pp. 30 and 148.

24. See pp. 63–64, the passage discussed in Section III above.

25. I am indebted to James Conant for suggestions about my arguments here. Hehas also emphasized the significance of the first sentence of §353, which I have notquoted earlier: ‘The question about the method and possibility of verification of aproposition is only a particular form of the question ‘‘How do you mean that?’’ ’. Itis a form of that question but only a particular form.


dreams. Yet it seems possible, does it not, that they should dreamabout chasing rabbits, or even about being chased by giant rab-bits? If, in a story told from a dog’s point of view, we were toldof such dreams, we should certainly not think that the sentenceswe were reading were meaningless.26 Now take this sentence: ‘Ifsomeone believes that his dog has been dreaming about chasingsquirrels, then either he is right or he is wrong, whether or no wehave a way of telling’.

How might Wittgenstein respond to someone who said that?27

He might say that, when we talk in that ‘either... or’ way, itsounds as if we are asserting that there are two alternatives: theperson who believes that dogs dream about squirrels believesrightly, or he believes wrongly. But what we are doing is insistingon a particular use of ‘believes’. If we are going to say of thisperson ‘He believes this about dogs’, that way of talking bringswith it (in the use we are insisting on) talk of believing rightly orwrongly. But we are not advancing beyond the fact that we wantto use ‘believe that’ in this context.

(There are other ways of using ‘believe that’. In discussingrelated issues, Rorty uses the example ‘Theseus was the son ofPoseidon, not of Zeus’. If we say of someone that he believesthat Theseus was the son of Poseidon, that use of ‘believe’ doesnot bring with it ‘he believes rightly or he believes wrongly’.28)

We are willing to say of someone: he believes dogs dream thatsort of thing. We use ‘believe’ in that sort of context, althoughwe have no way of investigating the question. If he says ‘I believeetc.’ we would not say that he had merely uttered a sentence thatwill some day be usable to express a belief, nor do we think thatthe person believes merely that when it is fixed what ‘aspects of

26. See, for example, Don Marquis, ‘Blood Will Tell’, in Treasury of Great DogStories (New York, 1990), ed. Roger Caras, pp. 422–430, at p. 428. See also Wittgen-stein’s remarks in the lecture referred to in note 21 above, about Lytton Strachey’sdescription of the dying thoughts of Queen Victoria. Wittgenstein denied that Strach-ey’s description was meaningless because of its unverifiability. It has its meaningthrough its connection with the public language-game of description of people’sthoughts. See Geach, Mental Acts (London, 1957), p. 3; cf. also the descriptions ofthat lecture in Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–47, pp. 32,152, 274.

27. The response I imagine is based on Wittgenstein’s discussion of the Michelson–Morley experiment in the lecture of 18th November 1935, included in the Appendix.

28. For a discussion of these issues, see John McDowell, ‘On the Sense and Referenceof a Proper Name’, Mind 86: 159–185 (1977), especially §8.

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the world’ establish the truth or falsity of the sentence, it willturn out to be a true sentence. Again, and similarly, we do use‘believe that’ this way: if the story Putnam told us were true, thensomeone in the seventeenth century did believe that the bones atWhoozie were a million years old. We are, that is, willing totalk about people, whose lives differ from ours in lacking manytechniques of investigation important for us, as believing whatwe do. And when, in philosophy, we discuss this willingness wedo not get beyond it, to anything else which supports it, althoughwe may appear to do so.

That willingness to ascribe the same beliefs as ours to peoplewhose lives with words (including the words they use in express-ing what we take to be beliefs which are the same as ours), arein some respects very different from our lives with words (includ-ing in particular the words we use in expressing the beliefs wetake to be the same as theirs): that willingness is a striking andsignificant human phenomenon. It is one of the characteristicfeatures of our relation to the thought of other people.

We can connect it with the case of translation. When Putnamdiscusses Malcolm’s understanding of Wittgenstein, he objectsthat the view Malcolm ascribes to Wittgenstein forces us to saythat the word ‘water’, used in a novel or letter written in 1700,does not mean what the word means today, because our tech-niques for telling whether something is water have changed. Andso it would follow that we should not translate the word ‘water’used in 1700 into present-day English as ‘water’. Against this,Putnam protests that Wittgenstein quite sensibly would allowthere to be sameness of meaning despite differences in methodsof verification, and so would not be committed to the impossi-bility of such translations. Wittgenstein as I read him might drawour attention to the phenomenon here, our simply going aheadand taking those people’s word ‘water’ as ours, our simple will-ingness to ‘translate’ their word ‘water’ by ‘water’. This is notmade correct by a word’s meaning being independent of tech-niques of investigation. Rather, seventeenth-century life with theword ‘water’ is in many ways very like ours; in the presence ofthe many similarities and the limited differences, what we do inmost of the contexts in which we want to talk about their thoughtis connect it with ours, in that we treat their word in just thesame way we treat the word in the mouth of one of ourcontemporaries.


When Putnam said that, if a seventeenth-century person hadentertained the idea that the bones at Whoozie were a millionyears old, he would have been right, he says that there is a picturewe have: a picture ‘which has as much weight in our lives as theidea that there are people out there, in the past, and in othercultures in the present, with whom we can communicate’. Suchpictures are intrinsic to the practices which they inform and sup-port. The suggestion there is that we see others as in the samethought-space as ourselves, able to speak of the same things, ableto say and mean at least roughly what we can. This is an idea ofwhat is possible in the relation between their thought and ours.But does such an idea support and inform our judgments of whatis actually the case, our practice? Our practice here is the complexone of communicating with people, a practice which includes theascription of beliefs to them in a great variety of circumstances.Putnam’s sentence ‘if a seventeenth century person had... enter-tained the possibility that the skeletal remains found at Whoozieare a million years old, that person would have been right’ pro-vides not so much a picture supporting our practice, but a sampleof our practice. We do not get beyond the practice to an idea orpicture of human relations or language, forming an importantkind of support for it.

Putnam, we saw, contrasts Wittgenstein’s real views with Mal-colm’s reading of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, according to Put-nam, accepts that meaning may remain unchanged whentechniques of investigation change. But in what sort of contextmight the view ascribed to Wittgenstein appear to be needed?And what is it doing in such contexts? The apparent need to holdthat meaning remains unchanged in such circumstances arisesbecause it seems that our ascriptions of beliefs (about water, orthe age of bones, or whatnot) to people in the past can be correctonly if their sentences can mean what ours do; and the verifi-cationist has called that into question. But our response to thechallenge should not be to join in a debate with the verificationistabout when meanings can be the same, or about when people’ssentences can refer to the same things. Putnam holds that thereare important ideas about sameness of meaning, ideas whichWittgenstein does not call into question, which support our prac-tices. Against this I am arguing, and putting forward as Wittgen-stein’s view, that these practices are not supported by such beliefs

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or pictures. (Compare the practice of taking some of what is saidto us as contradicting what we have said. In this practice, wemake our utterances meet each other, make them stand in such-and-such logical relations. The practice is a fundamental one,and does not rest on ideas about people being able to hold con-tradictory beliefs, or any other ideas.)

I am not here making any general claims about the importancepictures can have in connection with our ways of using words.There are two particular kinds of case worth noting. First, a con-ception of human beings as beings with whom communication ispossible, a conception which one might describe as a picture ofhuman beings as capable of communication, may supportattempts to communicate in circumstances in which there aregrave barriers, like the total incomprehensibility of the languageof the people among whom one has suddenly found oneself. (Sofar as Putnam’s claim about the role of pictures in supportingour practice calls attention to such cases, I should have no objec-tion to it.) And, secondly, there are cases in which a picture maybe important in determining whom we take to be incapable ofcommunicating. If I believe that people who look very unlikemyself and my compatriots are utterly incapable of speaking mylanguage, then, even when they utter in my presence sentences ofmy language, pronounced just as I and other natives pronouncesuch sentences, I may not connect the sounds they make with mylanguage, may not take them to be saying anything in my lan-guage. (Or, if I do understand the sentence, I may look aroundin some bewilderment for the person uttering it, not being ableto take as possible the idea that it was uttered by the persondirectly in front of me, any more than I should think that itmight have come from the fly sitting on my hand.) A picture ofthese foreign people as incapable of communicating may standin the way of taking them to be uttering sentences that I or mycompatriots might assert.29 But the possibility of such cases doesnot imply that, in the normal case, there is also a picture, but apicture with an opposite role, a picture of people as capable ofcommunicating, providing an underpinning for such ordinarypractices as the ascription of beliefs (about water, for example)to people who lived three hundred years ago.

29. I am indebted to James Conant for general discussion of this case, and for detailsof what it is like to be treated as not capable of communication.


XI

Here is a remark of Wittgenstein’s that is relevant.

...the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greaterdepth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on findingourselves on the old level. (Remarks on the Foundations of Math-ematics, p. 333.)

The illusory image is, in our present case, that of something lyingbeyond the practice of saying such things as that Leibniz believedabout the bones what we now know to be so. We are willing toascribe our belief to him, willing to treat the sentence in hismouth as about the age of the bones, just as we use our words,including ‘triangle’, in giving the beliefs of a six-year-old child,whose life with the word ‘triangle’ is very different from ours.The child does not grasp the geometrical propositions which,according to Wittgenstein, go to determine the grammar of theword ‘triangle’. These propositions can be used by us in all sortsof ways, for example in figuring out such things as what patternof triangular tiles might fill a space. Or, again, we can use thegeometry of the triangle in figuring out the height of some distantobject; the child cannot do so. Since the child lacks knowledgeof the proofs which, according to Wittgenstein, contribute to fix-ing the grammar of ‘triangle’, and since the child is incapable ofdoing with the word all those things that depend on some mas-tery of geometry, it seems to follow that the child who uses theword ‘triangle’ is using a word with a different grammar, andhence does not mean what we mean, and hence that his beliefsabout what he calls triangles are not beliefs about triangles in oursense. (Compare Wittgenstein’s remark from the 1940s, quotedearlier, that for the person who has not yet got the proof thatthere are an infinite number of primes, the proposition sayingthat there are has no or only the vaguest meaning. And comparealso Stanley Cavell’s discussion of what it is for such-and-suchsort of object to ‘exist in someone’s world’.30) I am drawingattention here to the fact that in our practice we do not refuseto treat the child’s beliefs as beliefs about triangles. But I do notwant to go beyond the fact that in our practice we do ascribe

30. The Claim of Reason (Oxford, 1979), ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Lan-guage’, pp. 168–190, especially pp. 172–173.

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beliefs about triangles to the child to the idea that what informsor supports our practice is an idea of meaning as capable of beingthe same despite differences in mastery of geometry, or an ideaof the child as someone with whom we can communicate, some-one able to mean what we do.

What I have just given as a ‘Wittgensteinian’ account mayseem very close to the Rortyan view to which Putnam objected,the view that saying of the seventeenth-century sentence that itwas true then is simply paying a compliment to ourselves. For Ihave described us as simply taking certain sentences uttered withapparent assertive force, or as conjectures, and treating them asexpressions of what we would now be saying if we uttered thosesentences. Putnam called the Rortyan view an emotive theory oftruth because the word ‘true’ is treated as a mere compliment;but what then am I saying, if it is not that we compliment Leibnizby treating his sentence as expressing our belief? What are wedoing if not patting people on the back for coming out withsentences like ones we ourselves use? We are, I suggest, makingconnections between activities of thought and talk which are dif-ferent in certain ways. Those differences could be given greatweight, or less weight. There are various possible ways in whicha concept of sameness of thought, sameness of belief, might beshaped. The shape we give it, in our ascriptions of belief, is this:thought or belief that is part of an activity differing from ours inmany of the available techniques may be the same as thought orbelief that is part of our life with words. There is great humansignificance in our making connections of thought in that way.

In our practice, we make the notion of something which peopleat different times, with different techniques of enquiry, maybelieve, may be said to believe, in that we use the same sentenceto state our beliefs and to give theirs. We make the notion ofsomething with truth-conditions independent of techniques ofinvestigation, in that we use the same sentence to state our beliefsand to give those of people living hundreds of years ago. So hereI am rejecting the idea that sameness of truth-conditions shouldbe thought of as supporting our practice. The picture of samenessof truth-conditions as supporting our practices of translating isa philosophical elaboration of the complex facts of our actualpractice; its attractiveness lies in its seeming to go beyond whatwe do.

In arguing against Rorty, Putnam appeals to the differencebetween a Davidsonian account of translation and a Quinean


account (NTO, pp. 6–7). A Davidsonian account, applied to thepresent case, might have in it: ‘The sentence ‘‘The bones atWhoozie are a million years old’’ is true in seventeenth-centuryEnglish if and only if the bones at Whoozie are a million yearsold’. If Rorty does follow Davidson here, he must, so Putnamargues, distinguish this schema from the Quinean schema thatsimply allows the seventeenth-century sentence to be ‘translated’by our sentence ‘The bones at Whoozie are a million years old’;and so Rorty must allow that the specification of truth-con-ditions in the Davidsonian scheme has significant weight. But theDavidsonian scheme can block our view of what it is for ourunderstanding of the languages between which we are translatingto enter the translations we give. Consider the familiar case of‘Snow is white’ and ‘Schnee ist weiss’. There is the life in whichthe German sentence is used, and the life in which ‘Snow is white’is used, and then there is the making of connections between theGerman life and the English life. That is, there are many acts, ofvarious sorts, in which we evince our willingness to treat thoselives as alike, acts like the making of vocabulary lists for childrento learn, acts like the ascription to Germans of beliefs akin toours, and so on. The practices in which we forge such connec-tions are not (so I am arguing) supported by pictures of therelation between understanding and truth-conditions. Rather,there are branches of the family of language-games of translationwhich lend themselves to Davidsonian representation.

It is important that we may wish to call attention to dissimi-larities rather than similarities between the life that some groupof people have with some word or words and the life that someother group of people have with what appears to be a word forthe same thing, say a word for the same place. We may want toinsist that there is no translating between the two groups. Sucha case is presented in Brian Friel’s play Translations (London,1981): the Irish name ‘Baile Beag’ and the English ‘Ballybeg’ maybe names of the same place, but the language-games in whichthey are used have such limited similarity, such grave differences,that sentences containing the two words may (Friel lets us see)be treated as not translations of each other.31 And one could say

31. On the issues here, especially on the difference between interpretation and trans-lation, and on different sorts of translation, see also Michael Forster, ‘On the VeryIdea of Denying the Existence of Radically Different Conceptual Schemes’, Inquiry,41: 133–185 (1998).

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here that the two names are in a sense not names for the sameplace after all, because the place Baile Beg does not exist in theworld of the British soldiers (to use the way of speaking I quotedfrom Stanley Cavell).32 The issue of translation is here political;a focus on cases like ‘Snow is white’, or even ‘These bones are amillion years old’ leads attention away from cases in which wemay reasonably refuse to make that connection between humanlives that is made by treating our words as meeting the words ofothers. Friel’s play makes explicit the relation between the failureof human connectedness and the absence of connection of words,as it does also, and with great comic effect, the relation betweenthe human connectedness of the Irish peasant with the author ofthe Georgics and the connection between the Irish language andLatin. Putnam says that we have the idea that there are peopleout there, in the past, and in other cultures in the present, withwhom we can communicate. Friel’s play presents such communi-cation with people in the past, but shows also what it is like forthere to be people out there with whom there is no real communi-cation; the language of an occupying army is seen in the play asan instrument not of communication but of occupation.33

Speaking of mathematical conviction, Wittgenstein said that itmight be put in the form ‘I recognize this as analogous to that’;

32. See also Alasdair MacIntyre’s arguments about such pairs of place-names, in‘Relativism, Power and Philosophy’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philo-sophical Association, 59: 5–22 (1985), especially p. 7.

33. For a summary of controversies about the relation between politics and languagein Friel’s play, see Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture(Dublin, 1988), Appendix II of Chapter 6 (pp. 154–5). Friel’s play helps make clearwhat is the matter with some remarks of John Koethe’s about my reading of Witt-genstein on these issues (in his The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought, Ithaca, 1996,p. 71). Koethe has claimed that I make the willingness to attribute beliefs like ourown to people distant from ourselves into a mere verbal response to similarities anddifferences. The language he uses, of ‘mere verbal response’, seems to miss the depthand far-reachingness of what we do with words, and also the kind of importanceWittgenstein saw in the use of words, in the making of connections with words. Suchconnections both reveal and help to shape our relations with others. What would itbe to be willing to connect Baile Beag with Ballybeg, or to treat ‘Nablus’ and ‘Shech-em’ (say) as if they were ‘simply two names of the same place’, two labels one orother of which we might put on a roadmap for tourists? I don’t mean the answer to beobvious: Friel’s play shows us a context in which the willingness to make a connectionconstitutes a betrayal of one’s community. What the human significance is of a ‘verbalresponse’ has to be seen in the particular case. See also MacIntyre, op. cit., for dis-cussion of ‘simply two names of the same place’, and for a response to the idea thatthe tourist use of place-names exemplifies a ‘core’ use, all the rest of what is involvedin the use of such names being a matter of mere contingent associations.


and he added that ‘recognize’ is used there, not as in ‘I recognizehim as Lewy’, but as in ‘I recognize him as superior to myself ’.It is the indication that one accepts a convention (Lectures onthe Foundations of Mathematics, p. 63). I am arguing here thataccepting a translation is similar: it is a ‘recognition of this asanalogous to that’; and the use of ‘recognize’ is like that in ‘Irecognize him as superior to myself ’. What I have suggestedabout Friel’s play, then, is that it may lead us to say: ‘I will notrecognize a sentence about Baile Beg as analogous to a sentenceabout Ballybeg’. If there is incommensurability between the lan-guages, it is a matter of refusal to accept conventions allowingtranslation.

In ‘The Craving for Objectivity’, Putnam emphasizes that whatmakes a translation correct depends on the context and on ourinterests.34 That claim can be understood in various ways; so,although I too might say that what makes a translation correctdepends on the context and on our interests, I am not sure howfar our agreement here goes. Like Putnam, I should reject ideasof incommensurability based on our being supposedly impri-soned in our own forms of thought or language; I do, however,leave room for a kind of incommensurability, based on our poss-ibly refusing to ‘recognize this as analogous to that’. Such a viewdoes not remove objectivity from our practices of translation,any more than Wittgenstein’s treatment of mathematics removesobjectivity from our practices of proof (but that is another story,and the analogy between proof and translation cannot be pushedtoo far).

If Rorty is recommending that we treat Leibniz’s utterance asnot having a truth value, why should I object? Why should Put-nam? For neither Putnam nor I takes our present practices oftranslation to be sacrosanct, and Rorty is simply recommendinga change in those practices, so far as they entitle us to say thatLeibniz got right what we now know, so far (that is) as they givesense to a notion of non-local correctness. The problem is notthat he has recommended a change, but that his case for theusefulness of the change depends upon his seeing in those presentpractices a dependence on suspect features of our philosophical

34. Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990), pp. 120–131, atp. 122.

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tradition. The case for change is that it would be generally usefulto replace the tradition with something less stultifying. My argu-ment has not been that Wittgenstein requires us to leave ourpractices alone, but rather that the practices in question dependneither on suspect nor on non-suspect conceptions of the pos-sibility of communication or of the possibility of our getting righthow things are.

XII

Let us go back to our narrative of the seventeenth century, andmake some changes in it. We can imagine the history of ourculture having gone very differently from the way it went. Inthis new story, the sciences do not develop as they actually did.Scientific work is discouraged, and then suppressed, and istreated as inspired by the devil. Various ancient scrolls are disco-vered, and taken to be divinely inspired. They are believed tocontain in somewhat cryptic form the answer to questions thatwe should say are empirical. Procedures are developed and aretaught in universities for finding these hidden answers in thesacred texts. The texts are used to assign dates to events; to assigna date to a past event is to assign it a date from 0 to 6000 yearsago: that is their dating system. Using the sacred texts, the bonesfound at Whoozie are determined to be 1200 years old.35

Putnam’s remark about our ability to communicate with peo-ple in cultures different from our own suggests that he would saythat the people in the culture I have described do have beliefsabout how old the bones are. That is, he would go along withthe way I have ‘translated’ their beliefs just now, when I said thatthey took the bones to be 1200 years old. And I think he wouldsay that their beliefs about the age of the bones are wrong. Buthere we should note that, within their life with talk about the ageof things, it would be treated only as a sort of joke to say ofsomething that it is a million years old. In their grammar thereis no place for the hypothesis that the bones are a million yearsold: there is no such serious move in their game. I am not sayingthat their language is incommensurable with ours; I am allowing

35. The story was suggested by my reading of R. L. Goodstein’s ‘Language andExperience’ in Philosophy of Science, eds. Arthur Danto and Sidney Morgenbesser(New York, 1960), pp. 82–100.


that we might indeed ‘translate’ their sentences into our lan-guage, and ascribe to them false beliefs about the age of thebones. But we should note that we are doing this across a bigdifference in grammar. Their life with talk of how old things areis quite like ours in some ways and very unlike ours in others. Ifsomeone in that culture uttered the sentence ‘Those bones are amillion years old’ we might indeed say ‘She got the age of thebones right’, but (because the sentence has such a different placein our life from what it has in theirs) our saying such a thing iscloser to being a compliment we pay to the sentence than is say-ing the same thing of Leibniz in the original story.

If we say of someone at another time or in another culturethat, in uttering the sentence she got such-and-such right, howclose that comes to being merely a compliment we pay to thesentence depends on how far life with those words is in that cul-ture from ours. In the case of Leibniz’s speculation about thebones, we think of him as already within a scientific culture, aculture in which theories may be tied to each other in the designof instruments and the development of techniques, and in whichsacred texts are not seen as determining the possibilities withinwhich what can be recognized as serious speculation takes place.What makes the sentence an hypothesis at all is that it is connec-ted with the ways hypotheses are formulated and discussed, andmethods for investigating them thought about, looked for, critic-ized, and so on. And so, if we say of Leibniz that he got the ageof the bones right, our comment itself has more to it than if wesay the same thing of someone who utters the sentence in theculture that has altogether rejected scientific investigation.

A criticism of Putnam, then, is that the idea of us as having apicture of people communicating with each other over time andacross cultures can lead attention away from how much or howlittle there may be in ascriptions of beliefs, beliefs specified in ourlanguage, to people distant from us.

XIII

Here are my conclusions, including a few comments on thedebate between Rorty and Putnam.

It is worthwhile, I think, to give the opposite emphasis fromPutnam’s to Wittgenstein’s remark (PI §43) about meaning and

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use: that, for a large class of cases, though not for all, in whichwe employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be explained this way: themeaning of a word is its use in the language. Putnam emphasizesthat Wittgenstein is not identifying meaning with use. True. Buthe is insisting that in a large number of cases we should try think-ing of meaning as use. And, if we do that, it will indeed push usin the direction of verificationism,36 will lead us to take seriouslythose differences in use emphasized by verificationists. We shouldnote that, if a specification of the method of verification is acontribution to grammar, and if grammar tells us what we aretalking about, then giving a method of verification is a contri-bution to telling what we are talking about. We can emphasizethese connections in Wittgenstein’s thought without taking himto be presenting a theory of reference or meaning as determinedby grammar (let alone by verification). What I have called theverificationist strand in Wittgenstein’s thought is properly seen asa matter of a philosophical technique, a technique for redirectingattention; the usefulness of the technique depends on the particu-lar kinds of problem with which we may be confronted.

Wittgenstein is no verificationist. But taking seriously the veri-ficationist element that is present in his philosophical methods issomething that we can do, that Putnam could do, without givingup on the importance of communication and understandingbetween people over time and across cultures that vary in manyways, including their techniques of investigation. If that verifi-cationist element is allowed for, is the distance between Putnamand Rorty narrowed? Not, perhaps, by very much. One signifi-cant difference between them is that Putnam’s account does andRorty’s does not treat as important the human connections thatare recognized in our willingness to translate the sentences ofothers as sentences of our language, as expressions of what we

36. Putnam, in ‘Meaning Holism’ (Realism with a Human Face, pp. 278–302, atp. 301, quotes Warren Goldfarb’s remarks about §43, and expresses agreement withGoldfarb’s view. Goldfarb wrote ‘Given that invoking use by itself carries little infor-mation, I take [Wittgenstein’s] remark in §43 to be, by and large, a denial of thepossibility and the appropriateness of theorizing about meaning’ (‘I Want You toBring Me a Slab: Remarks on the Opening Sections of the Philosophical Investi-gations’, Synthese, 56: 265–282 (1983), at p. 279). My view differs from Goldfarb’s inthat I take the invocation of use in §43 to have significant content, and to be connec-ted with Wittgenstein’s efforts to draw attention to differences in use that we may beinclined to overlook in philosophy. (I should not disagree with his point that §43does not provide a definition of meaning.)


should believe were we to utter the same words. Putnam’sexample of the bones at Whoozie is a particularly tellingexample, because the connections we make here between thespeculator and ourselves reflect a shared human interest in under-standing the strange things we find in the world with us. ButPutnam’s example takes us further.

I have spoken of our words meeting the words of others: stand-ing in such relations as expressing the same or different beliefs.Our words meeting the words of others, our words meeting whatis the case: these ‘meetings’ (that is to say, the logic of belief )are shaped in what we do, our responses to words and gestures.‘Concepts...’, Wittgenstein said, ‘are the expression of our inter-est, and direct our interest’ (PI §570). In Putnam’s discussion ofthe bones at Whoozie there is expressed clearly and feelingly thegreat importance of our interest in ‘people out there’ (NTO, p. 4),our interest in understanding and communicating, and also ourinterest in getting things right. These ideas form part of a concep-tion lying at a great distance from Rorty, from his idea that theascription of beliefs to organisms and machines is an activitythe point of which is that it makes possible the explanation andprediction of behaviour. That activity of ascription of beliefs, asRorty conceives it (and as he recommends that we conceive it),is detached from the idea of our beliefs being made to be true orfalse by how things are (except in a derivative sense of ‘make’).For Putnam, such a view—of the ascription of beliefs to otherpeople, and of what is meant by beliefs being true—involves akind of alienation from our Lebenswelt; for Rorty, that Lebens-welt, with its familiar modes of thought, is something from whichwe may do well, even at the cost of paradox, to alienate ourselves(although we may indeed find a few of its phrases useful for thesake of rhetorical effectiveness).37 The debate between Rorty andPutnam is not about solidarity versus truth, but about whether

37. My statement of Rorty’s views is based on his ‘Robert Brandom on Social Prac-tices’, in Truth and Progress, pp. 122–137, especially pp. 128–129 and 132–137; mystatement of a possible reply from Putnam draws from his ‘Why is a Philosopher?’,in Realism with a Human Face, pp. 104–119, especially p. 118. For a discussion ofRorty’s claims about the usefulness of dropping talk of the answerability of ourbeliefs to anything but other people, see James Conant, ‘Freedom, Cruelty and Truth:Rorty versus Orwell’ and Rorty’s reply to Conant, in Richard Rorty and His Critics,ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford, forthcoming); Conant also has a general account ofthe debate between Putnam and Rorty in his Introduction to Putnam’s Words andLife (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994), pp. xxiv–xxxiii.

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there is (as Putnam thinks) an understanding of solidarity thatdoes not oppose it to truth, and at the same time does not watertruth down. The debate is also about how to read Wittgenstein,about what is useful in Wittgenstein, and about whether Wittgen-stein’s sort of attention to the kind of beings we are, to our natu-ral history, leads to a naturalism that has no room forunwatered-down truth. But unwatered-down truth is a questionfor another occasion.38

APPENDIX

I have referred to material from Margaret Macdonald’s notes toWittgenstein’s lectures during 1935–6. The Appendix containsrelevant excerpts from those notes.39

18th November 1935

If one says that sense data are private, they are often contrastedwith physical objects. Like putting some transparent paperbetween him and the object and tracing it in two dimensions.We are sometimes tempted to think that what we see is a two-dimensional picture in this way. We are then tempted to say thatwhat I see is not really a chair at all, but a sense datum or aparticular view of the chair or some such thing. There may be amirror which I do not see when I think I see the chair, so thatwhat I am really seeing is a mirror image. I might point out thatwe are not compelled here to say that we see the same but [couldsay] that something seems the same, or that the appearance isthe same, with regard to both the mirror image and the object.

Propositions like ‘This is green’ (when I point to my own sensedatum and utter these words) have been discussed by Russell andMoore. Nothing prevents me from pointing and saying thewords, but that is about all. But Russell and Moore said that

38. I am very grateful to James Conant and Anthony Woozley for comments andsuggestions about an early version of this essay. I much appreciate having had theopportunity to present the material at the Simposio de Filosofıa: En Torno a laObra de Hilary Putnam, organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas. Inpreparing this version of the essay, I have been helped by Hilary Putnam’s veryilluminating response to it at the conference, and also by the comments of the otherparticipants. An early and shorter version of the essay, translated by J. A. Robles,appeared in Dianoia, 1992.

39. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holder of the material includedhere.


when one said this one was talking to oneself. This seems to betaken as a proof that there is some sort of object there when Isay ‘This is green’—but not the physical object, which is public.The form ‘This is so-and-so’ is very well known to us. In certainsituations in which we use the expression it is tautologous butseems to have very good sense.40

We are tempted to say that, whether we know or not whetherhe sees red, he does see it or not, although we have no criterionfor this. Compare with the determining of the velocity of light,and the means of finding out when the light reached the mirror.We are inclined to say ‘Either it did reach the mirror in half thetime or it did not, even though we have no means of detectingthis’... This sort of question says nothing; it is a tautology. Butwhat role does the tautology play? It sounds as if, when you say‘Either the light reached the mirror in half the time or it did not’,you were insisting that there were two alternatives. But what isdone is to insist on the use of certain expressions.

We have a particular picture that we think corresponds to ourwords; we have a picture of something arriving somewhere at acertain time, and we say that we know what we mean by sayingthat the ray of light arrives at a certain time. But do you knowhow to use this picture in the particular case we are discussing?Light is compared to a sort of Messenger. We are then using asort of picture which almost compels us to go on in a certainway. I cannot talk about light as a ‘Messenger’ without saying thatit makes sense to say that he arrived somewhere at a certain time.All we have is a lamp, a mirror and a certain sensation of light. Butwe think of the experiment in terms of throwing a ball and of a ballbouncing back again. But actually nothing was thrown andnothing came back. But the idea of a surface which ‘throws back’the light is very familiar to us. But, if we go on with this picture,then to say it makes no sense to ask at what time the light reachedthe mirror makes havoc of our thoughts. We have to give up thepicture. To say that it makes no sense to say that the light arrivedat a certain moment involves also that it makes no sense to saythat it arrived at a time between two limits. But, you might say,we are not dealing with moments but with length of time (manwith a watch); but this makes no difference.

40. The footnoted sentence is an altered version of Margaret Macdonald’s notes.

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After-images. We might say that one thing is favourable to thenotion of sense data: the fact of after-images. One might say: Anafter-image is private. I cannot have his after-image. What wouldit be like for me to have his after-image?

The question ‘What would it be like for so-and-so to be thecase?’ is always asked relative to the removing of a certain sortof trouble. If someone said ‘What would it be like for someoneto sit on a chair?’, I should say: What do you mean by askingthis question? What sort of thing do you want explained—whatis your trouble? Ordinarily, we know what it means for someoneto sit on a chair; there is no difficulty about it. He justs sits on achair and that is that. Or are you asking me to paint a pictureof someone sitting on a chair? Or are his legs stiff, so that youdo not know what he will do with them when he sits on the chair?Compare this with asking what it would be like to be expectingsomeone from 4 to 4:30. Is it asking whether there is a peculiarstate of mind lasting from 4 to 4:30, or whether it is differentactivities, or what is it? It usually involves several alternative pos-sibilities, as if, e.g., one could sit on a chair in many differentways.

If you ask ‘What would it be like to have the same after-imageas someone else?’, one might ask ‘What sort of explanation doyou want?’ We must say what particular trouble we want solvedand what comparison to be made. We must compare this withthe case in which we should normally say that we see ‘the sameso-and-so’. We want to know the use of ‘same’ in, e.g., ‘I see thesame chair’, ‘I see the same colour’ or ‘I see the same after-image’as he. What is the criterion for this being the same chair as I sawyesterday? I can have two chairs which look exactly the same,take them out of your sight and then return them, and, pointingto one, say ‘Is this the chair on which you sat?’ In these circum-stances there would be no answer to this question; it would haveno sense. Compare the case of two rivers which flow into eachother, and one goes on. Which is the one that goes on? If a brookflows into the Danube, we should be inclined to say it is theDanube that goes on and not the brook. But suppose two riversjoin and go on with a new name, then we can say: two havedisappeared and one has no source! You can imagine people whowould say in such cases ‘Well, it is either the same river or it isnot, even though we cannot discover this’. This would be non-sense. How are the words ‘It is or it is not’ being used?


What is the criterion in the case of the after-images? Can wesay ‘I saw the same after-image on two different occasions?’ If Ilook at the sun and then look away, I see an after-image, and ifI look at an electric light, I see an after-image of the same sort,though I usually say they are different [after-images] thoughexactly alike. How do we compare two after-images? We coulddescribe them or paint a picture of them. But, again, peoplemight say ‘However you compare them, either you have the sameafter-image or you have not’. (Should we regard the sameness ofafter-images as an unreachable goal which we can approach butnever attain?)—You can say either. The point is that we use theword ‘same’ in a very different way. To say ‘Either we see thesame thing or we do not’ is to insist on a particular kind ofimagery. It suggests seeing two pictures which are either alike ornot alike. I do not object to this, but you must be careful aboutthe application, because the cases are very different. You mustgive the grammar of a picture as well as of a word or sentence.You must say how you are going to use the picture.

Compare the case of looking out of the window and seeing ashower of rain. People would say there must be a certain numberof drops, although we cannot count the number, and we must beseeing just that number. This looks as if there ought to be ananswer to ‘How many drops are there?’ This is a case wherewhatever you say is likely to clash with something else you say.Compare the case of a primitive arithmetic having ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’,‘5’, and ‘many’ for anything above 5. You want to say that‘many’ is an expression of ignorance (but that need not be so).Suppose someone asks ‘How many hairs has he got on his head?’You would probably say ‘A lot’, not ‘99’ or any definite number.

We see what makes us say that after-images are ‘essentiallyprivate’ and ‘Only I can know what after-images I have’. Wemight think that our grammar shows this, and reveals a differ-ence in the ‘nature’ of physical objects and after-images, but itdoesn’t.

Excerpt from notes, 21st January 1936

(The following material is in parentheses in Margaret Macdonald ’stypescript, and has her initials at the end, suggesting that the para-graph or some part of it may have been reconstructed by her fromsketchy notes.)

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To put a patch of colour beside the word ‘red’ as an ostensivedefinition does not yet compel you to call blood or strawberriesred, etc. This is something that you do afterwards, and you doin fact do it. To say that you do it because there is an internalrelation of similarity between the things you call red is to giveanother rule of grammar for ‘red’; the things which you do infact call red you are always going to say are related by theinternal relation of ‘being similar in colour’. And you could use‘red’ both for blood and for top C and the smell of lavender—just as you use it now for many different shades of red when youmight not—but if your use becomes too erratic we shall not saythat you are using a ‘word’ in a language at all. The use, e.g.,must conform to your rules...

cora diamond -- how old are these bones

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