Philosophical Investigations is not exactly hard to read, but the style of argument Wittgenstein uses is very slippery. He's trying to poke holes in the conceptual pictures and assumptions we use, and which often lead us to nonsense or philosophical debates that can be dissolved through conceptual clarification. It's nothing less than a full on broadside against an entire tradition of philosophical thought extending back to Plato.
I would say the first 100 or so pages of the book are a form of conceptual cartography around language. Later, he uses that "grammatical analysis" to look at psychology, vision, pain, and many other topics.
There are a lot of incredibly consequential arguments and thought experiments in the book, but you can pare them down to some generalizations:
- Language is a form of behavior.
- Language is public and cannot be fundamentally private. As are rules and rule following.
- For almost every case, meaning is use in a form of life (there are some caveats, like color, which also rely on an ostensive definition). An explanation of the "grammar" of a word, is an explanation of a rule for the use of the word in a particular context.
- Understanding is akin to an ability.
- Many of our complex mental and cognitive and cogitative abilities, are manifest in our behavior, the most rich and complex being language.
- Fundamental skepticism, of a Cartesian sort, is nonsense. Humans are social animals with the ability for an enormously complex language rich in concepts; the mind/body, inside/outside, distinction is a false picture that leads to nonsense. Do not mistake the personal for the private.
I would say the first 100 or so pages of the book are a form of conceptual cartography around language. Later, he uses that "grammatical analysis" to look at psychology, vision, pain, and many other topics.
There are a lot of incredibly consequential arguments and thought experiments in the book, but you can pare them down to some generalizations:
- Language is a form of behavior.
- Language is public and cannot be fundamentally private. As are rules and rule following.
- For almost every case, meaning is use in a form of life (there are some caveats, like color, which also rely on an ostensive definition). An explanation of the "grammar" of a word, is an explanation of a rule for the use of the word in a particular context.
- Understanding is akin to an ability.
- Many of our complex mental and cognitive and cogitative abilities, are manifest in our behavior, the most rich and complex being language.
- Fundamental skepticism, of a Cartesian sort, is nonsense. Humans are social animals with the ability for an enormously complex language rich in concepts; the mind/body, inside/outside, distinction is a false picture that leads to nonsense. Do not mistake the personal for the private.