ARCHIVEUM · The Architecture of Language · Artifact VIII of VIII
Wittgenstein's two philosophies and what changed between them. What language cannot say. The relationship between language, silence, and the boundaries of thought itself.
Prelude
This curriculum began with a question about origins: how did language evolve, and what does that origin reveal about what language is? Each subsequent artifact moved inward, examining the architecture of language at finer and finer levels of resolution, until by the final artifact of the middle section we were examining the gap between what a speaker says and what they mean. Now the curriculum turns to face its own boundary. If the first artifact asked where language came from, this one asks where it ends.
The question of the limits of language is not, as it might sound, a marginal question at the edges of serious inquiry. It is the central question of twentieth-century philosophy of language, the question that organized the careers of Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the question that the mature Wittgenstein returned to from a completely different direction and with completely different conclusions. Two of the most important philosophical works of the century, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953), are both responses to this question, and they give answers so different that they appear to be the work of different minds, though they share an author.
The question connects to everything this curriculum has examined. The Sapir-Whorf question (Artifact IV) asked whether the language one speaks sets the limits of one's thought. The untranslatable (Artifact VI) mapped the places where one language cannot reach what another has named. Rhetoric (Artifact VII) examined how language moves people beyond the reach of explicit argument. All of these are explorations of language's reach and its limits. This artifact examines the limits themselves: not where one language ends and another begins, but where language as such ends, and what, if anything, exists beyond it.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein · Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7 (1921)
I
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1889 – 1951 · Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921; Philosophical Investigations, 1953 (posth.)
Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who came to philosophy through engineering and then through mathematics. He studied under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, worked on the Tractatus while serving in the Austrian army during the First World War (keeping the manuscript in his knapsack at the front), and after the war retired to teach in rural Austrian primary schools, believing he had solved all the problems of philosophy. Returning to philosophy in the late 1920s, he came to believe the Tractatus was fundamentally mistaken and spent the rest of his career developing an entirely different approach. The Philosophical Investigations, written during his second Cambridge period and left unfinished at his death, is the record of that revision. No philosopher of the century shaped more profoundly, and then reversed more completely, their own foundational commitments.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is unlike any other philosophical text. It is brief (fewer than 80 pages), organized in a system of numbered propositions (7 main propositions, each with decimal sub-propositions), and written in a prose style that aspires to the same logical precision it is describing. Its ambition is nothing less than a complete account of the relationship between language, thought, and the world, and an identification of the boundary at which all three end.
The text opens with two propositions that establish its ontological framework. Proposition 1: "The world is everything that is the case." Proposition 1.1: "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." This is not a casual distinction. For the early Wittgenstein, the world is not made up of objects in the first instance; it is made up of facts, which are objects standing in determinate relations to each other. An object by itself is not yet a fact; it becomes a fact when it enters into a state of affairs with other objects. The world is the totality of these states of affairs.
The corresponding account of language mirrors this ontology exactly. Just as the world consists of facts (objects in combination), language consists of propositions (names in combination). A name refers to an object; a proposition depicts a fact. The proposition "The cat is on the mat" depicts the fact that consists of the cat-object standing in a certain spatial relation to the mat-object. The proposition is a picture of the fact it describes.
The Tractatus was not written in a vacuum. It emerged from the intellectual context created by Frege's development of modern mathematical logic and Russell's subsequent development and popularization of that logic. Frege had shown that the logical structure of propositions is far more complex than the subject-predicate grammar of natural language suggests; that quantifiers, variables, and logical connectives underlie the surface forms of speech in ways that ordinary grammar conceals. Russell had developed the logical atomism that the Tractatus extended: the view that language and the world share an underlying logical structure, and that philosophical clarity requires analysis of the surface forms of language down to their logical constituents.
Russell's theory of descriptions, introduced in "On Denoting" (1905), was particularly important for the Tractatus. Russell had argued that definite descriptions like "the present king of France" are not names but disguised quantified propositions; their logical form differs from their grammatical form. The implication: the surface grammar of natural language is a misleading guide to its underlying logical structure, and philosophical errors arise from mistaking grammatical form for logical form. The Tractatus accepted this diagnosis and generalized it: all philosophical problems arise from misunderstanding the logic of language.
II
The core of the early Wittgenstein's philosophy is the picture theory of meaning: the claim that a proposition is meaningful insofar as it is a picture of a possible state of affairs in the world. A proposition has meaning by sharing a logical form with the fact it depicts; the arrangement of names in the proposition mirrors the arrangement of objects in the state of affairs.
Wittgenstein was supposedly inspired toward this idea by a newspaper account of how Parisian law courts used scale models of traffic accidents to reconstruct what had happened. The model was meaningful because it had the same spatial structure as the accident it depicted: the model car on the left occupied the same structural position as the real car on the left. The elements of the model stand in for the elements of the reality, and the spatial relationships in the model represent the spatial relationships in reality. A proposition, Wittgenstein thought, works the same way: its elements (names) stand in for elements of reality (objects), and the arrangement of elements in the proposition represents the arrangement of objects in a possible state of affairs.
A proposition is true when the state of affairs it depicts is actual, and false when that state of affairs is not actual. But for a proposition to be true or false, it must first be capable of being either: it must have a sense, a definite possible fact that it either correctly or incorrectly depicts. A proposition that has no possible state of affairs as its content has no sense; it says nothing, because there is nothing it could be true or false about.
This account of meaning immediately implies a sharp limitation on what language can meaningfully say. Language can picture facts: contingent states of affairs that are either actually the case or not the case. What language cannot picture is anything that is not a contingent fact: logical truths (which are not pictures of specific states of affairs but say nothing about how things happen to be), necessary truths (which could not have been otherwise and therefore depict no specific arrangement of contingent reality), ethical and aesthetic claims (which do not describe facts about the world but express value attitudes), and metaphysical claims about what the world is, considered as a whole.
Wittgenstein is explicit about the consequences. Proposition 6.41: "The sense of the world must lie outside the world." Proposition 6.42: "So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics." Proposition 6.53: "The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy, and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions." The conclusion (Proposition 7): "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
This conclusion has struck many readers as perverse. Wittgenstein appears to be saying that the most important things, ethics, aesthetics, religion, the meaning of life, are strictly unsayable. But he does not say they are unimportant or illusory. His distinction is not between the meaningful and the meaningless but between what can be said and what can only be shown.
III
The saying/showing distinction is the most mysterious and most discussed element of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein distinguishes between what a proposition says (the fact it depicts) and what it shows (the logical form it shares with that fact). The logical form cannot itself be stated in a proposition; any attempt to say what the logical form of a proposition is would produce a proposition with its own logical form, which would itself need to be shown rather than said. The logical structure of language cannot be captured in language; it shows itself in the structure of meaningful propositions.
The same applies to the most fundamental features of reality. The form of objects, the fact that there are objects, the structure of the world as such: none of these can be meaningfully stated, because meaningful statements presuppose these features as conditions of their own possibility. A proposition that attempted to say that there are objects would be using the concept of objects in its subject position while purporting to assert it in its predicate position; the attempt is circular and the proposition lacks sense.
What can be shown cannot be said. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.1212
The ethical and aesthetic are in this category. They cannot be stated because they are not facts about the world; they are expressions of the speaker's attitude toward the world considered as a whole. But they are not, for this reason, unimportant. Wittgenstein wrote in a letter to his publisher Ludwig von Ficker that the point of the Tractatus was ethical: "My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one." What is most important cannot be said, but it shows itself in a life, in an attitude, in the quality of attention one brings to the world. The silence at the end of the Tractatus is not emptiness; it is the boundary where the ethical, the aesthetic, and the mystical begin.
The Tractatus contains one of the most extraordinary self-referential moves in the history of philosophy. In Proposition 6.54, Wittgenstein writes: "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 surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly."
Wittgenstein is saying that the propositions of the Tractatus are themselves nonsensical in the strict technical sense: they attempt to say what can only be shown. The book is a ladder that must be discarded once you have climbed it. This is not false modesty; it is a consequence of the theory itself. The picture theory of meaning implies that metaphysical propositions, including the propositions of the Tractatus, cannot be meaningful pictures of facts, because they are not about contingent states of affairs but about the conditions of possibility of all states of affairs. The book acknowledges its own impossibility in its concluding pages, and asks to be used as a philosophical instrument rather than read as a philosophical doctrine.
IV
The Tractatus was taken up with enormous enthusiasm by the Vienna Circle: a group of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians who met regularly in Vienna in the late 1920s and early 1930s, organized around Moritz Schlick and including Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Friedrich Waismann, and Herbert Feigl. The Circle developed the Tractatus's argument about the limits of the sayable into a systematic philosophical program called logical positivism.
The Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis)
Active c. 1924 – 1936 · Dispersed by the rise of National Socialism
The Circle's central thesis was the verification principle: a proposition is meaningful if and only if it is either analytically true (true by virtue of the meanings of its terms) or empirically verifiable (capable in principle of being confirmed or disconfirmed by observation). Metaphysical propositions (about God, the soul, the ultimate nature of reality) are neither; they are therefore not false but meaningless, pseudo-propositions that create the appearance of making claims without actually doing so. A.J. Ayer popularized this view for the English-speaking world in Language, Truth and Logic (1936).
The Vienna Circle's verification principle was intended as a criterion of cognitive meaning: a way of distinguishing genuine knowledge claims from pseudo-claims masquerading as knowledge. Metaphysics, theology, and much of traditional philosophy were to be condemned not as false but as cognitively empty: the sentences that expressed them were grammatically well-formed but logically defective.
The principle faced immediate and devastating difficulties, most of which were identified by members of the Circle themselves. First: the verification principle is itself neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable. It is a philosophical claim about the conditions of meaning, which is exactly the kind of claim it condemns as meaningless. Carnap attempted to reframe the principle as a practical proposal about scientific language rather than as a substantive philosophical thesis; this avoided the self-refutation problem but at the cost of abandoning the strong claims the Circle had originally made.
Second: many meaningful statements resist simple empirical verification. Historical statements about events no longer observable, counterfactual statements about what would have happened under different conditions, theoretical statements in physics about unobservable entities: all of these are meaningful in obvious ways but not directly verifiable by observation. The Circle eventually moved to a weaker requirement of confirmability or testability, which avoided the most obvious counterexamples but also substantially weakened the principle's claim to eliminate metaphysics.
Karl Popper, whose work intersected with but was not part of the Circle, proposed falsifiability rather than verifiability as the criterion of scientific status: a scientific claim is one that could in principle be shown to be false by some possible observation. Popper explicitly agreed with the Circle that metaphysics was not science, but denied that this made it meaningless. The Popper-Circle debate set the terms for the philosophy of science for decades.
Wittgenstein, who had been in Vienna and had met with members of the Circle, was appalled by their appropriation of the Tractatus. He felt they had misunderstood his book's most essential point. The Circle had taken the criterion of sense from the Tractatus and used it as a weapon against metaphysics. Wittgenstein's intention was different: the silence at the end of the Tractatus was a gesture of respect toward what cannot be said, not an instruction to dismiss it as nonsense. Ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical were for Wittgenstein the most important things, not least significant because they could not be stated. The Circle had taken the tool and inverted its purpose.
More fundamentally, Wittgenstein came to believe that the Tractatus rested on a mistake: the assumption that language has a single essence, a determinate logical structure that a correct analysis would reveal. This assumption, which he shared with Russell and Frege, was the target of his later philosophy.
V
What changed between the early and the late Wittgenstein was not a piecemeal revision of details but a wholesale reconception of what language is. The Tractatus assumed that language has an essence: a fixed logical structure underlying all uses and all forms. The Philosophical Investigations begins by attacking this assumption directly, and never lets it go.
Early Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
Late Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
The Philosophical Investigations opens with a quotation from Augustine's Confessions, in which Augustine describes learning language as a child by associating sounds with objects: he noticed that adults used certain sounds when pointing to things, and gradually learned to use those sounds himself. Wittgenstein presents this as a picture of language that is natural and seductive but fundamentally wrong. Augustine's picture assumes that every word names something; that the function of language is fundamentally referential; that meaning is a matter of correctly associating words with their objects.
But consider the words "five," "not," "perhaps," "but." What do these words name? The Augustinian picture cannot account for them. It fits nouns for physical objects reasonably well, and then breaks down almost immediately when confronted with the actual diversity of the language. The opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations systematically show that the naming picture, which seemed so natural, describes only a small subset of actual linguistic practices and misleads us about the rest.
VI
Wittgenstein introduces the concept of language games (Sprachspiele) to replace the monolithic picture of language with a pluralistic one. A language game is a particular practice of using language in conjunction with the non-linguistic activities it is embedded in: a specific form of human life within which certain linguistic moves have meaning. The phrase "language game" is deliberately chosen to emphasize that language use is an activity, something done in a context with rules, purposes, and participants, rather than a code that maps onto a fixed reality.
Giving orders
The imperative use of language in institutional contexts: military commands, instructions in a kitchen, direction at a building site. The meaning of "Slab!" said by a builder to an assistant is constituted by the practice of building, not by any inner reference to the object slab.
Describing an object
Reporting what is seen or experienced. The accuracy of a description is judged against what it describes; the language game has criteria of correctness built into the practice of description itself.
Reporting an event
Telling what happened: the narrative language game, organized around temporal sequence and causal connection. What counts as an adequate report is determined by the purposes the report serves.
Making up a story
Fiction, which resembles assertion in its surface grammar but differs in the standards of correctness that apply: the storyteller is not held to the facts of the actual world but to the internal consistency and plausibility of the story world.
Play-acting
Performance, in which the ordinary relationship between language and speaker intention is suspended: the actor who says "I will kill you" does not thereby threaten. Understanding performance requires understanding the frame that makes it performance rather than assertion.
Speculating about an event
Hypothesis, conjecture, and counterfactual reasoning. The language game of "what if" and "perhaps" and "it might be that," organized by norms of epistemic caution that differ from both assertion and fiction.
Wittgenstein lists many more: translating from one language to another, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, solving a problem in arithmetic. The list is deliberately heterogeneous, pointing to the irremediable diversity of language use. There is no single thing that all these practices have in common that would constitute the essence of language. What they share is something Wittgenstein calls family resemblance: the overlapping and crisscrossing similarities that members of a family share without any single feature running through all of them. Just as members of a family share various combinations of nose, eyes, gait, and temperament without any one feature appearing in all of them, the various language games share various combinations of features without any one feature appearing in all of them.
The central positive thesis of the Philosophical Investigations is expressed in Proposition 43: "For a large class of cases, though not for all, in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." This is often quoted as an unqualified slogan, but Wittgenstein hedges it carefully: it applies to a large class of cases, not to all cases. Nevertheless, the slogan captures a genuine revolution. If meaning is use rather than reference, then the question "What does this word mean?" is answered not by pointing to what the word refers to but by describing how it is used: in what contexts, for what purposes, according to what rules, in conjunction with what other activities.
This has immediate consequences for philosophical puzzlement about meaning. Philosophical problems often arise when a word is taken out of its ordinary use and put to work in philosophical contexts where its rules of use do not apply. The word "know" has a perfectly clear use in ordinary contexts: "I know where the keys are," "She knows how to swim." When the philosopher asks "Can anyone really know anything?" and applies the word to all possible claims at once, the word has been removed from the contexts that give it its application criteria. It is no longer being used; it is merely being moved around. This is what Wittgenstein means when he says philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.
The concept of forms of life (Lebensformen) situates language games within a broader context of biological and social existence. A language game is not a self-contained linguistic practice; it is embedded in a way of living, in the activities, institutions, and natural responses that give it its sense. The language game of promising makes sense within a form of life in which there are commitments, trust, institutions, and relationships across time. The language game of expressing pain makes sense within a form of life in which there are bodies that can hurt, responses to pain that are instinctive and public, and social practices of caring for the suffering.
This grounding of language in forms of life is Wittgenstein's final answer to the question of justification. When asked why a word is used as it is, one can give reasons up to a point; but the chain of reasons comes to an end. "What is the last thing one can say?" Nothing. Or rather: "This is what we do." At the foundation of language use is not an insight into necessary truth or logical structure but a shared animal and social existence. Language is, ultimately, part of natural history.
VII
Among the most important and most contested arguments in the Philosophical Investigations is the private language argument. Wittgenstein asks us to consider a hypothetical: suppose someone wanted to keep a diary of the recurrence of a certain sensation, calling it "S." Each time the sensation recurs, they write "S" in their diary. The question: can such a practice of "naming" a private sensation constitute a genuine language?
The private language argument says no, and the reasons are profound. For a word to have meaning, there must be a distinction between using it correctly and using it incorrectly. If I call this sensation "S" and that sensation "S," there must be a fact of the matter about whether my second use is the same as my first or different. But in a purely private language, the only check on correct use would be the speaker's own memory of what "S" was supposed to mean. And the memory cannot serve as a criterion: "whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right.'" The private language, without the possibility of a public check on correctness, cannot establish the normative distinction between correct and incorrect use that meaning requires.
The private language argument is not an argument that inner experience does not exist or that words for inner states are meaningless. It is an argument about the conditions of meaning. Words for inner states like "pain," "belief," "fear," and "desire" get their meaning from their use in public practices: from the contexts in which they are taught, from the behavior criteria that underlie their application, from the ways in which they function in social interactions around suffering, caring, and communicating. The word "pain" is not a private name for a private inner object; it is a public word whose application is anchored in the natural expressions and social responses to pain.
The Cartesian picture, in which each person has direct and certain access to their own mental states while having only indirect and uncertain access to others' mental states, gets things backwards. What is most public and most shared is what underlies the meaning of mental vocabulary; what is most private (the subjective quality of experience, what philosophers call qualia) is precisely what cannot be said. This is a version of the Tractatus's distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown, now expressed in terms of use rather than logical form: the inner life shows itself in behavior, expression, and practice, but cannot be captured in a purely private code.
The philosophical consequences are wide-ranging. The private language argument undermines the Cartesian foundationalist program (the attempt to ground all knowledge in the certainty of inner states), the possibility of a purely phenomenal vocabulary, and the Whorfian picture in which each speaker's private conceptual world is constructed by their language. It supports instead a picture of language, and of mind, as essentially social: grounded in shared practices, public criteria, and the natural history of human beings in community.
VIII
One of the deepest puzzles in the Philosophical Investigations concerns what it means to follow a rule. The puzzle was radicalized by Saul Kripke in his 1982 book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, which presented what has become known as the rule-following paradox, or "Kripkenstein" for short (since Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein is controversial and may represent Kripke's own view as much as Wittgenstein's).
Consider the arithmetic rule for addition. You have applied it many times: 2+2=4, 5+7=12, 68+57=125. Now someone asks you to compute 68+57 and you answer 125. You would say you are following the same rule you have always followed, and the rule tells you the answer is 125. But here is the puzzle: all your past applications of "addition" are consistent with a different rule, call it "quaddition," which gives the same results as addition for all numbers you have ever computed but differs for sufficiently large numbers. How do you know that what you mean by "plus" is addition and not quaddition?
The puzzle is not merely about arithmetic. It applies to every word you use. Every past use of the word "green" is consistent with a deviant interpretation under which it applied to things you would ordinarily call "green" but will now apply to something you would call "red." Nothing in your past use of "green," and nothing in your mental life, seems to determine that your next use should be "green" in the normal sense rather than in the deviant sense. The meaning of a word seems to be normative: it determines how the word ought to be used in new cases. But where does this normative determination come from?
Kripke presents this as a sceptical paradox to which there is no satisfactory direct solution: there is no fact about you that constitutes your meaning addition rather than quaddition. His "sceptical solution" is that meaning attributions are not descriptions of facts about individuals but are made within social practices: it is the practice of the community that determines what counts as following a rule correctly. Meaning is constitutively social: there is no such thing as meaning something privately, in isolation from a community that applies correctness conditions to your use.
Whether or not this is the right reading of Wittgenstein, the rule-following discussion points to something important: the normative dimension of language is not explicable in purely causal or descriptive terms. The rule does not determine its own future applications mechanically; it requires something, interpretation, practice, or community, to bridge the gap between the rule as stated or shown and its application in new cases. This gap is not a deficiency of rules but a feature of normativity itself. And it connects directly to the limits of language: if the application of any rule requires something beyond the rule itself, then the rules of language do not, by themselves, determine the uses to which language can be put.
IX
Martin Heidegger
1889 – 1976 · Being and Time, 1927; "Letter on Humanism," 1947
Heidegger was a German philosopher whose work represents a distinctive and deeply contested tradition within the philosophy of language. His political involvement with National Socialism casts a shadow over his legacy that has not been resolved. Philosophically, his account of language represents the most radical alternative to both the early and the late Wittgenstein: where Wittgenstein approached language from the side of logic and then from the side of practice, Heidegger approached it from the side of ontology, asking not what language means or how it is used but what language is in the most fundamental sense of "being."
Heidegger's most quoted statement about language is from the "Letter on Humanism" (1947): "Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells." This is not a metaphor in the Lakoff-Johnson sense: a mapping from a familiar domain (houses) to an unfamiliar one (language). It is an ontological claim. Heidegger means that Being, the fact that there is anything at all rather than nothing, "houses" itself in language: only in language, and through language, does Being disclose itself to human beings. Human existence (Dasein) is the being for whom Being is a question; and it is such a being precisely because it has language, the medium in which Being can come to presence.
Heidegger's relationship to the Wittgensteinian saying/showing distinction is illuminating. Both philosophers are pointing at something that language cannot fully contain: Wittgenstein calls it the mystical and grounds it in the logical structure of language; Heidegger calls it Being and grounds it in the ontological difference between beings (particular things that exist) and Being itself (the fact of existence as such). Neither can be explicitly stated without a kind of violence to what is being pointed at; both can only be approached, circled, gestured toward.
For Heidegger, the history of Western philosophy since Plato has been a progressive forgetting of the question of Being: a succession of answers to the question of what beings are, with the question of Being itself receding behind those answers. Language participates in this forgetting: the ordinary language of representation and calculation, which treats beings as objects available for use, is a language in which Being is forgotten. Poetry is the language in which Being is remembered: the language of Holderlin and Rilke, which does not represent objects but allows the world to appear in its full presence and mystery.
Jacques Derrida, working in the Heideggerian tradition but pushing it toward consequences Heidegger resisted, developed the critique of what he called logocentrism: the assumption, pervasive in Western philosophy, that there is a logos, a rational ground, a presence, a meaning, that language expresses or represents. Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) argued that this assumption systematically privileges speech over writing (since speech seems closer to the presence of the speaker and the intention behind the words) and presence over absence (since meaning seems to require a present speaker who means something).
Derrida's deconstruction does not claim that meaning does not exist or that texts have no determinate content; it claims that meaning is never simply present in a text but is produced through a play of differences and deferrals that cannot be arrested at a final, fully present meaning. This is expressed in his neologism differance (a French word combining the senses of "differ" and "defer," and deliberately misspelling difference in a way that is visible only in writing and inaudible in speech): meaning is produced by the play of differences between signs and deferred by the impossibility of any sign reaching a final, self-sufficient meaning. Language points beyond itself, but what it points toward is never simply available.
Whether or not Derrida's specific arguments are accepted, his work points to a genuine feature of language that Wittgenstein's later philosophy also identifies: the impossibility of stepping outside language to a viewpoint from which its relation to reality can be directly inspected. Both philosophers, from very different directions, arrive at the conclusion that there is no Archimedean point outside language from which language's adequacy to reality can be assessed. We are always already inside language; the limits of what we can say are the limits from inside which we operate, not a boundary visible from a position outside it.
X
Every tradition that has thought seriously about the limits of language has arrived, eventually, at silence. Not the silence of having nothing to say but the silence that is the appropriate response to what cannot be said. The Western philosophical tradition approaches this silence through the concept of the ineffable: what is beyond the reach of language because it exceeds the categories that language provides. Other traditions have developed more elaborate accounts of what lies beyond language and how to approach it.
Apophatic theology, the via negativa, is the tradition within Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Neo-Platonic thought that holds that God cannot be described in positive terms. Any positive statement about God ("God is good," "God is eternal," "God is omnipotent") attributes to God a property drawn from human experience and thereby limits God to what human concepts can reach. The apophatic tradition holds that this is presumptuous and false: God infinitely exceeds every human concept. The only accurate language about God is negative language: God is not finite, not evil, not temporal, not limited. Even the statement "God exists" is suspect, since existence as we understand it is a property of beings, and God is beyond being.
The apophatic tradition runs through Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth century CE), whose Mystical Theology is the most sustained philosophical account of divine incomprehensibility in the Christian tradition; through Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), who in the Guide for the Perplexed argued that all positive divine attributes are equivocal and misleading; through Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), whose mystical sermons push language toward its breaking point in their attempts to speak of the relation between the soul and the divine ground. In each case, the approach to what cannot be said produces language of extraordinary intensity, precisely because it is working at the edge of what language can do.
The Zen tradition in Buddhism developed an explicit practice around the limits of language: the koan. A koan is a question or statement that cannot be resolved through ordinary discursive reasoning. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" "What was your face before your parents were born?" "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The koan is not a riddle with a hidden answer. It is a device for bringing the practitioner's discursive mind to a halt, for exposing the limitations of the conceptual apparatus that ordinary language provides.
The Zen understanding of language is that it is a skillful means (upaya): a tool that can be used to point toward the truth, but that is not itself the truth and should not be mistaken for it. The tradition is full of warnings against taking language too literally: the finger that points at the moon is not the moon. The conceptual categories that language provides are tools for navigation in the world; they are not the final structure of reality. And the experience toward which Zen practice points, enlightenment or awakening, is by definition beyond what can be expressed in language, since it is the experience of reality prior to the conceptual partitioning that language performs.
The Tractarian insight and the Zen insight converge on the same observation from very different directions: what is most important is what language cannot reach. The early Wittgenstein identified ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical as the unsayable. The Zen tradition identifies awakening as what no concept can capture. The apophatic theologians identify the divine ground as beyond all positive characterization. These are not the same claim, and the traditions are not saying the same thing; but they are all doing something similar: using language to approach and mark the place where language ends.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his 1974 paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," raised a secular version of this question. The subjective character of experience, what it is like to be a bat using echolocation, what it is like to see the color red, what it is like to be in pain, seems to elude any third-person, objective characterization. No amount of neuroscientific description of the brain processes underlying pain captures what pain feels like from the inside. Nagel called this the "explanatory gap" between objective physical description and subjective phenomenal experience. It is a version of the Wittgensteinian saying/showing distinction applied to consciousness: the subjective character of experience shows itself from the first-person perspective but cannot be captured in the third-person language of objective description.
Frank Jackson's "knowledge argument," introduced in his 1982 paper on Mary the color scientist, presents the same gap in thought-experiment form. Mary knows all the physical facts about color vision: she knows everything neuroscience can tell her about the wavelengths of light, the structure of the retina, the processing of the visual cortex. But she has been raised in a black and white room and has never seen color. When she leaves the room and sees red for the first time, does she learn something new? If she does, then there are facts about experience that cannot be captured in objective physical language, and the limits of that language are the limits of the sayable in a domain that matters enormously.
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
Wittgenstein · Tractatus, 6.44
XI · Final Synthesis
This curriculum began with a claim: language is the medium in which thought exists, and understanding its structure is understanding the boundaries of one's own mind. Eight artifacts later, that claim can be examined with more precision, more nuance, and more genuine uncertainty than was possible at the start.
The red thread that connects the eight artifacts is the question of the relationship between language and what it is about. How does language attach to the world? What does it capture and what does it miss? How does it shape the minds that use it? Where does it end?
| Artifact | Question Posed | What It Found at the Limit |
|---|---|---|
| I. How Language Evolved | Where did language come from? | Language emerged between minds, not inside them. The biological and social origins cannot be disentangled. |
| II. The Structure of Language | What are languages made of? | Languages are vastly more diverse than any single speaker can see from inside one, yet constrained in ways that reveal shared cognitive architecture. |
| III. How Meaning Works | How does utterance become communication? | Most communication operates in the gap between what is said and what is meant, mediated by context, inference, and cooperative assumptions that cannot be fully stated. |
| IV. The Sapir-Whorf Question | Does language shape thought? | Yes, to a significant but limited degree. Language influences what is habitually attended to; it does not determine what is possible to think. |
| V. Writing and the Mind | What does writing do to thought? | Writing externalizes thought, making it available for analysis and revision. The literate mind operates with cognitive tools unavailable to the oral mind. |
| VI. Translation | Can meaning cross between languages? | Imperfectly and productively. The untranslatable marks the places where languages have attended differently to human experience. |
| VII. Rhetoric | How does language move people? | Through the simultaneous deployment of character, emotion, and argument, operating on cognitive systems that are not purely rational and that can be influenced at a level below explicit awareness. |
| VIII. The Limits | Where does language end? | At the edge of what can be shown rather than said. The limits are not fixed walls but horizons that recede as language extends and that can be approached but not passed. |
The two Wittgensteins, taken together, establish something that neither alone could establish. The early Wittgenstein showed that language has limits: there is a domain of what can be meaningfully said, and outside it is the unsayable, which shows itself or remains silent. The late Wittgenstein showed that there is no single language, and therefore no single set of limits: there are as many language games as there are human practices, and the boundaries between them are not sharp lines but fuzzy borders managed by ongoing social convention. Together, they suggest that the limits of language are both real (there are things language cannot say, truths it cannot reach) and plural (the limits are different in different practices, different traditions, different forms of life) and always shifting (the limits are not fixed in advance but are made and remade by the practices that constitute them).
The most important consequence of this combined view is that the limits of language are not the limits of thought in a simple sense. The things that cannot be said can often be shown: in actions, in art, in the quality of attention that a person brings to the world, in the silences that surround the things that matter most. Wittgenstein's final proposition, that whereof one cannot speak one must be silent, is not a counsel of despair but an instruction about the nature of what is most important. What is most important shows itself; it does not submit to discursive formulation. The person who understands this is not impoverished by the limits of what can be said but enriched by their awareness of what those limits surround.
Language is not merely a tool for communicating what we already think. It is the medium in which thought first becomes possible, in which experience first becomes articulable, in which the world first discloses itself to minds capable of asking questions. Its limits are the horizons of our cognitive world. Not its walls.
And the red thread, at last: every artifact in this curriculum has been an examination of a boundary. Where the boundary of language lies, what it looks like from the inside, how it changes with the medium and the practice and the culture and the grammar: these questions have turned out to be inseparable from each other, and from the more fundamental question of what it is to be a creature for whom the world exists in language at all.
The fly is in the fly-bottle. The work of philosophy, and the work of this curriculum, has been to help the fly see the glass.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951): Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921; Philosophical Investigations, 1953 (posth.); picture theory of meaning; saying and showing; language games; family resemblance; forms of life; meaning as use; private language argument; rule-following. · Gottlob Frege (1848–1925): Foundations of modern logic; sense and reference; compositionality; the logical analysis of natural language. · Bertrand Russell (1872–1970): Theory of descriptions; logical atomism; the logical form underlying surface grammar; collaboration with the early Wittgenstein. · Moritz Schlick (1882–1936): Leader of the Vienna Circle; logical positivism; the verification principle. · Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970): The Vienna Circle; logical syntax of language; the elimination of metaphysics; The Logical Structure of the World, 1928. · A. J. Ayer (1910–1989): Popularization of logical positivism in English; Language, Truth and Logic, 1936. · Karl Popper (1902–1994): Falsifiability as the criterion of science; critique of the verification principle; The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934. · Saul Kripke (b. 1940): The rule-following paradox; "Kripkenstein"; Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 1982. · Martin Heidegger (1889–1976): Language as the house of Being; the ontological difference; the forgetting of Being; poetry as the highest language; "Letter on Humanism," 1947. · Jacques Derrida (1930–2004): Logocentrism; deconstruction; differance; Of Grammatology, 1967. · Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late 5th century CE): Apophatic theology; the via negativa; Mystical Theology. · Moses Maimonides (1138–1204): Negative theology; equivocal divine attributes; Guide for the Perplexed. · Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328): Language pushed to its limits in mystical theology; the ground of the soul. · Thomas Nagel (b. 1937): "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," 1974; the explanatory gap; subjective experience beyond objective description. · Frank Jackson (b. 1943): The knowledge argument; Mary the color scientist; phenomenal knowledge beyond physical knowledge.
The sequence has moved from the origins of language through structure, meaning, literacy, translation, rhetoric, and finally the edge where language gives way to silence. All eight artifacts are now live.