Citations are from the Blackwell 3rd edition of Philosophical Investigations (2001).
Explanations come to an end somewhere.
—Pt. I, §1
(Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.)
—Pt. I, §6
Our language may be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
—Pt. I, §18
(Do not say: “There isn’t a ‘last’ definition”. That is just as if you chose to say: “There isn’t a last house on this road; one can always build an additional one”.)
—Pt. I, §29
We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name.
—Pt. I, §31
Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.
—Pt. I, §36
For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.
—Pt. I, §38
To the philosophical question: “Is the visual image of this tree composite, and what are its component parts?” the correct answer is: “That depends on what you understand by ‘composite’.” (And that is of course not an answer but a rejection of the question.)
—Pt. I, §47
There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.
—Pt. I, §50
Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,—but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship or these relationships, that we call them all “language”.
—Pt. I, §65
And if we carry this comparison still further it is clear that the degree to which the sharp picture can resemble the blurred one depends on the latter’s degree of vagueness. For imagine having to sketch a sharply defined picture ‘corresponding’ to a blurred one. In the latter there is a blurred red rectangle: for it you put down a sharply defined one. Of course—several such sharply defined rectangles can be drawn to correspond to the indefinite one.—But if the colours in the original merge without a hint of any outline won’t it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won’t you then have to say: “Here I might just as well draw a circle or a heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. Anything—and nothing—is right.”——And this is the position you are in if you look for definitions corresponding to our concepts in aesthetics or ethics.
—Pt. I, §77
(The fluctuation of scientific definitions: what to-day counts as an observed concomitant of a phenomenon will to-morrow be used to define it.)
—Pt. I, §79
Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another—unless we require it to prevent a misunderstanding. One might say: an explanation serves to remove or to avert a misunderstanding——one, that is, that would occur but for the explanation; not every one that I can imagine.
—Pt. I, §87
“Inexact” is really a reproach, and “exact” is praise. And that is to say that what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than what is more exact. Thus the point here is what we call “the goal”. Am I inexact when I do not give our distance from the sun to the nearest foot, or tell a joiner the width of a table to the nearest thousandth of an inch?
—Pt. I, §88
The ideal, as we think of it, is unshakable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe.—Where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.
—Pt. I, §103
We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.
—Pt. I, §109
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.
—Pt. I, §109
The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.
—Pt. I, §119
It is the business of philosophy, not to resolve a contradiction by means of a mathematical or logico-mathematical discovery, but to make it possible for us to get a clear view of the state of mathematics that troubles us: the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved. (And this does not mean that one is sidestepping a difficulty.)
—Pt. I, §125
Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.
—Pt. I, §126
What really comes before our mind when we understand a word?—Isn’t it something like a picture? Can’t it be a picture?
—Pt. I, §139
Notice, however, that there is no sharp distinction between a random mistake and a systematic one. That is, between what you are inclined to call “random” and what “systematic”.
—Pt. I, §143
Perhaps you will say here: to have got the system (or, again, to understand it) can’t consist in continuing the series up to this or that number: that is only applying one’s understanding. The understanding itself is a state which is the source of the correct use.
—Pt. I, §146
In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process.
(A pain’s growing more or less; the hearing of a tune or a sentence: these are mental processes.)
—Pt. I, §154
But why do you say that we felt a causal connection? Causation is surely something established by experiments, by observing a regular concomitance of events for example. So how could I say that I felt something which is established by experiment?
—Pt. I, §169
(This role [of words like “understanding” in our language] is what we need to understand in order to resolve philosophical paradoxes. And hence definitions usually fail to resolve them; and so, a fortiori does the assertion that a word is ‘indefinable’.)
—Pt. I, §182
But when we reflect that the machine could also have moved differently it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual machine. As if it were not enough for the movements in question to be empirically verified in advance, but that they had to be really—in a mysterious sense—already present. And it is quite true: the movement of the machine-as-symbol is predetermined in a different sense from that in which the movement of any actual machine is predetermined.
—Pt. I, §193
“But how can a rule shew me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule.”—That is not what we ought to say, but rather: any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.
—Pt. I, §198
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.
—Pt. I, §199
Teaching which is not meant to apply to anything but the examples given is different from that which ‘points beyond’ them.
—Pt. I, §208
“A thing is identical with itself.”—There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted.
—Pt. I, §216
“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.
—Pt. I, §241
(Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one.)
—Pt. I, §249
Or is it like this: the word “red” means something known to everyone; and in addition, for each person, it means something known only to him?
—Pt. I, §273
“But in a fairy tale the pot too can see and hear!” (Certainly; but it can also talk.)
—Pt. I, §282
To use a word without justification does not mean to use it without right.
—Pt. I, §289
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and designation’ the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.
—Pt. I, §293
The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.
—Pt. I, §304
What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
—Pt. I, §309
The lightning-like thought may be connected with the spoken thought as the algebraic formula is with the sequence of numbers which I work out from it.
—Pt. I, §320
The law of the excluded middle says here: It must either look like this, or like that. So it really—and this is a truism—says nothing at all, but gives us a picture. And the problem ought now to be: does reality accord with the picture or not? And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how—but it does not do so, just because we do not know how it is to be applied. Here saying “There is no third possibility” or “But there can’t be a third possibility!”—expresses our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture: a picture which looks as if it must already contain both the problem and its solution, while all the time we feel that it is not so.
—Pt. I, §352
Essence is expressed in grammar.
—Pt. I, §371
You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language.
—Pt. I, §384
Think of a picture of a landscape, an imaginary landscape with a house in it.—Someone asks “Whose house is that?”—The answer, by the way, might be “It belongs to the farmer who is sitting on the bench in front of it”. But then he cannot for example enter his house.
—Pt. I, §398
What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities, however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes.
—Pt. I, §415
Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a window as a swastika, for example.
—Pt. I, §420
In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed.
—Pt. I, §426
It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact.
—Pt. I, §445
My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
—Pt. I, §464
Justification by experience comes to an end. If it did not it would not be justification.
—Pt. I, §485
To say “This combination of words makes no sense” excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language.
—Pt. I, §499
One wants to say: a significant sentence is one which one can not merely say, but also think.
—Pt. I, §511
Don’t take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, occupy our minds.
(“Don’t take it as a matter of course” means: find it surprising, as you do some things which disturb you. Then the puzzling aspect of the latter will disappear, by your accepting this fact as you do the other.)
((The transition from patent nonsense to something which is disguised nonsense.))
—Pt. I, §524
Seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, willing, are not the subject of psychology in the same sense as that in which the movements of bodies, the phenomena of electricity etc., are the subject of physics. You can see this from the fact that the physicist sees, hears, thinks about, and informs us of these phenomena, and the psychologist observes the external reactions (the behavior) of the subject.
—Pt. I, §571
A main cause of philosophical disease—an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example.
—Pt. I, §593
When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge of the future they always forget the fact of the prediction of one’s own voluntary movements.
—Pt. I, §629
And memories etc., in language, are not mere threadbare representations of the real experiences; for is what is linguistic not an experience?
—Pt. I, §649
The question is not one of explaining a language-game by means of our experiences, but of noting a language-game.
—Pt. I, §655
“When I teach someone the formation of the series…I surely mean him to write…at the hundredth place.”—Quite right; you mean it. And evidently without necessarily even thinking of it. This shews you how different the grammar of the verb “to mean” is from that of “to think”. And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity! Unless, that is, one is setting out to produce confusion.
—Pt. I, §693
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Pt. II.iv
It is like the relation: physical objects—sense-impressions. Here we have two different language-games and a complicated relation between them.—If you try to reduce their relations to a simple formula you go wrong.
—Pt. II.v
“The mind seems able to give a word meaning”—isn’t this as if I were to say “The carbon atoms in benzene seem to lie at the corners of a hexagon”? But this is not something that seems to be so; it is a picture.
—Pt. II.vii
Again: I do not ‘observe’ what only comes into being through observation. The object of observation is something else.
—Pt. II.ix
The question is: “In what sort of context does it occur?”
—Pt. II.ix
If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person present indicative.
—Pt. II.x
Don’t regard a hesitant assertion as an assertion of hesitancy.
—Pt. II.x
What we have rather to do is to accept the everyday language-game, and to note false accounts of the matter as false. The primitive language-game which children are taught needs no justification; attempts at justification need to be rejected.
—Pt. II.xi (p. 171)
Do I really see something different each time [I look at the double cross], or do I only interpret what I see in a different way? I am inclined to say the former. But why?—To interpret is to think, to do something; seeing is a state.
—Pt. II.xi (p. 181)
The words “It’s on the tip of my tongue” are no more the expression of an experience than “Now I know how to go on!”—We use them in certain situations, and they are surrounded by behaviour of a special kind, and also by some characteristic experiences. In particular they are frequently followed by finding the word.
—Pt. II.xi (p. 187)
Let the use of words teach you their meaning. (Similarly one can often say in mathematics: let the proof teach you what was being proved.)
—Pt. II.xi (p. 187)
If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.
—Pt. II.xi (p. 190)
Mathematik ist freilich, in einem Sinne, eine Lehre,—aber doch auch ein Tun. Und ‘falsche Züge’ kann es nur als Ausnahme geben. Denn würde, was wir jetzt so nennen, die Regel, so wäre damit das Spiel aufgehoben, worin sie falsche Züge sind.
But what would this mean: “Even though everybody believed that twice two was five it would still be four”?—For what would it be like for everybody to believe that?—Well, I could imagine, for instance, that people had a different calculus, or a technique which we should not call “calculating”. But would it be wrong? (Is a coronation wrong? To beings different from ourselves it might look extremely odd.)
Of course, in one sense mathematics is a branch of knowledge,—but still it is also an activity. And ‘false moves’ can only exist as the exception. For if what we now call by that name became the rule, the game in which they were false moves would have been abrogated.
—Pt. II.xi (p. 193)
What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words.
—Pt. II.xi (p. 193)
Remembering has no experiential content.
—Pt. II.xiii
An investigation is possible in connexion with mathematics which is entirely analogous to our investigation of psychology. It is just as little a mathematical investigation as the other is a psychological one. It will not contain calculations, so it is not for example logistic. It might deserve the name of an investigation of the ‘foundations of mathematics’.
—Pt. II.xiv