Title:  Ts-310: Brown Book (WL) - Diplomatic transcription [Draft]
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Author:  Ludwig Wittgenstein
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1.
Augustine, in describing his learning of language, says that
he was taught to speak by learning the names of things. It
is clear that whoever says this has in mind the way in which
a child learns such words as “man”, “sugar”, “table”, etc.
He does not primarily think of such words as “today”, “not”,
“but”, “perhaps”.
     

      Suppose a man described a game of chess, without mentioning
the existence and operations of the pawns. His description
of the game as a natural phenomenon will be incomplete. On
the other hand we may say that he has completely described a
simpler game. In this sense we can say that Augustine's des-
cription of learning the language was correct for a simpler
language than ours. Imagine this language:–
1).   Its function is the communication between a builder A &
his man B. B has to reach A building stones. There are cubes,
bricks, slabs, beams, columns. The language consists of the
words “cube”, “brick”, “slab”, “column”. A calls out one of
these words, upon which B brings a stone of a certain shape.
Let us imagine a society in which this is the only system of
language. The child learns this language from the grown-ups
by being trained to its use. I am using the word “trained”
in a way strictly analogous to that in which we talk of an anim-
al being trained to do certain things. It is done by means of
example, reward, punishment, and such like. Part of this train-
ing is that we point to a building stone, direct the attention
of the child towards it, & pronounce a word. I will call
this procedure demonstrative teaching of words. In the actual
2.
use of this language, one man calls out the words as orders,
the other acts according to them. But learning and teaching
this language will contain this procedure: The child just
“names” things, that is, he pronounces the words of the lan-
guage when the teacher points to the things. In fact, there
will be a still simpler exercise: The child repeats words which
the teacher pronounces.
     

      (Note: Objection: The word “brick” in language 1) has not
the meaning which it has in our language. – This is true if it
means that in our language there are usages of the word “brick!”
different from our usages of this word in language 1). But
don't we sometimes use the word “brick!” in just this way? Or
should we say that when we use it, it is an elliptical sentence,
a shorthand for “Bring me a brick”? Is it right to say that if
we say “brick!” we mean “Bring me a brick”? Why should I trans-
late the expression “brick!” into the expression, “Bring me a
brick”? And if they are synonymous, why shouldn't I say: If
he says “brick!” he means “brick!” …? Or: Why shouldn't he
be able to mean just “brick!” if he is able to mean “Bring me
a brick”, unless you wish to assert that while he says aloud
“brick!” he as a matter of fact always says in his mind, to
himself, “Bring me a brick”? But what reason could we have to
assert this? Suppose someone asked: If a man gives the order,
“Bring me a brick”, must he mean it as four words, or can't he
mean it as one composite word synonymous with the one word
“brick!”? One is tempted to answer: He means all four words if
in his language he uses that sentence in contrast with other
<…>3.
sentences in which these words are used, such as, for instance,
“Take these two bricks away”. But what if I asked, “But how
is his sentence contˇrasted with these others? Must he have
thought them simultaneously, or shortly before or after, or is
it sufficiaent that he should have one time learnt them, etc.?”
When we have asked ourselves this question, it appears that it
is irrelevant which of these alternatives is the case. And
we are inclined to say that all that is really relevant is
that these contrasts should exist in the system of language
which he is using, and that they need not in any sense be present
in his mind when he utters his sentence. Now compare this
conclusion with our original question. When we asked it, we
seemed to ask a question about the state of mind of the man who
says the sentence, whereas the idea of meaning which we arrived
at in the end was not that of a state of mind. We think of the
meaning of signs sometimes as states of mind of the man using
them, sometimes as the rôle which these signs are playing in a
system of language.
¤ William James speaks of specific feelings
accompanying the use of such words as “&”, “if”, “or”. And
there is no doubt that at least certain gestures are often con-
nected with such words, as a collecting gesture with “and”, &
a dismissing gesture with “not”. And there obviously are
visual and muscular sensations connected with these gestures.
On the other hand it is clear enough that these sensations do
not accompany every use of the word “not”, and “&”. If in some
language the word “but” meant what “not” means in English, it
is clear that we should not compare the meanings of these two
3a.
¤
      Insert:     The connection between these two ideas is that the
mental experiences which accompany the use of a sign undoubt-
edly are caused by our usage of the sign in a particular
system of language.
34.
words by comparing the sensations which they produce. Ask
yourself what means we have of finding out the feelings which
they produce in different people and on different occasions.
Ask yourself: “When I said, ‘Give me an apple & a pear, &
leave the room’, had I the same feeling when I pronounced the
two words ‘&’?” But we do not deny that the people who use the
word “but” as “not” is used in English will broadly speaking
have similar sensations accompanying the word “but” as the Eng-
lish have when they use “not”. And the word “but” in the two
languages will on the whole be accompanied by different sets of
experiences.)
2).   Let us now look at an extension of language 1). The
builder's man knows by heart the series of words from one to
ten. On being given the order, “Five slabs!”, he goes to
where the slabs are kept, says the words from one to five,
takes up a plate for each word, & carries them to the builder.
Here both the parties use the language by speaking the words.
Learning the numerals by heart will be one of the essential
features of learning this language. The use of the numerals
will again be taught demonstratively. But now the same word,
e.g., “three”, will be taught either by pointing to slabs, or
to bricks, or to columns, etc.. And on the other hand, different
numerals, will be taught by pointing to groups of stones of the
same shape.
     

      (Remark: We stressed the importance of learning the series
of numerals by heart because there was no feature comparable to
this in the learning of language 1). And this shews us that by
introducing numerals we have introduced an entirely different
<…>5.
kind of instrument into our language.
The difference of kind
is much more obvious when we contemplate such a simple example
than when we look at our ordinary language with innumerable
kinds of words all looking more or less alike when they stand
in the dictionary. –
     

      What have the demonstrative explanations of the numerals
in common with those of the words “slab”, “column”, etc. except
a gesture and pronouncing the words? The way such a gesture
is used in the two cases is different. This difference is
blurred if one says, “In one case we point to a shape, in the
other we point to a number”. The difference becomes obvious
and clear only when we contemplate a complete example (i.e.,
the example of a language completely worked out in detail).)
3).   Let us introduce a new instrument of communication, –
a proper name. This is given to a particular object (a par-
ticular building stone) by pointing to it and pronouncing the
name. If A calls the name, B brings the object. The demon-
strative teaching of a proper name is different again from the
demonstrative teaching in the cases 1[(|)] & 2).
     

      (Remark: This difference does not lie, however, in the act
of pointing and pronouncing the word or in any mental act
(meaning)? accompanying it, but in the rôle which the demonstrat-
ion (pointing & pronouncing) plays in the whole training and in
the use which is made of it in the practice of communication
by means of this language. One might think that the difference
could be described by saying that in the different cases we
point to different kinds of objects. But suppose I point with
6.
my hand to a blue jersey. How does pointing to its colour
differ from pointing to its shape? – We are inclined to say
the difference is that we mean something different in the two
cases. And “meaning” here is to be some sort of process tak-
ing place while we point. What particularly tempts us to this
view is that a man on being asked whether he pointed to the
colour or the shape is, at least in most cases, able to answer
this & to be certain that his answer is correct. If on the
other hand, we look for two such characteristic mental acts as
meaning the colour and meaning the shape, etc., we aren't able
to find any, or at least none which must always accompany point-
ing to colour, pointing to shape, respectively. We have only
a rough idea of what it means to concentrate one's attention
on the colour as opposed to the shape, or vice versa. The
difference one might say does not lie in the act of demonstrat-
ion, but rather in the surrounding of the that act in the use of the
language.)

4).   On being ordered “This slab!”, B brings the plate to which
A points. On being ordered, “Plate, there!”, he carries a
plate to the place indicated. Is the word “there” taught dem-
onstrativel[t|y]? Yes & no! When a person is trained in the use
of the word “there”, the teacher will in training him make the
pointing gesture and pronounce the word “there”. But should
we say that thereby he gives a place the name “there”? Rem-
ember that the pointing gesture in this case is part of the prac-
tice of communication itself.
     

      (Remark: It has been suggested that such words as “there”,
7.
“here”, “now”, “this” are the “real proper names” as opposed
to what in ordinary life we call proper names, & in the view I
am referring to, can only be called so crudely. There is a
widespread tendency to regard what in ordinary life is called
a proper name only as a rough approximation of what ideally
could be called so. Compare Russell's idea of the “individual”.
He talks of individuals as the ultimate costituents of reality,
but says that it is difficult to say which things are individ-
uals. The idea is that further analysis has to reveal this.
We, on the other hand, introduced the idea of a proper name in
a language in which it was applied to what in ordinary life we
call “objects”, “things” (“building stones”).
     

      – “What does the word ‘exactness’ mean? Is it real
exactness if your are supposed to come to tea at 4.30 and come
when a good clock strikes 4.30? Or would it only be exactness
if you began to open the door at the moment the clock begins to
strike? But how is this moment to be defined and how is “be-
ginning to open the door” to be defined? Would it be correct
to say, ‘It is difficult to say what real exactness is, for all
we know is only rough approximations’?”)

5).   Question and answer: A asks, “How many plates?” B counts
them and answers with the numeral.
     

      Systems of communication as for instance 1), 2), 3), 4),
5) we shall call “language-games”. They are more or less akin
to what in ordinary language we call games. Children are
taught their native language by means of such games, and here
they even have the entertaining character of games. We are not,
8.
however, regarding the language-games which we describe as
incomplete parts of a language, but as languages complete in
themselves, as complete systems of human communication. To
keep this point of view in mind, it very often is useful to
imagine such a simple language to be the entire system of comm-
unication of a tribe in a primitive state of society. Think
of primitive arithmetics of such tribes.
     

      When the boy or grown-up learns learns what one might call
special technical languages, e.g., the use of charts and diag-
rams, descriptive geometry, chemical symbolism, etc., he learns
more language-games. (Remark: The picture we have of the lan-
guage of the grown-up is that of a nebulous mass of language,
his mother tongue, surrounded by discreet and more or less
clear cut language games, the technical languages.)
6).   Asking for the name: we introduce new forms of building
stones. B points to one of them & asks, “What is this?”; A
answers, “This is a …”. Later on A calls out this new word,
say “arch”, & B brings the stone. The words, “This is a …”
together with the pointing gesture we shall call ostensive
explanation or ostensive definition. In case 6) a generic
name was explained, in actual fact, the name of a shape. But
we can ask analogously for the proper name of a particular ob-
ject, for the name of a colour, of a number numeral, of a direction.
     

      (Remark: Our use of expressions like “names of numbers”,
“names of colours”, “names of materials”, “names of nations” may
spring from two different sources. <a)> One is that we might imag-
ine the functions of proper names, numerals, words for colours,
9.
etc. to be much more alike than they actually are. If we do
so we are tempted to think that the function of every word is
more or less like the function of a proper name of a person,
or such generic names as “table”, “chair”, “door”, etc. The
<b)> second source is this, that if we see how fundamentally differ-
ent the functions of such words as “table”, “chair”, etc. are
from those of proper names, and how different from either the
functions of, say, the names of colours, we see no reason why
we shouldn't speak of names of numbers or names of directions
either, not by way of saying some such thing as “numbers and
directions are just different forms of objects”, but rather
by way of stressing the analogy which lies in the lack of ana-
logy between the functions of the words “chair” & “Jack” on
the one hand, & “east” and “Jack” on the other hand.)
7).   B has a table in which written signs are placed opposite
to pictures of objects (say, a table, a chair, a tea-cup, etc.).
A writes one of the signs, B looks for it in the table, looks or
points with his finger from the written sign to the picture
opposite, & fetches the object which the picture represents.
     

      Let us now look at the different kinds of signs which
we have introduced. First let us distinguish between sentences
and words. A sentence I will call every complete sign in a
language-game, its constituent signs are words. (This is
merely a rough and general remark about the way I will use the
words “proposition” and “word”). A proposition may consist of
only one word. In 1) the signs “brick!”, “column!” are the
sentences. In 2) a sentence consists of two words. Accord-
10.
ing to the rôle which propositions play in a language-game,
we distinguish between orders, questions, explanations, descrˇip-
tions, & so on.
8).   If in a language-game similar to 1) A calls out an order:
“slab, column, brick!” which is obeyed by B by bringing a slab,
a column & a brick, we might here talk of three propositions,
or of one only. If on the other hand,
9)   the order of words shews B the order in which to bring the
building stones, we shall say that A calls out a proposition
consisting of three words. If the command in this case took
the form, “Slab, then column, then brick!” we should say that
it consisted of four words (not of five). Amongst the words
we see groups of words with similar functions. We can easily
see a similarity in the use of the words “one”, “two”, “tree”,
etc. & again one in the use of “slab”, “column” & “brick”, etc.,
& thus we distinguish parts of speech. In 8) all words of
the proposition belonged to the same part of speech.
10).   The order in which B had to bring the stones in 9) could
have been indicated by the use of the ordinals thus: “Second,
column; first, slab; third, brick!”. Here we have a case in
which what was the function of the order of words in one lan-
guage-game is the function of particular words in another.
     

      Reflections such as the preceding will show us the infin-
ite variety of the functions of words in propositions, and it is
curious to compare what we see in our examples with the simple
& rigid rules which logicians give for the construction of prop-
ositions.
If we group words together according to the simil-
arity of their functions, thus distinguishing parts of speech,
11.
it is easy to see that many different ways of classification
can be adopted. We could indeed easily imagine a reason for
not classing the word “one” together with “two”, “three”, etc.,
as follows:
11).   Consider this variation of our language-game 2). Ins-
tead of calling out, “One slab!”, “One cube!”, etc., A just
calls “slab!”, “cube!”, etc., the use of the other numerals
being as described in 2). Suppose that a man accustomed to
this form (11)) of communication was introduced to the use of
the word “one” as described in 2). We can easily imagine that
he would refuse to classify “one” with the numerals “2”, “3”,
etc..
     

      (Remark: Think of the reasons for and against classifying
“O” with the other cardinals. “Are black and white colours?”
In which cases would you be inclined to say so & which not? –
Words can in many ways be compared to chess men. Think of the
several ways of distinguishing different kind of pieces in the
game of chess (e.g., pawns & “officers”).

     Remember the phrase, “two or more”.)
     

      It is natural for us to call geestures, as those employed
in 4), or pictures as in 7), elements or instruments of language.
(We talk sometimes of a language of gestures.) The pictures
in 7) & other instruments of language which have a similar
function I shall call patterns. (This explanation, as others
which we have given, is vague, and meant to be vague.) We
may say that words and patterns have different kinds of functions.
When we make use of a pattern we compare something with it, e.g.,
12.
q a chair with the picture of a chair. We did not compare a
slab with the word “slab”. In introducing the distinction,
“word, pattern”, the idea was not to set up a final logical
duality. We have only singled out two characteristic kinds
of instruments from the variety of instruments in our language.
We shall call “one”, “two”, “three”, etc. words. If instead
of these signs we used “-”, “--”, “---”, “----“, we might call
these patterns. Suppose in a language the numerals were “one”,
“one one”, “one one one”, etc., should we call “one” a word or
a pattern? The same element may in one place be used as word
& in another as pattern. A circle might be the name for an
ellipse, or on the other hand a pattern with which the ellipse
is to be compared by a particular method of projection. Con-
sider also these two systems of expression:
12).   <…> A gives B an order consisting of two written symbols,
the first an irregularly shaped patch of a geometrical figure, say
a circle. B brings an object of this outline and that colour,
say a circular green object.
13).   A gives B an order consisting of one symbol, a geomet-
rical figure painted a particular colour, say a green circle.
B brings him a green circular object. In 12) patterns corres-
pond to our names of colours and other patterns to our names of
shape. The symbols in 13) cannot be regarded as combinations
of two such elements. A word in inverted commas can be called
a pattern.
Thus in the sentence, “He said, ‘Go to hell’”,
‘Go to hell’ is a pattern of what he said. Compare these cases:
13.
a) Someone says, “I whistled … (whistling a tune) ; b) Some-
one writes, “I whistled ”. An onomatopoetic word like
“rustling” may be called a pattern. We call a very great
variety of processes “comparing an object w[e|i]th a pattern”.
We comprise many kinds of symbols under the name “pattern”.
In 7) B compares a picture in the table with the objects he has
before him. But what does comparing a picture with the object
consist in? Suppose the table shewed: a) a picture of a
hammer, of pincers, of a saw, of a chisel; b) on the other hand,
pictures of twenty different kinds of butterflies. Imagine
what the comparison in these cases would consist in, & note
the difference. Compare with these cases a third case c)
where the pictures in the table represent building stones drawn
to scale, & the comparing has to be done with ruler and comp-
asses. Suppose that B's task is to bring a piece of cloth of
the colour of the sample. How are the colours of sample and
cloth to be compared? Imagine a series of different cases:
14).   A shews the sample to B, upon which B goes and fetches
the material “from memory”.
15).   A gives B the sample, B looks from the sample to the
materials on the shelves from which he has to choose.
16).   B lays the sample on each bolt of material & chooses
that one which he can't distinguish from the sample, for which
the difference between the sample & the material seems to vanish.
17).   Imagine on the other hand that the order has been, “Bring
a material slightly darker than this sample”. In 14) I said
that B fetches the material “from memory”, which is using a
14.
common form of expression. But what might happen in such a
case of comparing “from memory” is of the greatest variety.
Imagine a few instances:
14a).   B has a memory image before his mind's eye when he goses
for the material. He alternately looks at materials and re-
calls his image. He goes through this process with, say, five
of the bolts, in some instances saying to himself, “Too dark”,
in some instances saying to himself, “Too light”. At the
fifth bolt he stops, says, “That's it”, & takes it from the
shelf.
14b).   No memory image is before B's eye. He looks at four
bolts, shaking his head each time, feeling some sort of mental
tension. On reaching the fifth bolt, this tension relaxes,
he nods his head, & takes the bolt down.
14c).   B goes to the shelf without a memory image, looks at
five bolts one after the other, takes the fifth bolt from the
shelf.
      “But this can't be all comparing consists in”.
     

      When we call these three preceding cases cases of com-
paring from memory, we feel that their description is in a sense
unsatisfactory, or incomplete. We are inclined to say that the
description has left out the essential feature of such a pro-
cess & given us accessory features only. The essential feature
it seems would be what one might call a specific experience of
comparing & of recognizing. Now it is clear queer that on closely
looking at cases of comparing, it is very easy to see a great
number of activities and states of mind, all more or less charac-
15.
teristic of the act of comparing. This in fact is so, whether
we speak of comparing from memory or of comparing by means of
a sample before our eyes. We know a vast number of such proc-
esses, processes similar to each other in a vast number of dif-
ferent ways. We hold pieces whose colours we want to compare
together or near each other for a longer or shorter period,
look at them alternately or simultaneously, place them under
different lights, say different things while we do so, have mem-
ory images, feelings of tension & relaxation, satisfaction &
dissatisfaction, the various feelings of strain in and around
our eyes accompanying prolonged gazing at the same object, &
all possible combinations of these & many other experiences.
The more such cases we observe & the closer we look at them, the
more doubtful we feel about finding one particular mental exp-
erience characteristic of comparing.
In fa[s|c]t, if after you
had scrutinized a number of such closely, I admitted that there
existed a peculiar mental experience which you might call the
experience of comparing, & that if you insisted, I should be
willing to adopt the word “comparing” only for cases in which
this peculiar feeling had occurred, you would now feel that the
assumption of such a peculiar experience had lost i[y|t]s point,
because this experience was placed side by side with a vast num-
ber of other experiences which after we have scrutinized the
cases seems to be that which really constitutes what connects all
the cases of comparing. For thise “specific experience” we had
been looking for was meant to have played the rôle which has
been assumed by the mass of experiences revealed to us by our
16.
scrutiny: We never wanted the specific experience to be just
one among a number of more or less characteristic experiences.
(One might say that there are two ways of looking at this mat-
ter, one as it were, at close quarters, the other as though
from a distance and through the medium of a particular peculiar atmos-
phere.) In fact we have found that the use which we really
make of the word “comparing” is different from that which look-
ing at it from far away we were led to expect. We find that
what connects all the cases of comparing is a vast number of
overlapping similarities, and as soon as we see this, we feel
no longer compelled to say that there must be some one feature
common to them all. What ties the ship to the wharf is a
rope, and the rope consists of fibres, but it does not get its
strength from any fibre which runs through it from one end to
the other, but from the fact that there is a vast number of
fibres overlapping.
     

      “But surely in case 14c) B acted entirely automatically.
If all that happened was really what was described there, he
did not know why he chose the bolt he did choose. He had no
reason for choosing it. If he chose the right one, he did it
as a machine might have done it”. Our first answer is that we
did not deny that B in case 14c) had what we should call a per-
sonal experience, for we did not say that he didn't see the mat-
erials from which he chose or that which he chose, nor that he
didn't have muscular and tactile sensations and such like while
he did it. Now what would such a reason which justified his
choice and made it non-automatic be like? (i.e. : What do we
17.
imagine it to be like?) I suppose we should say that the
opposite of automatic comparing, as it were, the ideal case of
conscious comparing, was that of having a clear memory image
before our mind's eye or of seeing a real sample & of having a
specific feeling of not being able to distinguish in a partic-
ular way between these samples and the material chosen. I
suppose that this peculiar sensation is the reason, the justif-
ication, for the choice. This specific feeling, one might say,
connects the two experiences of seeing the sample, on the one
hand, and the material on the other. But if so, what connects
this specific experience with either? We don't deny that such
an experience might intervene. But looking at it as we did
just now, the distinction between automatic and non-automatic
appears no longer clear-cut and final as it did at first. We
don't mean that this distinction loses its practical value in
particular cases, e.g., if asked under particular circumstances,
“Did you take this bolt from the shelf automatically, or did you
think about it?”, we may be justified in saying that we did
not act automatically and give as a reason explanation we had looked
at the material carefully, had tried to recall the memory image
of the pattern, & had uttered to ourselves doubts and decisions.
This may in the particular case be taken to distinguish automat-
ic from non-automatic. In another case however we may distin-
guish between an automatic & a non-automatic way of the appear-
ance of a memory image, and so on.
     

      If our case 14c) troubles you, you may be inclined to say:
“But why did he bring just this bolt of material? How has he
18.
recognized it as the right one? What by? – If you ask “why”,
do you ask for the cause or for the reason? If for the cause,
it is easy enough to think up a physiological or psychological
hypothesis which explains this choice under the given conditions.
It is the task of the experimental sciences to test such hypoth-
eses. If on the other hand you ask for a reason the answer is,
“There need not have been a reason for the choice. A reason
is a step preceding the step of the choice. But why should
every step be preceded by another one?”
     

      “But then B didn't really recognize the material as the
right one”. – You nee[e|d]n't reckon 14c) among the cases of recog-
nizing, but if you have become aware of the fact that the proc-
esses which we call processes of recognition form a vast family
with overlapping similarities, you will probably feel not dis-
inclined to include 14c) in this family, too. – “But doesn't B
in this case lack the criterion by which he can recognize the
material? In 14a), e.g., he had the memory image and he recog-
nized the material he looked for by its agreement with the image”.
– But had he also a picture of this agreement before him, a
picture with which he could compare the agreement between the
pattern and the bolt to see whether it was the right one? And,
on the other hand, couldn't he have been given such a picture?
Suppose, e.g., that A wished B to remember that what was wanted
was a bolt exactly like the sample, not, as perhaps in other
cases, a material slightly darker than the pattern. Couldn't
A in this case have given to B an example of the agreement
required by giving him two pieces of the same colour (e.g.,
19.
as a kind of reminder)? Is any such link between the order &
its execution necessarily the last one? – And if you say that
in 14b) at least he had the relaxing of the tension by which
to recognize the right material, had he to have an image of
this relaxation about him to recognize it as that by which the
right material was to be recognized? –
     

      “But supposing B brings the bolt, as in 14c), & on compar-
ing it with the pattern it turns out to be the wrong one?” –
But couldn't that have happened in all the other cases as well?
Suppose in 14a) the bolt which B brought back was found not to
match with the pattern. Wouldn't we in some such cases say
that his memory image had changed, in others that the pattern
or the material had changed, in others again that the light had
changed? It is not difficult to invent cases, imagine circ-
umstances, in which each of these judgements would be made. –
“But isn't there after all an essential difference between the
cases 14a) & 14c)?– Certainly! Just that pointed out in the
description of these cases. –
     

      In 1) B learnt to bring a building stone on hearing the
word “column!” called out. We could imagine what happened in
such a case to be this: In B's mind the word called out brought
up an image of a column, say; the training had, as we should
say, established this association. B takes up that building
stone which conforms to his image. – But was this necessarily
what happened? If the training could bring it about that the
idea or image – automatically – arose in B's mind, why shouldn't
it bring about B's actions without the intervention of an image?
20.
This would only come to a slight variation of the associative
mechanism. Bear in mind that the image which is brought up by
the word is not arrived at by a rational process (but if it is,
this only pushes our argument further back), but that this case
is strictly comparable with that of a mechanism in which a but-
ton is pressed and an indicator plate appears. In fact this
sort of mechanism can be used instead of that of association.
     

      Mental images of colours, shapes, sounds, etc. etc., which
play a rôle in communication by means of language we put in the
same category with patches of colour actually seen, sounds
heard.
18[(|)].   The object of the training in the use of tables (as in
7)) may be not only to teach the use of one particular table,
but it may be to enable the pupil to use or construct himself
tables with new coordinations of written signs & pictures.
Suppose the first table a person was trained to use contained
the four words “hammer”, “pincers”, “saw”, “chisel” & other
corresponding pictures. We might now add the picture of anoth-
er object which the pupil had before him, say of a plane, &
correlate with it the word “plane”. We shall make the correl-
ation between this new picture and word as similar as possible
to the correlations in the previous table. Thus we might add
the new word and picture on the same sheet, and place the new
word under the previous words and the new picture under the
previous pictures. The pupil will now be encouraged to make
use of the new picture and word without the special training
which we gave him when we taught him to use the first table.
21.
These acts of encouragement will be of various kinds, and many
such acts will only be possible if the pupil responds, and res-
ponds in a particular way. Imagine the gestures, sounds, etc.
of encouragement you use when you teach a dog to retrieve. ˇImagine
on the other hand, that you tried to teach a cat to retrieve.
As
the cat will not respond to your encouragement, most of the acts
of encouragement which you performed when you trained the dog
are here out of the question.
19).   The pupil could also be trained to give things names of
his own invention and to bring the objects when the names are
called. He is, e.g., presented with a table on which he finds
pictures of objects around him on one side and blank spaces on
the other, and he plays the game by writing signs of his own
invention opposite the pictures and reacting in the previous way
when these signs are used as orders. Or else,
20).   the game may consist in B's constructing a table and
obeying orders given in terms of this table. When the use of
a table is taught, and the table consists, say, of two vertical
columns, the left hand one containing the names, the right hand
one the pictures, a name and a picture being correlated by
standing on a horizontal line, an important feature of the train-
ing may be that which makes the pupil slide his finger from left
to right, as it were the training to draw a series of horizon-
tal lines, one below the other. Such training may help to make
the transition from the first table to the new item.
     

      Tables, ostensive definitions, & similar instruments I
shall call rules, in accordance with ordinary usage. The use
of a rule can be explained by a further rule.

22.
21).   Consider this example: We introduce different ways of
reading tables. Each table consists of two columns of words &
pictures, as above. In some cases they are to be read horiz-
ontally from left to right, i.e., according to the scheme:
In others according to such schemes as:
Or:
etc.
Schemes of this kind can be adjoined to our tables, as rules
for reading them. Could not these rules again be explained
by further rules? Certainly.
On the other hand, is a rule
incompletely explained if no rule for its usage has been given?
     

      We introduce into our language-games the endless series
of numerals. But how is this done? Obviously the analogy
between this process & that of introducing a series of twenty
numerals is not the same as that between introducing a series
of twenty numerals and introducing a series of ten numerals.
Suppose that our game was like 2) but played with the endless
series of numerals. The difference between it & 2) would not
be just that more numerals were used.
That is to say, suppose
that as a matter of fact in playing the game we had actually
made use of, say, 155 numerals, the game we play would not be
that which could be described by saying that we played the game
2), only with 155 instead of 10 numerals. But what does the
difference consist in? (The difference would <…>seem to be almost
23.
one of the spirit in which the games are played.) The difference
between games can lie say in the number of the counters used,
in the number of squares of the playing board, or in the fact
that we use squares in one case & hexagons in the other, & such
like.
Now the difference between the finite and infinite game
does not seem to lie in the material tools of the game; for we
should be inclined to say that infinity can't be expressed in
them, that is, that we can only conceive of it in our thoughts
& hence that it is in these thoughts that the finite and infin-
ite game must be distinguished. (It is queer though that these
thoughts should be capable of being expressed in signs.) Let
us consider two games. They are both played with cards carry-
ing numbers, and the highest number takes the trick.
22).   One game is played with a fixed number of such cards, say
32. In the other game we are under certain circumstances
allowed to increase the number of cards to as many as we like,
by cutting pieces of paper and writing numbers on them. We
will call the first of these games bounded, the second unbound-
ed. Suppose a hand of the second game was played & the number
of cards actually used was 32. What is the difference in this
case between playing a hand a) of the unbounded game & playing
a hand b) of the bounded game?
     

      The difference will not be that between a hand of a bound-
ed game with 32 cards and a hand of a bounded game with a great-
er number of cards. The number of cards used, was, we said,
the same. But there will be differences of another kind, e.g.,
the bounded game is played with a normal pack of cards, the
unbounded game with a large supply of blank cards & pencils.
24.
The unbounded game is opened with the question, “How high
shall we go?” If the players look up the rules of this game
in a book of rules, they will find the phrase “& so on” or
“& so on ad inf.” at the end of certain series of rules. So
the difference between the two hands a) & b) lies in the tools
we use, though admittedly not in the cards they are played
with. But this difference seems trivial and not the essential
difference between the games. We feel that there must be a
big & essential difference somewhere. But if you look closely
at what happens when the hands are played, you find that you
can only detect a number of differences in details, each of
which would seem inessential.
The acts, e.g., of dealing &
playing the cards may in both cases be identical. In the
course of playing the hand a), the players may have considered
making up more cards, & again discarded the idea. But what
was it like to consider this? It could be some such process
as saying to themselves or aloud, “I wonder whether I should
make up another card”. Again, no such consideration may have
entered the minds of the players. It is possible that the
whole difference in the events of a hand of the bounded, and a
hand of the ˇunbounded game lay in what was said before the game
started, e.g., “Let's play the bounded game”.
     

      “But isn't it correct to say that hands of the two diff-
erent games belong to two different systems?” Certainly.
Only the facts which we are referring to by saying that they
belong to different systems are much more complex than we might
expect them to be.
     

      Let us now compare language-games of which we should say
25.
that they are played with a limited set of numerals with lan-
guage-games of which we should say that they are played with
the endless series of numerals.

23).   Like 2) A orders B to bring him a number of building
stones. The numerals are the <…> signs “1”, “2”, etc.
… “9”, each written on a card. A has a set of these cards
and gives B the order by shewing him one of the set & calling
out one of the words, “slab”, “column”, etc.
24).   Like 23), only there is no set of indexed cards. The
series of numerals 1 …9 is learned by heart. The numerals
are called out in the orders, & the child learns them by word
of mouth.
25).   An abacus is used. A sets the abacus, gives it to B,
B goes with it to where the slabs lie, etc..
26).   B is to count the slabs in a heap. He does it with an
abacus, the abacus has twenty beads. There are never more than
20 plates in a heap. B sets the abacus for the heap in quest-
ion & shews A the abacus thus set.
27).   Like 26). The abacus has 20 small beads & one large
one. If the heap contains more than 20 plates, the large bead
is moved. (So the large bead in some way corresponds to the
word “many”).
28).   Like 26). If the heap contains n plates, n being more
than 20 but less than 40, B moves n-20 beads, shews A the abacus
thus set, & claps his hand once.
29).   A & B use the numerals of the decimal system (written or
spoken) up to 20. The child learning this language learns these
26.
numerals by heart, etc., as in 2).
30).   A certain tribe has a language of the kind 2). The
numerals used are those of our decimal system. No one numeral
used can be observed to play the predominaˇnt rôle of the last
numeral in some of the above games (27), 28)). (One is tempted
to continue this sentence by saying, “although there is of
course a highest numeral actually used”). The children of the
tribe learn the numerals in this way: They are taught the signs
from 1 to 20 as in 2) and to count rows of beads of no more
than 20 on being ordered, “Count these”. When in counting the
pupil arrives at the numeral 20, one makes a gesture suggestive
of “Go on”, upon which the child says (in most cases at any
rate) “21”. Analogously, the children are made to count to 22
& to higher numbers, no particular number playing in these exer-
cises the predominant rôle of a last one. The last stage of
the training is that the child is ordered to count a group of
objects, well above 20, without the suggestive gesture being
used to help the child over the numeral 20. If a child does
not respond to the suggestive gesture, it is separated from the
others and treated as a lunatic.
31).   Another tribe. Its language is like that in 30). The
highest numeral observed in use is 159. In the life of this
tribe the numeral 159 plays a peculiar rôle. Supposing I said,
“They treat this number as their highest”, – but what does this
mean? Could we answer: “They just say that it is the highest”?
– They say certain words, but how do we know what they mean by
them? A criterion for what they mean would be the occasions
27.
on which the word we are inclined to translate into our word
“highest” is used, the rôle, we might say, which we observe this
word to play in the life of the tribe. In fact we could eas-
ily imagine the numeral 159 to be used on such occasions, in con-
nection with such gestures and forms of behaviour as would make
us say that this numeral plays the rôle of an unsurmountable
limit, even if the tribe had no word corresponding to our “high-
est”, and the criteria for numeral 1[3|5]9 being the highest numeral
did not consist of anything that was said about the numeral.
32).   A tribe has two systems of counting. People learned to
count with the alphabet from A to Z and also with the decimal
system as in 30). If a man is to count objects with the first
system, he is ordered to count “in the closed way”, in the sec-
ond case, “in the open way”; & the tribe uses the words “closed”
& “open” also for a closed and open door.
     

      (Remarks: 23) is limited in an obvious way by the set of
cards. 24): Note analogy and lack of analogy between the lim-
ited supply
of cards in 23) & of words in our memory in 24).
Observe that the limitation in 26) on the one hand lies in the
tool (the abacus of 20 beads) & its usage in our game, on the
other hand (in a totally different way) in the fact that in the
actual practice of playing the game no more than 20 objects are
ever to be counted. In 27) that latter kind of limitation was
absent, but the large bead rather stressed the limitation of our
means. Is 28) a limited or an unlimited game? The practice
we have described gives the limit 40. We are inclined to say
this game “has it in it” to be continued indefinitely, but rem-
28.
ember that we could also have construed the pre[d|c]eding games
as beginnings of a system. In 29) the systematic aspect of
the numerals used is even more conspicuous than in 28). One
might say that there was no limitation imposed by the tools of
this game, if it were not for the remark that the numerals up
to 20 are learnt by heart. This suggests the idea that the
child is not taught to “understand” the system which we see in
the decimal notation. Of the tribe in 30) we should certainly
say that they are trained to construct numerals indefinitely,
that the arithmetic of their language is not a finite one, that
their series of numbers has no end. (It is just in such a
case when numerals are constructed “indefinitely” that we say
that people have the infinite series of numbers.) 31) might
show you what a vast variety of cases can be imagined in which
we should be inclined to say that the arithmetic of the tribe
deals with a finite series of numbers, even in spite of the fact
that the way in which the children are trained in the use of
numerals suggests no upper limit. In 32) the terms “closed” &
“open” (which could by a slight variation of the example be
replaced by “limited” and “unlimited”) are introduced into the
language of the tribe itself. Introduced in that simple and
clearly circumscribed game, there is of course nothing myster-
ious about the use of the word “open”. But this word corres-
ponds to our “infinite”, & the games we play with the latter
differ from 31) only by being vastly more complicated. In other
words, our use of the word “infinite” is just as straight forward
as that of “open” in 31<32?>), and our idea that its meaning is
29.
“transcendent” rests on a misunderstanding.)
     

      We might say roughly that the unlimited cases are charac-
terized by this: that they are not played with a definite supply
of numerals, but instead with a system for constructing numer-
als (indefinitely). When we say that someone has been supplied
with a system for constructing numerals, we generally think of
either of three things: a) of giving him a training similar to
that described in 30), which, experience teaches us, will make
him pass tests of the kind mentioned there; b) of creating a
disposition in the same man's mind, or brain, to react in that
way; c) of supplying him with a general rule for the constˇruction

of numerals.
     

      What do we call a rule? Consider this example:
33).   B moves about according to rules which A gives him. B
is supplied with the following table:

A gives an order made up of the letters in the table, say:
“aacaddd”. B looks up the arrow corresponding to each letter
of the order and moves accordingly; in our example thus:
The table 33) we should call a rule (or else “the expression of
a rule”. Why I give these synonymous expressions will appear
later.) We shan't be inclined to call the sentence “aacaddd”
itself a rule. It is of course the description of the way B
has to take. On the other hand, such a description would under
certain circumstances be called a rule, e.g., in the following
case:
34). B is to draw various ornamental
30.
34).   B is to draw various ornamental linear designs. Each
design is a repetition of one element which A gives him.
Thus if A gives the order “cada”, B draws a line thus:
     

      In this case I think we should say that “cada” is the
rule for drawing the design. Roughly speaking, it characteriz-
es what we call a rule to be applied repeatedly, in an indef-
inite number of instances. Cf., e.g., the following case with
34):
35).   A game played with pieces of various shapes on a chess
board. The way each piece is allowed to move is laid down by
a rule. Thus the rule for a particular piece is “ac”, for
another piece “acaa”, & so on. The first piece then can make
a move like this: , the second, like this: . Both
a formula like “ac” or a diagram like that corresponding to
such a formula might here be called a rule.
36).   Suppose that after playing the game 33[(|)] several times as
described above, it was played with this variation: that B no
longer looked at the table, but reading A's order the letters
call up the images of the arrows (by association), & B acts <…>
according to these imagined arrows.
37).   After playing it like this for several times, B moves
about according to the written order as he would have done had
he looked up or imagined the arrows, but actually without any
such picture intervening. Imagine even this variation:
38).   B in being trained to follow a written order, is shewn
the table of 33) once, upon which he obeys A's orders without
further intervention of the table in the same way in which B in
31.
33) does with the help of the table on each occasion.
     

      In each of these cases, we might say that the table 33)
is a rule of the game. But in each one this rule plays a dif-
ferent rôle. In 33) the table is an instrument used in what
we should call the practice of the game. It is replaced in
36) by the working of association. In 37) even this shadow of
the table has dropped out of the practice of the game, and in
38) the table is admittedly an instrument for the training of B
only.
     

      But imagine this further case:
39).   A certain system of communication is used by a tribe.
I will describe it by saying that it is similar to our game 38)
except that no table is used in the training. The training
might have consisted in several times leading the pupil by the
hand along the path one wanted him to go. But we could also
imagine a case:
40).   where even this training is not necessary, where, as we
should say, the look of the letters abcd naturally produced an
urge to move in the way described.
This cause at first sight
looks puzzling. We seem to be assuming a most unusual working
of the mind. Or we may ask perhaps we ask, “How on earth is he to know which
way to move if the letter a is shewn him”? But isn't B's
reaction in this case the very reaction described in 37) & 38),
& in fact our usual reaction when for instance we hear and obey
an order? For, the fact that the training in 38) & 39) preced-
ed
the carrying out of the order does not change the process of
carrying out. In other words the “curious mental mechanism”
assumed in 40) is no other than that which we assumed to be
32.
created by the training in 37) and 38). “But could such a
mechanism be born with you?” But did you find any difficulty
in assuming that that mechanism was born with B, which enabled
him to respond to the training in the way he<…> did? And remem-
ber that the rule or explanation given in table 33) of the signs
abcd was not essentially the last one, and that we might have
given a table for the use of such tables, and so on. (Cf. 21)).
     

      How does one explain to a man how he should carry out the
order, “Go this way!” (pointing with an arrow the way he should
go)?
Couldn't this mean going the direction which we should
call the opposite of that of the arrow?
Isn't every explanat-
ion of how he should follow the arrow in the position of another
arrow?
What would you<…> say to this explanation: A man says,
“If I point this way (pointing with his right hand) I mean you
to go like this” (pointing with his left hand the same way)?
This just shews you the extremes between which the uses of signs
vary.
     

      Let us return to 39). Someone visits the tribe and ob-
serves the use of the signs in their<…> language. He describes
the language by saying that its sentences consist of the letters
abcd used according to the table: (of 33)). We see that the
expression, “A game is played according to the rule so-and-so”
is used not only in the variety of cases exemplified by 36), 37),
& 38), but even in cases where the rule is neither an instrument
of the training nor of the practice of the game, but stands in
the relation to it in which our table stands to the practice of
our game 39).
One might in this case call the table a natural
33.
law describing the behaviour of the people of this tribe.
Or we might say that the table is a record belonging to the
natural history of the tribe.
     

      Note that in the game 33) I distinguished sharply between
the order to be carried out and the rule employed. In 34) on
the other hand, we called the sentence “cada” a rule, & it was
the order. Imagine also this variation:
41).   The game is similar to 33), but the pupil is not just
trained to use a single table; but the training aims at making
the pupil use any table correlating letters with arrows. Now
by this I mean no more than that the training is of a peculiar
kind, roughly speaking one analogous to that described in 30).
I will refer to a training more or less similar to that in 30)
as a “general training”. General trainings form a family
whose members differ greatly from one another.
The kind of
thing I'm thinking of now mainly consists: 9) a) of a training
in a limited range of actions, b) of giving the pupil a lead to
extend this range, & c) of random exercises and tests. After
the general training the order is now to consist in giving him
a sign of this kind:
He carries out the order by moving thus: . Here I
suppose we should say the table, the rule, is part of the order.
     

      Note, we are not saying “what a rule is” but just giving
different applications of the word “rule”; & we certainly do
this by giving applications of the words “expression of a rule”.
     

      Note also that in 41) there is no clear case against call-
34.
ing the whole symbol given the sentence, though we might
distinguish in it between the sentence and the table. What
in this case more particularly tempts us to this distinction
is the linear writing of the part outside the table. Though
from ceratin certain points of view we should call the linear character
of the sentence merely external and inessential, this charac-
ter and similar ones play a great rôle in what as logicians we
are inclined to say about sentences and propositions. And
therefore if we conceive of the symbol in 41) as a unit, this
may make us realise what a sentence can look like.
     

      Let us now consider these two games:
42).   A gives orders to B: they are written signs consisting of
dots and dashes and B executes them by doing a figure in danc-
ing with a particular step. Th[i|u]s the order “-.” is to be car-
ried out by taking a step and a hop alternately; the <…>
order “..---” by alternately taking two hops and three steps,
etc. The training in this game is “general” in the sense
explained in 41); and I should like to say, “the orders given
don't move in a limited range. They comprise combinations of
any number of dots and dashes”. – But what does it mean to say
that the orders don't move in a limited range? Isn't this
nonsense? Whatever orders are given in the practice of the
game constitute the limited range. – Well, what I meant to say
by “the orders don't move in a limited range” was that neither
in the teaching of the game nor in the practice of it a limit-
ation of the range plays a “predominant” rôle (see 30)) or, as
we might say, the range of the game (it is superfluous to say
35.
limited) is just the extent of its actual (“accidental”)
practice. (Our game is in this way like 30)) Cf. with this
game the following:
43).   The orders and their execution as in 42); but only
these three signs are used: “-.”, “-..”, “.--”. We say that
in 42) B in executing the order is guided by the sign given to
him. But if we ask ourselves whether the three signs in 43)
guide B in executing the orders, it seems that we can say both
yes and no according to the way we look at the execution of the
orders.
     

      If we try to decide whether B in 43) is guided by the
signs or not, we are inclined to give such answers as the fol-
lowing: a) B is guided if he doesn't just look at an order, say
“.--” as a whole and then act, but if he reads it “word by
word” (the words used in our language being “.” “-”) and acts
according to the words he has read.
     

      We could make these cases clearer if we imagine that the
“reading word by word” consisted in pointing to each word of
the sentence in turn with one's finger as opposed to pointing
at the whole sentence at once, say by pointing to the beginning
of the sentence. And the “acting according to the words” we
shall for the sake of simplicity imagine to consist in acting
(stepping or hopping) after each word of the sentence in turn.
b) B is guided if he goes through a conscious process which
makes a connection between the pointing to a word and the act
of hopping and stepping. Such a connection could be imagined
in many different ways. E.g., B has a table in which a dash
36.
is correlated to the picture of a man making a step and a dot
to a picture of a man hopping. Then the conscious acts conn-
ecting reading the order and carrying it out might consist
in consulting the table, or in consulting a memory image of it
“with one's mind's eye”. c) B is guided if he does not just
react to looking at each word of the order, but experiences the
peculiar strain of “trying to remember what the sign means”,
& further, the relaxing of this strain when the meaning, the
right action, comes before his mind.
     

      All these <…> explanations seem in a particular peculiar way unsat-
isfactory, and it is the limitation of our game which makes
them unsatisfactory. This is expressed by the explanation that
B is guided by the particular combination of words in one of
our three sentences if he could also have carried out orders
consisting in other combinations of dots and dashes. And if
we say this, it seems to us that the “ability” to carry out
other orders is a particular state of the person carrying out
the orders of 42). And at the same time we can't in this case
find anything which we should call such a state.
     

      Let us see what rôle the words “can” or “to be able to”
play in our language. Consider these examples:

44).   Imagine that for some purpose or other people use a kind
of instrument or tool; this consists of a board with a slot in
it guiding the movement of a peg. The man using the tool
slides the peg along the slot. There are such boards with
straight slots, circular slots, elliptic slots, etc. The lan-
guage of the people using this instrument has expressions for
37.
describing the activity of moving the pe[h|g] in the slot. They
talk of moving it in a c[o|i]rcle, in a straight line, etc. They
also have a means of describing the board used. They do it
in this form: “This is a board in which the peg can be moved in
a circle”. One could in this case call the word “can” an
operator by means of which the form of expression describing an
action is transformed into a description of the instrument.
45).   Imagine a people in whose language there is no such form
of sentence as “the book is in the drawer” or “water is in the
glass”, but wherever we should use these forms they say, “The
book can be taken out of the drawer”, “The water can be taken
out of the glass”.
46).   An activity of the men of a certain tribe is to test
sticks as to their hardness. They do it by trying to bend the
sticks with their hands. In their language they have express-
ions of the form, “This stick can be bent easily” or “This stick
can be bent with difficulty”. They use these expressions as
we use “This stick is soft” or “This stick is hard”. I mean to
say that they don't use the expression, “This stick can be bent
easily” as we should use the sentence “I am bending the stick
with ease”. Rather they use their expression in a way which
would make us say that they are describing a state of the
stick. I.e., they use such sentences as, “This hut is built
of sticks that can be bent easily”. (Think of the way in which
we form adjectives out of verbs by means of the ending “-able”,
e.g., “deformable”.)
     

      Now we might say that in the last three cases the sent-
38.
ences of the form “so-and-so can happen” described the state of
objects, but there are great differences between these examples.
In 44) we saw the state described before our eyes. We saw
that the board had a circular or a straight slot, etc. In
45), in some instances at least this was the case, we could see
the objects in the box, the water in the glass, etc. In such
cases we use the expression “state of an object” in such a way
that there corresponds to it what one might call a stationary
sense experience.
     

      When on the other hand, we talk of the state of a stick
in 46), observe that to this “state” there does not correspond
a particular sense experience which lasts while the state lasts.
[i|I]nstead of that, the defining criterion for something being in
this state consists in certain tests.
     

      We may say that a car travels 20 miles an hour even if it
only travels for half an hour. We can explain our form of
expression by saying that the car travels with a speed which
enables it to make 20 miles an hour. And here also we are in-
clined to talk of the velocity of the car as of a state of its
motion. I think we should not use this expression if we had
no other “experiences of motion” than those of a body being in a
particular place at a certain time and in another place at an-
other time; if, e.g., our experience<s> of motion were of the
kind which we have when we see the hour hand of the clock has
moved from one point of the dial to the other.
47).   A tribe has in its language commands for the execution of
certain actions of men in warfare, something like “Shoot!”,
39.
“Run!”, “Crawl!”, etc. They also have a way of describing a
man's build. Such a description has the form “He can run fast”,
“He can throw the spear far”. What justifies me in saying
that these sentences are descriptions of the man's build is the
use which they make of sentences of this form. Thus if they
see a man with bulging leg muscles but who as we should say has
not the use of his legs for some reason or other, they say he
is a man who can run fast. The drawn image of a man which
shews large biceps they describe as representing a man “who
can throw a spear far”.
48).   The men of a tribe are subjected to a kind of medical
examination before going into war. The examiner puts the men
through a set of standard[s|i]sed tests. He lets them lift certain
weights, swing their arms, skip, etc. The examiner then gives
his verdict in the form “So-and-so can throw a spear” or “can
throw a boomerang” or “is fit to pursue the enemy”, etc. There
are no special expressions in the language of this tribe for
the activities performed in the tests; but these are referred
to only as the tests for certain activities in warfare.
     

      It is an important remark concerning this example and
others which we give that one may object to the description
which we give of the language of a tribe, that in the specimens
we give of their language we let them speak English, thereby
already presupposing the whole background of the English lan-
guage, that is, our usual meanings of the words. Thus if I
say that in a certain language there is no special verb for
“skipping”, but that this language uses instead the form “making
40.
the test for throwing the boomerang”, one may ask how I have
characterized the use of the expressions, “make a test for” &
“throwing the boomerang”, to be justified in substituting these
English expressions for whatever their actual words may be.
To this we must answer that we have only given a very sketchy
description of the practices of our fictitious languages, in
some cases only hints, but that one can easily make these des-
criptions more complete. Thus in 48) I could have said that
the examiner uses orders for making the men go through the tests.
These orders all begin with one particular expression which I
could translate into the English words, “Go through the test”.
And this expression is followed by one which in actual warfare
is used for certain actions. Thus there is a command upon which
men throw their boomerangs and which therefore I should trans-
late into, “Throw the boomerangs”. Further, if a man gives an
account of the battle to his chief, he again uses the expression
I have translated into “Throw a boomerang”, this time in a des-
cription. Now what characterizes an order as such or a descr-
iption as such or a question as such, etc., is – as we have
said – the rôle which the utterance of these signs plays in
the whole practice of the language. That is to say, whether a
word of the language of our tribe is rightly translated into a
word of the English language depends upon the rôle this word
plays in the whole life of the tribe; the occasions on which it
is used, the expressions of emotions by which it is generally
accompanied, the ideas which it generally awakens or which prompt
its saying, etc. etc. As an exercise ask yourself: in which
41.
cases would you say that a certain word uttered by the people
of the tribe was a greeting? In which cases should we say it
corresponded to our “Goodbye”, in which to our “Hello”? In
which cases would you say that a word of a foreign language
corresponded to our “perhaps”? – to our expressions of doubt,
trust, certainty? You will find that the justifications for
calling something an expression of doubt, conviction, etc.
largely, though of course not wholly, consist in descriptions
of gestures, the play of facial expressions, and even the tone
of voice. Remember at this point that the personal experiences
of an emotion must in part be strictly localized experiences;
for if I frown in anger I feel the muscular tension of the frown
in my forehead, & if I weep, the sensations around my eyes are
obviously part, and an important part, of what I feel. This is,
I think, what William James meant when he said that a man doesn't
cry because he is sad but that he is sad because he cries. The
reason why this point is often not understood is that we think
of the utterance of an emotion as though it were some artificial
device to let others know that we have it. Now there is no
sharp line between such “artificial devices” and what one might
call the natural expressions of emotion. Cf. in this respect:
a) weeping, b) raising one's voice when one is angry, c) writ-
ing an angry letter, d) ringing the bell for a servant you wish
to scold.
     
49).   Imagine a tribe in whose language there is an expression
corresponding to our “He has done so-and-so” and another expres-
sion corresponding to our “He can do so-and-so”, this latter
42.
expression, however, being only used where its use is justified
by the same fact which would also justify the former expression.
Now what can make me say this? They have a form of communic-
ation which we should call narration of past events because of
the circumstances under which it is employed.. There are also
circumstances under which we should ask and answer such questions
as “Can so-and-so do this?”. Such circumstances can be descr-
ibed, e.g., by saying that a chief picks men suitable for a
certain action, say crossing a river, climbing a mountain, etc.
As the defining criteria of “the chief picking men suitable
for this action”, I will not take what he says but only the
other features of the situation. The chief under these circ-
umstances asks a question which, as far as its practical con-
sequences go, would have to be translated by our “Can so-and-so
swim across this river?” This question, however, is only
answered affirmatively by those who actually have swum across
this river. Th[u|i]s answer is not given in the same words in
which under the circumstances characterizing narration he would
say that he has swum across this river, but it is given in the
terms of the question asked by the chief. On the other hand,
this answer is not given in cases in which we should certainly
give the answer, “I can swim across this river”, if, e.g., I
had performed more difficult feats of swimming though not just
that of swimming across this particular river.
     

      By the way, have the two phrases, “He has done so-&-so”
and “He can do so-&-so” the same meaning in this language or
have they different meanings? If you think about it, something
43.
will tempt you to say the one, something to say the other.
This only shows that the question has here no clearly defined
meaning. All I can say is: If the fact that they only say,
“He can …” if he has done … is your criterion for the same
meaning, then the two expressions have the same meaning. If
the circumstances under which an expression is used make its
meaning, the meanings are different. The use which is made of
the word “can” – the expression of possibility in 49) – can
throw a light upon the idea that what can happen must have hap-
pened before (Nietzsche).
It will also be interesting to
look, in the light of our examples, on the statement that what
happens can happen.
     

      Before we go on with our consideration of the use of “the
expression of possibility”, let us get clearer about that dep-
artment of our language in which things are said about past &
future, that is, about the use of sentences containing such
expressions as “yesterday”, “a year ago”, “in five minutes”,
“before I did this”, etc. Consider this example:
50).   Imagine how a child might be trained in the practice of
“narration of past events”. He was first trained in asking for
certain things (as it were, in giving orders. See 1).) Part
of this training was the exercise of “naming the things”. He
has thus learnt to name (& ask for) a dozen of his toys. Say
now that he has played with three of them (e.g., a ball, a stick,
and a rattle), then they are taken away from him, and now the
grown-up says such a phrase as, “He's had a ball, a stick, and
a rattle”. On a similar occasion he stops short in the enum-
44.
eration and induces the child to complete it. On another
occasion, perhaps, he only says, “He's had …” and leaves
the child to give the whole enumeration. Now the way of “in-
ducing the child to go on” can be this: He stops short in his
enumeration with a facial expression and a raised tone of voice
which we should call one of expectancy. All then depends on
whether the child will react to this “inducement” or not. Now
there is a queer misunderstanding we are most liable to fall
into, which consists in regarding the “outward means” the teach-
er uses to induce the child to go on as what we might call an
indirect means of making himself understood to the child.
We
treat regard the case as though the child already possessed a language
in which it thought and that the teacher's job is to induce it
to guess his meaning in the realm of meanings before the child's
mind, as though the child could in his own private language
ask himself such a question as, “Does he want me to continue,
or repeat what he said, or something else?” (Cf. with 30)).
51).   Another example of a primitive kind of narration of past
events: we live in a landscape with characteristic natural
landmarks against the horizon. It is therefore easy to rem-
ember the place at which the sun rises at a particular season,
or the place above which it stands when at its highest point,
or the place at which it sets. We have some characteristic
pictures of the sun in different positions in our landscape.
Let us call this series of pictures the sun series. We have
also some characteristic pictures of the activities of a child,
lying in bed, getting up, dressing, lunching, etc. This set
45.
I'll call the life pictures. I imagine that the child can
frequently see the position of the sun while about the day's
activities. We draw the child's attention to the sun's stand-
ing in a certain place while the child is occupied in a part-
icular way. We then let it look both at a picture representing
its occupation and at a picture showing the sun in its position
at that time. We can thus roughly tell the story of the child's
day by laying out a row of the life pictures, and above it what
I called the sun series, the two rows in the proper correlation.
We shall then proceed to let the child supplement such a pic-
ture story, which we leave incomplete. And I wish to say at
this point that this form of training (see 50) and 30)) is one
of the big characteristic features in the use of language, or
in thinking.

52).   A variation of 51). There is a big clock in the nurs-
ery, for simplicity's sake imagine it with an hour hand only.
The story of the child's day is narrated as above, but there is
no sun series; instead we write one of the digits numbers of the dial
against each life picture.
     
53).   Note that there would have been a similar game in which
also, as we might say, time was involved, that of just laying
out a series of life pictures. We might play this game with
the help of words which would correspond to our “before” and
“after”. In this sense we may say that 53) involves the ideas
of before and after, but not the idea of a measurement of time.

I needn't say that an easy step would lead us from the narrations
in 51), 52), & 53) to narrations in words. Possibly someone
46.
considering such forms of narration might think that in them
the real idea of time isn't yet involved at all, but only some
crude substitute for it, the position of a clock hand and such
like. Now if a man claimed that there is an idea of “five
o'clock” which does not bring in a clock, that the clock is
only the coarse instrument indicating when it is five o'clock
or that there is an idea of an hour which does not bring in an
instrument for measuring the time, I will not contradict him,
but I will ask him to explain to me what his use of the term
“an hour” or “five o'clock” is. And if it is not that involv-
ing a clock, it is a different one; and then I will ask him why
he uses the term “five o'clock”, “an hour”, “a long time”, “a
short time”, etc., in one case in connection with a clock, in
the other independent of one; it will be because of certain ana-
logies holding between the two uses, but we have now two uses
of these terms, and no reason to say that one of them is less
real and pure than the other.
This might get clearer by con-
sidering the following example:
54).   If we give a person the order, “Say a number, any one
which comes into your mind”, he can generally comply with it
at once. Suppose it were found that the numbers thus said
on request increased – with every normal person – as the day
went on; a man starts out with some small number every morning
and reaches the highest number before falling asleep at night.
Consider what could tempt one to call the reactions described
“a means of measuring time” or even to say that they are the
real milestones in the passage of time, the sun clocks, etc.
47.
being only indirect markers. indicators. (Examine the statement that the
human heart is the real clock behind all the other clocks).
     

      Let us now consider further language-games into which
temporal expressions enter.
55).   This arises out of 1). If an order like “Slab!”,
“Column!”, etc. is called out, B is trained to carry it out
immediately. We now introduce a clock into this game, an order
is given, and we train the child not to carry it out until the
hand of our clock reaches a point indicated before w[a|i]th the
finger. (This might, e.g., be done in this way: You first
trained the child to carry out the order immediately. You
then give the order, but hold the child back, releasing it only
when the hand of the clock has reached the point of the dial to
which we point with our fingers.)
     

      We could at this stage introduce such a word as “now”.
We have two kinds of orders in this game, the orders used in
1), or and orders consisting of these together with a gesture indic-
ating a point of the clock dial. In order to make the distin-
ction between these two kinds more explicit, we may affix a
particular sign to the orders of the first kind and e.g., say:
“slab, now!”.
     

      It would be easy now to describe language-games in such
expressions as “in five minutes”, “half an hour ago”.
56).   Let us now have the case of a description of the future,
a forecast. One might, e.g., awaken the tension of expectation
in a child by keeping his attention for a considerable time
on some traffic lights changing their colour periodically. We
also have a red, a green, and a yellow disc before us and alter-
48.
nately point to one of these discs by way of forecasting the
colour which will appear next. It is easy to imagine further
developements of this game.
     

      Looking at these language-games, we don't come across
the ideas of the past, the future, and the present in their
problematic and almost mysterious aspect. What this aspect is
and how it comes about that it appears can be most characterist-
ically exemplified if we look at the question, “Where does the
present go when it becomes past, and where is the past?” –
under what circumstances has this question an allurement for
us? For under certain circumstances it hasn't, and we should
wave it away as nonsense.
     

      It is clear that this question most easily arises if we
are preoccupied with cases in which there are things flowing by
us, – as logs of wood float down a river. In such a case we
can say the logs which have passed us are all down towards the
left and the logs which will pass us are all up towards the
right. We then use this situation as a simile for all happen-
ing in time and even embody the simile in our language, as when
we say that “the present event passes by” (a log passes by),
“the future event is to come” (a log is to come). We talk
about the flow of events; but also about the flow of time –
the river on which the logs travel.
     

      Here is one of the most fertile sources of philosophic
puzzlement: We talk of the future event of something coming
into my room, and also of the future coming of this event.
     

      We say, “Something will happen”, and also, “Something
49.
comes towards me”; we refer to the log as to “something”, but
also to the log's coming towards me.
     

      Thus it can come about that we aren't able to rid ourselves
of the implications of our symbolism, which seems to admit of
a question like, “where does the flame of a candle go to when
it's blown out?”, “Where does the light go to?”, “Where does the
past go to?”. We have become obsessed with our symbolism.
We may say that we are led into puzzlement by an analogy which
irresistibly drags us on.– And this also happens when the
meaning of the word “now” appears to us in a mysterious light.
In our example 55) it appears that the function of “now” is in
no way comparable to the function of an expression like “five
o'clock”, “midday”, “the time when the sun sets”, etc. This
latter group of expressions I might call “specifications “determinations of
times”. But our ordinary language uses the word “now” and
determinations of time in similar contexts. Thus we say “The
sun sets now”. “The
sun sets at six o' clock”.
We are inclined to say that both
“now” and “six o'clock” “refer to points of time”. This use
of words produces a puzzlement which one might express in the
question, “What is the ‘now’? – for it is a moment of time and
yet it can't be said to be either the ‘moment at which I speak’
or the ‘moment at which the clock strikes’ etc., etc.”– Our
answer is: The function of the word “now” is entirely different
from that of a specification of time.– This can easily be
seen if we look at the rôle this word really plays in our usage
of language, but it is obscured when instead of looking at the
whole language-game, we only look at the contexts, the phrases
50.
of language in which the word is used. (The word “today” is
not a date, but it isn't anything like it either. It doesn't
differ from a date as a hammer differs from a mallet, but as a
hammer differs from a nail; and surely we may say there is both
a connection between a hammer and a mallet and between a hammer
and a nail.)
     

      One has been tempted to say that “now” is the name of an
instant of time, and this, of course, would be like saying that
“here” is the name of a place, “[T|t]his” the name of a thing, and
“I” the name of a man.
(One could of course also have said
“a year ago” was the name of a time, “over there” the name of a
place, and “you” the name of a person.) But nothing is more
unlike than the use of the word “this” and the use of a proper
name, – I mean the games played with these words, not the phrases
in which they are used.
For we do say, “This is short” and
“Jack is short”; but remember that “This is short” without the
pointing gesture and without the thing we are pointing to would
be meaningless. – What can be compared with a name is not the
word “this” but, if you like, the symbol consisting of this
word, the gesture, and the sample. We might say: Nothing is
more characteristic of a proper name A than that we can use it
in such a phrase as, “This is A”; & it makes no sense to say,
“This is this” or “Now is now” or “Here is here”.
     

      The idea of a proposition saying something about what will
happen in the future is even more liable to puzzle us than the
idea of a proposition about the past. For comparing future
events with past events, one may almost be inclined to say that
51.
though the past events do not really exist in the full light of
day, they exist in an underworld into which they have passed
out of the real life; whereas the future events do not even
have this shadowy existence. We could, of cou[s|r]se, imagine a
realm of the unborn, future events, whence they come into real-
ity and pass into the realm of the past; and, thinking if we think in terms
of this metaphor, we may be surprised that the future should
appear less existent than the past. Remember, however, that
the grammar <…> of our temporal expressions is not symmetrical
with respect to an origin corresponding with the present moment.
Thus the grammar of the expressions relating to memory does
not reappear “with opposite sign” in the grammar of the future
tense. //Thus there is nothing in the grammar of the future
tense corresponding to the grammar of the word “memory”. This
part of the grammar of the past tense does not recur “with its
sign changed” on the future side.// This is the reason why
it has been said that propositions concerning future events are
not really propositions. And to say this, is all right as long
as it isn't meant to be more than a decision about the use of
the term “proposition”; a decision which, though not agreeing
with the common usage of the word “proposition”, may come natur-
al to human beings under certain circumstances. If a philos-
opher says that propositions about the future are not real prop-
ositions, it is because he has been struck by the asymmetry in
the grammar of temporal expressions. The danger is, however,
that he imagines he has made a kind of scientific statement
about “the nature of the future”.
52.
57).   A game is played in this way: A man throws a die, and
before throwing he draws on a piece of paper some one of the
six faces of the die. If, after having thrown, the face of
the die turning up is the one he has drawn, he fe[l|e]ls (expresses)
satisfaction. If a different face turns up, he is dissatis-
fied. Or, let there be two partners and every time one guesses
correctly what he will throw his partner pays him a penny, and
if incorrectly, he pays his partner. Drawing the face of the
die will be under the circumstances of this game be called
“making a guess” or a “conjecture”.
58).   In a certain tribe contests are held in running, putting
the weight, etc. and the spectators stake money possessions on the compet-
itors. The pictures of all the competitors are placed in a
row, and what I called the spec[a|t]ators' staking property on one
of the competitors consists in laying this property (pieces of
gold) under one of the pictures. If a man has placed his gold
under the picture of the winner in the competition he gets back
his stake doubled. Otherwise he loses his stake. Such a
custom we should undoubtedly call betting, even if we observed
it in a society whose language held no scheme for stating “de-
grees of probability”, “chances” and the like. I assume that
the behaviour of the spectators expresses great keenness and
excitement before and after the result outcome of the bet is known. I
further imagine that on <…> examining the placing of the
bets I can understand “why” they were thus placed. I mean:
In a competition between two wrestlers, mostly the bigger man is
the favorite; or if the smaller, I find that he has shown great-
53.
er strength on previous occasions, or that the bigger had recent-
ly been ill, or had neglected his training, etc. Now this may
be so although the language of the tribe does not express reas-
ons for the placing of the bets. That is to say, nothing in
their language corresponds to our saying, e.g., “I bet on this
man because he has kept fit, whereas the other has neglected
his training”, and such like. I might describe this state of
affairs by saying that my observation has taught me certain
causes for their placing their bets as they do, but that the
bettors had used no reasons for ac[y|t]ing as they did. %
     

      The tribe may, on the other hand, have a language which
comprises “giving reasons”. Now this game of giving the reason
why one acts in a particular way does not involve finding the
causes of one's actions (by frequent observations of the con-
ditions under which they arise). Let us imagine this:
59).   If a man of our tribe has lost his bet and upon this is
chaffed or scolded, he points out, possibley exaggerating, cert-
ain features of the man on whom he has laid his bet. One can
imagine a discussion of pros and cons going on in this way: two
people pointing out alternately certain features of the two
competitors whose chances, as we should say, they are discussing;
A pointing with a gesture to the great height of the one, B in
answer to this shrugging his shoulders and pointing to the size
of the other's biceps, and so on. I could easily add more
details which would make us say that A and B are giving reasons
for laying a bet on one person rather than on the other.
     

      Now one might say suggest that giving reasons in this way for
54.
laying their bets certainly presupposes that they have observed
causal connections between the result of a fight, say, and cert-
ain features of the bodies of the fighters, or of their train-
ing. But this is an assumption which, whether reasonable or
not, I certainly have not made in the description of our case.
(Nor have I made the assumption that the bettors give reasons
for their reasons.) We should in a case like that just describ-
ed not be surprised if the language of the tribe contained what
we should call expressions of degrees of belief, conviction,
certainty. These expressions we could imagine to consist in
the use of a particular word spoken with different intonations,
or a series of words. (I am not thinking however of the use
of a scale of probabilities.) – It is also easy to imagine that
the people of our tribe accompany their betting by verbal ex-
pressions which we translate into, “I believe that
so-and-so can beat so-and-so in wrestling”, etc.
60).   Imagine in a similar way conjectures being made as to
whether a certain load of gunpowd/er will be sufficient to
blast a certain rock, and the conjecture to be expressed in a
phrase of the form, “This quantity of gunpowder can blast this
rock”.
61).   Compare with 60) the case in which the expression, “I
shall be able to lift this weight”, is used as an abbreviation
for the conjecture, “My hand holding this weight will rise if
I go through the process (experience) of ‘making an effort to
lift it’”. In the last two cases the word “can” characterized
what we should call the expression of a conjecture. (Of course
55.
I don't mean that we call the sentence a conjecture because it
contains the word “can”; but in calling a sentence a conjecture
we referred to the rôle which the sentence played in the lan-
guage-game; and we translate a word our tribe uses by “can” if
“can” is the word we should use under the circumstances des-
cribed). Now it is clear that the use of “can” in 59), 60),
61) is closely related to the use of “can” in 46) to 49); dif-
fering, however in this, that in 46) to 49) the sentences say-
ing that something could can happen were not expressions of con-
jecture. Now one might object to this by saying: Surely we are
only willing to use the word “can” in such cases as 46) to 49)
because it is reasonable to conjecture in these cases what a
man will do in the future from the tests he has passed or from
the state he is in.
     

      Now it is true that I have deliberately made up the cases
46) to 49) so as to make a conjecture of this kind seem reason-
able. But I have also deliberately made them up so as not to
contain a conjecture. We can, if we like, make the hypothesis
that the tribe woul[s|d] never use such a form of expression as
that used in 49), etc. if experience had not shown them that …
etc. But this is an assumption which, though possibly correct,
is in no way presupposed in the games 46) to 49) as I have act-
ually described them.
62).   Let the game be this: A writes down a row of numbers.
B watches him and tries to find a system in the sequence of
these numbers. When he has done so he says: “Now I can go on”.
This example is particularly instructive because “being able to
56.
go on” here seems to be something setting in suddenly in the
form of a clearly outlined event. – Suppose then that A had
written down the row 1,5,11,19,29. At thath point B shouts,
“Now I can go on”. What was it that happened when suddenly he
saw how to go on? A great many different things might have
happened. Let us assume then that in the present case while
A wrote one number after the other B busied himself with try-
ing out several algebraic formulae to see whether they fitted.
When A had written “19” B had been led to try the formula
<…> an = n2 + n ‒ 1. A's writing 29 confirms his guess.
63).   Or, no formula came into B's mind. After looking at
the growing row of numbers A was is writing, possibly with a feeling
of tension and with hazy ideas floating in his mind, he said to
himself the words, “He's squaring and always adding one more”;
then he made up the next number of the sequence and found it
to agree with the numbers A then wrote down. –
64).   Or the row A wrote down was 2, 4, 6, 8. B looks at it,
and says, “Of course I can go on”, and continues the series of
even numbers. Or he says nothing, and just goes on. Perhaps
when looking at the row 2, 4, 6, 8 which A had written down,
he had some sensation, or sensations, often accompanying such
words as, “That's easy!” A sensation of this kind is for ins-
tance, the experience of a slight, quick intake of breath,
what one might call a slight start.
     

      Now, should we say that the proposition, “B can continue
the series”, means that one of the occurrences just described
takes place? Isn't it clear that the statement, “B can contin-
57.
ue …” is not the same as the statement that the formula
an = n2 + n ‒ 1 comes into B's mind? This occurrence might have
been all that actually took place. (It is clear, by the way,
that it can make no difference to us here whether B has the
experience of this formula appearing before his mind's eye, or
the experience of writing or speaking the formula, or of pick-
ing it out with his eyes from amongst several formulae written
down beforehand.) If a parro[y|t] had uttered the formula, <…>
we should not have said that he could continue the series. –
Therefore, we are inclined to say “to be able to …” must mean
more than just uttering the formula, – and in fact more than
any one of the occurrences we have described. And this, we go
on, shows that saying the formula was only a symptom of B's being
able to go on, and that it was not the ability of going on it-
self. Now what is misleading in this is that we seem to intim-
ate that there is one peculiar activity, process, or state called
“being able to go on” which somehow is hidden from our eyes
but manifests itself in these occurrents which we call symptoms
(as an inflammation of the mucous membranes of the nose prod-
uces the symptom of sneezing).
This is the way talking of
symptoms, in this case, misleads us. When we say, “Surely
there must be something else behind the mere uttering of the
formula, as this alone we should not call ‘being able to …’”,
the word “behind” here is certainly used metaphorically, and
“behind” the utterance of the formula may be the circumstances
under which it is uttered. It is true, “B can continue …”
is not the same as to say, “B says the formula …”, but it does
58.
doesn't follow from this that the expression, “B can continue …”
refers to an activity other than that of saying the formula,
in the way in which “B says the formula” refers to the well-known activity.
The error we are in is analogous to this:
Someone is told the word “chair” does not mean this particular
chair I am pointing to, upon which he looks round the room for
the object which the word “chair” does denote. (The case
would be even more a striking illustration if he tried to look
inside the chair in order to find the real meaning of the word
<…> “chair”.) It is clear that when with reference to the
act of writing or speaking the formula etc., we use the sentence,
“He can continue the series”, this must be because of some con-
nection between writing down a formula and actually continuing
the series. And the connection in experience of these two
processes or activities is clear enough. But this connection
tempts us to suggest that the sentence, “B can continue …”
means something like, “B does something which, experience has
shown us, generally leads to his continuing the series.” But
does B, when he says, “Now I can go on” really mean, “Now I am
doing something which, as experience has shown us, etc., etc.”?
Do you mean that he had this phrase in his mind or that he would
have been prepared to give it as an explanation of what he had
said?! To say the phrase, “B can continue …” is correctly
used when prompted by such occurrences as described in 62), 63),
64) but that these occurrences justify its use only under cert-
ain circumstances (e.g. when experience has shown certain con-
nections) is not to say that the sentence, “B can continue …”
59.
is short for the sentence which describes all these circum-
stances, i.e. the whole situation which is the background of
our game.
     

      On the other hand we should under certain circumstances
be ready to substitute “B knows the formula”, “B has said the
formula” for “B can continue the series”. As when we ask a
doctor, “Can the patient walk?”, we shall sometimes be ready to
substitute for this, “Is his leg healed?” – “Can he speak?”
under certain circumstances means, “Is his throat all right?”,
under others ([E|e].g. if he is a small child) it means, “Has he
learned to speak?” – To the question, “Can the patient walk?”,
the doctor's answer may be, “His leg is all right”. – We use
the phrase, “He can walk, as far as the state of his leg is con-
cerned”, especially when we wish to oppose this condition for
his walking to some other condition, say the state of his spine.
Here we must beware of thinking that there is in the nature of
the case something which we might call a the complete set of con-
ditions, e.g. for his walking; so that the patient, as it were,
must walk can't help walking if all these conditions are fulfilled.
     

      We can say: The expression, “B can continue the series”,
is used under different circumstances to make different distinct-
ions. Thus it may distinguish a) between the case when a man
knows the formula and the case when he doesn't; or b) between
the case when a man knows the formula and hasn't forgotten how
to write the numerals of the decimal system, and the case when
he knows the formula and has forgotten how to write the numerals;
or c) (as perhaps in 64)) between the case when a man is feel-
60.
ing his normal self and the case when he is still in a condition
of shell shock; or d) between the case of a man who has done
this kind of exercise before and the case of a man who is new
at it. These are only a few of a large family of cases.
     

      The question whether “He can continue …” means the same
as “He knows the formula” can be answered in several different
ways: We can say, “They don't mean the same, i.e., they are not
in general used as synonyms as, e.g., the phrases, ‘I am well’
and ‘I am in good health’”; or we may say, “Under certain circ-
umstances
” ‘He can continue …’ means he knows the formula”.
Imagine the case of a language (somewhat analogous to 49)) in
which two forms of expression, two different sentences, are
used to say that a person's legs are in working order. The one
form of expression is exclusively used under circumstances
when preparations are going on for an expedition, a walking
tour, or the like; the other is used in cases when there is no
question of such preparations. We shall here be doubtful
whether to say the two sentences have the same meaning or dif-
ferent meanings. In any case the true state of affairs can
only be seen when we look into the detail of the usage of our
expressions. – And it is clear that if in our present case we
should decide on saying to say that the two expressions have different
meanings, we shall certainly not be able to say that the dif-
ference is that the fact which makes the second sentence true
is a different one from the fact which makes the first sentence
true.
     

      We are justified in saying that the sentence, “He can
61.
continue …” has a different meaning from that, “He knows the
formula”. But we mustn't imagine that we can find a particul-
ar state of affˇairs “which the first sentence refers to”, as it
were on in a plane above that on in which the special occurrences
(like knowing the formula, imagining certain further terms, etc.)
take place.
     

      Let us ask the following question: Suppose that, on one
ground or another, B has said, “I can continue the series”, but
on being asked to continue it he had shown himself unable to do
so, – should we say that this proved that his statement, that
he could continue, was wrong, or should we say that he was able
to continue when he said he was? Would B himself say, “I see
I was wrong”, or “What I said was true, I could do it then but
I can't now”? – There are cases in which he would correctly say
the one and cases in which he would correctly say the other.
Suppose a) when he said he could continue he saw the formula
before his mind, but when he was asked to continue he found he
had forgotten it; – or, b) when he said he could continue he
had said to himself the next five terms of the series, but now
finds that they don't come into his mind; – or c) before, he
had continued the series calculating five more places, now he
still remembers these five numbers but has forgotten how he had
calculated them; – or d) he says, “Then I felt I could continue,
now I can't”; – or e), “When I said I could lift the weight my
arm didn't hurt, now it does”; etc.
     

      On the other hand we say, “I thought I could lift this
weight, but I see I can't”, “I thought I could say this piece
62.
by heart, but I see I was mistaken”.
     

      These illustrations of the our use of the word “can” should
be supplemented by illustrations showing the variety of uses
we make of the terms “forgetting” and “trying”, for these uses
are closely connected with those of the word “can”. Consider Contemplate
these cases: a) Before, B had said to himself the formula, now,
“He finds a complete blank there”. b) Before, he had said to
himself the formula, now, for a moment he isn't sure “whether
it was 2 or 3”. c) He has forgotten a name and it is “on
the tip of his tongue”. Or d), he is not certain whether he
has ever known the name or has forgotten it.
     

      Now look at the way in which we use the word “trying”:
a) A man is trying to open a door by pulling as hard as he can.
b) He is trying to open the door of a safe by trying to find
the combination. c) He is trying to find the combination by
trying to remember it, or d) by turning the knobs and listening
with a stethoscope. Consider the various processes we call
“trying to remember”. Compare e) trying to move your finger
against a resistance (e.g. when someone is holding it), and f)
when you have intertwined the fingers of both hands in a part-
icular way and feel “You don't know what to do in order to make
a particular finger move”.
     

      (Consider also the class of cases in which we say, “I can
do so-and-so but I won't”: “I could if I tried” – e.g. lift
100 pounds; “I could if I wished” – e.g. say the alphabet.)
     

      One might perhaps suggest that the only case in which it
is correct to say, without restriction, that I can do a certain
63.
thing, is that in which while saying that I can do it, I
actually do it, and that otherwise I ought to say, “I can do
it as far as … is concerned”. One may be inclined to think
that only in the above case has a person given a real proof of
being able to do a thing.
65).   But if we look at a language-game in which the phrase
“I can …” is used in this way (e.g., a game in which doing a
thing is taken as the only justification for saying that one is
able to do it), we see that there is not the metaphysical dif-
ference between this game and one in which other justifications
are accepted for saying “I can do so-and-so”. A game of the
kind 65), by the way, shows us the real use of the phrase, “If
something happens it certainly can happen”; an almost useless
phrase in our language.
It sounds as though it had some very
clear and deep meaning, but like most of the general philosoph-
ical propositions it is meaningless except in very special cases.

66).   Make this clear to yourself by imagining a language
(similar to 49)) which has two expressions for such sentences
as, “I am lifting a fifty pound weight”; one expression is used
whenever the action is performed as a test (say, before an
athletic competition), the other expression is used when the
action is not performed as a test.
     

      We see that a vast net of family likenesses connects the
cases in which the expressions of possibility, “can”, “to be
able to”, etc. are used. Certain characteristic features, we
may say, appear in these cases in different combinations: there
is, e.g., the element of conjecture (that something will behave
64.
in a certain way in the future); the description of the state
of something (as a condition for its behaving in a certain way
in the future); the account of certain tests someone or some-
thing has passed. –
     

      There are, on the other hand, various reasons which in-
cline us to look at the fact of something being possible,
someone being able to do something, etc., as the fact that he
or it [a|i]s in a particular peculiar state.
Roughly speaking, this comes
to saying that “A is in the state of being able to do something”
is the form of representation we are most strongly tempted to
adopt, or, as one could also put it, we are strongly inclined

to use the metaphor of something being in a peculiar state for
saying that something can behave in a particular way. And
this way of representation, or this metaphor, is embodied in
the expressions, “He is capable of …”, “He is able to multiply
large numbers in his head”, “He can play chess”: in these
sentences the verb is used in the present tense, suggesting that
the phrases are descriptions of states which exist at the moment
when we speak.
     

      The same tendency shows itself in our calling the ability
of solving a mathematical problem, the ability to enjoy a piece
of music, etc., certain states of the mind; we don't mean by
this expression “conscious mental phenomena”. Rather, a state
of the mind in this sense is the state of a hypothetical mech-
anism, a mind model meant to explain the conscious mental phen-
omena. (Such things as unconscious or subconscious mental
states are features of the mind model.)
In this way also we
65.
can hardly help conceiving of memory as of a kind of store-
house. Note also how sure people are that to the ability of
adding or multiplying or to that of saying a poem by heart,
etc., there must correspond a peculiar state of the person's

brain, although on the other hand they know next to nothing
about such psycho-physiological correspondences. We have an
overwhelmingly strong tendency to conceive of the phenomena
which in such these cases we actually observe by the symbol of a mech-
anism whose manifestations these phenomena are; //We regard these
phenomena as manifestations of this mechanism.// and their
possibility is the particular construction of the mechanism
itself.
     

      Now looking back to our discussion of 43), we see that
it was no final real explanation of B's being guided by the signs
when we said that B was guided if he could also have carried
out orders consisting in other combinations of dots and dashes
than those of 43). In fact, when we considered the question
whether B in 43) was guided by the signs, we were all the time
inclined to say some such thing as that we could only decide
this question with certainty if we could look into the actual
mechanism connecting seeing the signs with acting according to
them. For we have a definite picture of what in a mechanism
we should call certain parts being guided by others. In fact,
the mechanism which immediately suggests itself when we wish to
show what in such a case as 43) we should call “being guided by
the signs” is a mechanism of the type of a pianola. Here, in
the working of the pianola we have a clear case of certain act-
66.
ions, those of the hammers of the piano, being guided by the
pattern of holes in the pianola roll. We could use the expres-
sion, “The pianola is reading off the record made by the perf-
orations in the roll”, and we might call patterns of such perf-
orations complex signs or sentences, opposing their function in
a pianola to the function which similar devices have in mechan-
isms of a different type, e.g., the combination of notches and
teeth which form a key bit. The bolt of a lock is caused to
slide by this particular combination, but we should not say
that the movement of the bolt was guided by the way in which we
combined teeth and notches, i.e., we should not say that the
bolt moved according to the pattern of the key bit. You see
here the connection between the idea of being guided and the
idea of being able to read new combinations of signs: for we
should say that the pianola can read any pattern of perforat-
ions, of a particular kind, it is not built for one particular
tune or set of tunes (like a musical box), – whereas the bolt
of the lock reacts to that pattern of the key bit only which is
predetermined in by the construction of the lock. We could say
that the notches and teeth forming a key bit are not comparable
to the words making up a sentence but to the letters making up
a word, and that the pattern of the key bit in this sense did

not correspond to a complex sign, to a sentence, but to a word.
     

      It is clear that although we might use the ideas of such
mechanisms as similes for describing the way in which B acts in
the games 42) and 43), no such mechanisms are actually involved
in these games.
We shall have to say that the use which we
67.
made of the expression “to be guided” in our examples of the
pianola and of the lock is only one use within a family of us-
ages, though these examples may serve as metaphors, ways of
representation, for other usages.
     

      Let us study the use of the expression, “to be guided”,
by studying the use of the word “reading”. By “reading” I
here mean the activity of translating script into sounds, also
of writing according to dictation or of copying in writing a
page of print, and such like; reading in this sense does not
involve any such thing as understanding what you read.
The use
of the word “reading” is, of course, extremely familiar to us
in the circumstances of our ordinary life (it would be extremely
difficult to describe these circumstances even roughly). A
person, say an Englishman, has as a child gone through one of
the normal ways of training in school or at home, he has learned
to read his language, later on he reads books, newspapers, let-
ters, etc. What happens when he reads the newspaper? – His
eyes glide along the printed words, he pronounces them aloud or
to himself, but he pronounces certain words just taking their
pattern in as a whole, other words which he pronounces after
having seen their first few letters only, others again he reads
out letter by letter. We should also say that he had read a
sentence if while letting his eyes glide along it he had said
nothing aloud or to himself, but on being asked afterwards what
he had read he was able to reproduce the sentence verbatim or
in slightly different words. He may also act as what we might
call a mere reading machine, I mean, paying no attention to
68.
what he spoke, perhaps concentrating his attention on something
totally different. We should in this case sa[t|y] that he read if
he acted faultlessly like a reliable machine. – Compare with
this case the case of a beginner. He reads the words by spell-
ing them out painfully. Some of the words however, he just
guesses from their contexts, or possibly he knows the piece by
heart. The teacher then says that he is pretending to read the
words, or just that he is not really reading them.
If, looking
at this example, we asked ourselves what reading was, we should
be inclined to say that it was a particular conscious mental
act. This is the case in which we say, “Only he knows whether
he is reading; nobody else can really know it”. Yet we must
admit that as far as the reading of a particular word goes,
exactly the same thing might have happened in the beginner's
mind when he “pretended” to read as what happened in the mind
of the fluent reader when he read the word. We are using the
word “reading” in a different way when we talk about the accom-
plished reader on the one hand and the beginner on the other
hand. What in the one case we call an instance of reading we
don't call an instance of reading in the other. –
Of course we
are inclined to say that what happened in the accomplished
reader and in the beginner when they pronounced the word could
not have been the same. The difference lying, if not in their
conscious states, then in the unconscious regions of their
minds, or in their brains. We here imagine two mechanisms,
the internal working of which we can see, and this internal
working is the real criterion for a person's reading or not
69.
reading. But in fact no such mechanisms are known to us in
these cases. Look at it in this way:
     
67).   Imagine that human beings or animals were used as read-
ing machines, assume that in order to become reading machines
they need a particular training. The man who trains them says
of some of them that they already can read, of others that they
can't. Take a case of one who has so far not responded to the
training. If you put before him a printed word he will some-
times make sounds, and every now and then it happens “accident-
ally” that these sounds more or less agree with correspond to the printed word.
A third person hears the pupil creature under training uttering the right
sound on looking at the word “table”. The third person says,
“He reads”, but the teacher answers, “No, he doesn't, it is mere
accident”. But supposing now that the pupil on being shown
other words and sentences goes on reading them correctly. After
a time the teacher says, “Now he can read”. – But what about
the first word “table”?
Should the teacher say, “I was wrong;
he read that, too”<…>, or should he say, “No, he only started
reading later”? When did he really begin to read, or: Which
was the first word, or the first letter, which he read? It
is clear that this question here makes no sense unless I give
an “artificial” explanation such as: “The first word which he
reads = the first word of the first hundred consecutive words
he reads correctly”. – Suppose on the other hand that we used
the word “reading” to distinguish between the case when a part-
icular conscious process of spelling out the words takes place
in a person's mind from the case in which this does not happen:
70.
– Then, at least the person who is reading could say that
such-and-such a word was the first which he actually read. –
Also, in the different case of a reading machine which is a
mechanism connecting signs with the reactions to these signs,
e.g., a pianola, we could say, “only after such-and-such a
thing has been done to the machine, e.g., certain parts had
been connected by wires, the machine actually read; the first
letter which it read was a d”. –
     

      In the case 67), by calling certain creatures “reading
machines” we meant only that they react in a particular way to
seeing printed signs. No connection between seeing and react-
ing, no internal mechanism enters into this case. It would be
absurd if the trainer had answered to the question whether he
read the word “table” or not, “Perhaps he read it”, for there
is no doubt in this case about what he actually did. The
change which took place was one which we might call a change in
the general behaviour of the pupil, and we have in this case
not given a meaning to the expression, “The first word in the
new era”. (Compare with this the following case:

In our figure a row of dots with large intervals succeeds a row
of dots with small intervals. Which is the last dot in the
first sequence and which the first dot in the second? Imagine
our dots were holes in the revolving disc of a siren. Then we
should hear a tone of low pitch following a tone of high pitch
(or vice versa). Ask yourself: At which moment does the tone
of low pitch begin and the other end?)
     
71.

      There is a great temptation on the other hand to regard
the conscious mental act as the only real criterion disting-
uishing reading from not reading. For we are inclined to say,
“Surely a man always knows whether he is reading or pretending
to read”, or “Surely a man always knows when he is really read-
ing”. If A tries to make B believe that he is able to read
Cyrillic script, cheating him by learning a Russian sentence
by heart and then saying it <…> while looking at the printed
sentence, we may certainly say that A knows that he is pretend-
ing and that he is not reading in this case is characterized by
a particular personal experience, namely, that of saying the
sentence by heart. Also, if A makes a slip in saying it by
heart, this experience will be different from that which a pers-
on has who makes a slip in reading.
68).   But supposing now that a man who could read fluently and
who was made to read sentences which he had never read before
read these sentences, but all the time with the peculiar feel-
ing of knowing the sequence of words by heart. Should we in
this case say that he was not reading, i.e., should we regard
his personal experience as the criterion distinguishing between
reading and not reading?
69).   Or imagine this case: A man under the influence of a
certain drug is shown a group of five signs, not letters of an
existing alphabet; and looking at them with all the outward signs
and personal experiences of spelling out a word, pronounces the
word “ABOVE”. (This sort of thing happens in dreams. After
waking up we then say, “It seemed to me that I was reading these
72.
signs though they weren't really signs at all”.) In such a
case some people might be inclined to say that he is reading,
others that he isn't. We could imagine that after he had spelt
out the word “above” we showed him other combinations of the
five signs and that he read them consistently with his reading
of the first permutation of signs shown to him. By a series
of similar tests we might find that he used what we might call
an imaginary alphabet. If this was so, we should be more
ready to say, “He reads” than “He imagines that he reads, but he
doesn't really”.
     

      Note also that there is a continuous series of intermed-
iary cases between the case when a person knows by heart what is
in print before him and the case in which he spells out the
letters of every word without any such help as guessing from
the context, knowing by heart, and such like.
     

      Do this: Say by heart the series of cardinals from one to
twelve, – Now look at the dial of your watch and read this
sequence of numbers. Ask yourself what in this case you called
reading, that is, what did you do to make it reading?
     

      Let us try this explanation: A person reads if he derives
the copy which he is producing from the model which he is copy-
ing. (I will use the word “model” to mean that which he is
reading off, e.g., the printed sentences which he is reading or
copying in writing, or such signs as “--..-” in 42) and 43)
which he is “reading” by his movements, or the scores which a
pianist plays off, etc. The word “copy” I use for the sentence
spoken or written from the printed one, for the movements made
73.
according to such signs as “--..-”, for the movements of the
pianist's fingers or the tune which he plays from the scores,
etc.) Thus if we had taught a person the Cyrillic alphabet
and had taught him how each letter was pronounced, if then we
gave him a piece printed in the Cyrillic script and he spelt it
out according to the pronunciation of each letter as we had
taught it, we should undoubtedly say that he was deriving the
sound of every word from the written and spoken alphabet taught
him. And this also would be a clear case of reading. (We
might use the expression, “We have taught him the rule of the
alphabet”.)
     

      But, let us see, what made us say that he derived the
spoken words from the printed by means of the rule of the alph-
abet? Isn't all we know that we told him that this letter was
pronounced this way, that letter that way, etc., and that he
afterwards read out words in the Cyrillic script? What sug-
gests itself to us as an answer is that he must have shown
somehow that he did actually make the transition from the printed
to the spoken words by means of the rule of the alphabet which
we had given him. And what we mean by his showing this will
certainly get clearer if we alter our example and
70)   assume that he reads off a text by transcribing it, say,
from block letters into cursive script. For in this case we
can assume the rule of the alphabet to have been given in the
form of a table which shows the block alphabet and the cursive
alphabet in parallel columns. Then the deriving the copy from
the text we should imagine this way: The person who copies looks
74.
up the table for each letter at frequent intervals, or he says
to himself such things as, “Now what's a small a like?”, or he
tries to visualize the table, refraining from actually looking
at it. –
     
71).   But what if, doing all this, he then transcribed an “A”
into a “b”, a “B” into a “c”, and so on? Should we not call
this “reading” “deriving” too? We might in this case describe
his procedure by saying that he used the table as we should
have used it had we not looked straight from left to right like
this: but like this: though he actually when looking
up the table passed with his<…> eyes or finger horizontally from
left to right. – But let us suppose now
72)   that going through the normal processes “looking up”, he
transcribed an “A” into an “n”, a “B” into an “x”, in short,
acted, as we might say, according to a scheme of arrows which
showed no simple regularity. Couldn't we call this “deriving”
too? – But suppose that
73)   he didn't stick to this way of transcribing. In fact he
changed it, but according to a simple rule: After having trans-
cribed “A” into “n”, he transcribed the next “A” into “o”, and
the next “A” into “p”, and so on. But where is the sharp line
between this procedure and that of producing a transcription
without any system at all? Now you might object to this by
saying, “In the case 71), you obviously assumed that he under-
stood the table differently
; he didn't understand it in the
normal way”. But what do we call “understanding the table in
75.
a particular way?” But whatever process you imagine this
“understanding” to be, it is only another link interposed
between the outward and inward processes of deriving derivation I have des-
cribed and the actual transcription.
In fact this process of
understanding could obviously be described by means of a schema
of the kind used in 71), and we could then say that in a part-
icular case he looked up the table like this: ; underst-
ood the table like this: ; and transcribed it like this:
. But does this mean that the word “deriving” (or
“understanding”) has really no meaning, as by following up its
meaning this seems to trail off into nothing? In case 70) the
meaning of “deriving” stood out quite clearly, but we told our-
selves that this was only one special case of deriving. It
seemed to us that the essence of the process of deriving was
here presented in a particular dress and that by stripping it
of this we should get at the essence. Now in 71), 72), 73) we
tried to strip our case of what had seemed but its peculiar
<…>costume only to find that what had seemed mere costumes were the
essential features of the case. (We acted as though we had
tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves.)

The use of the word “deriving” is indeed exhibited in 70), i.e.,
this example showed us one of the family of cases in which this
word is used. And the explanation of the use of this word, as
that of the use of the word “reading” or “being guided by sym-
bols”, essentially consists in describing a selection of examples
exhibiting characteristic features, some examples showing these
76.
features in exaggeration, others showing transitions, exaggerated forˇm, others in transitional phases, certain
series of examples showing the trailing off of such features.
Imagine that someone wished to give you an idea of the facial
characteristics of a certain family, the So-and-so's, he would
do it by showing you a set of family portraits and by drawing
your attention to certain characteristic features, and his main
task would consist in the proper arrangement of these pictures,
which, e.g., would enable you to see how certain influences
gradually changed the features, in what characteristic ways the
members of the family aged, what features appeared more strongly
as they did so.
     

      It was not the function of our examples to show us the
essence of “deriving”, “reading”, and so forth through a veil of
inessential features; they the examples were not descriptions of an outside
letting us guess at an inside which for some reason or other
could not be shown in its nakedness. We are tempted to think
that our examples are indirect means for producing a certain
image or idea in a person's mind, – that they hint at something
which they cannot show.
This would be so in some such case as
this: Suppose I wish to produce in someone a mental image of the
inside of a particular 18th century room which he is prevented
from entering. I therefore adopt this method: I show him the
house from the outside, pointing out the windows of the room in
question, I further lead him into other rooms of the same period.–
     

      Our method is purely descriptive; the descriptions we give
are not hints of explanations.

77.
     
        ((Interval. Vacation after Michaelmas Term.))
     

          Do we have a feeling of familiarity whenever we look at
familiar objects? Or do we have it usually?
     
          When do we actually have it?
     
          It helps us to ask: What do we contrast the feeling of
familiarity with?
     
          One thing we contrast it with is surprise.
     
          One could say: “Unfamiliarity is much more of an experience
than familiarity”.
     
          We say: A shows B a series of objects. B is to tell A
whether the object is familiar to him or not. a) The question
may be, “Does B know what the objects are?” or b) “Does he rec-
ognize the particular object?”
1).   Take the case that B is shown a series of apparatus, –
a balance, a thermometer, a spectroscope, etc.
2).   B is shown a pencil, a pen, an inkpot, and a pebble. Or:
3)   Besides familiar objects he is shown an object of which he
says, “That looks as though it served some purpose, but I don't
know what purpose”.
     
          What happens when B recognizes a pencil something as a pencil?
     
          Suppose A had shown him an object looking like a stick.
B handles this object, suddenly it comes apart, one of the
parts being a cap, the other a pencil. B says, “Oh, this is a
pencil”. He has recognized the object as a pencil.
4).   We could say, “B always knew what a pencil looked like;
he could e.g., have drawn one on being asked to. He didn't
know that the object he was given contained a pencil which he
78.
could have drawn any time”.
     

      Compare with this case 5).
5).   B is shewn a word written on a piece of paper held upside
down. He does not recogn[o|i]ze the word. The paper is gradually
turned round until B says, “Now I see what it is. It is ‘pen-
cil’”.
     

      We might say, “He always knew what the word ‘pencil’
looked like. He di[s|d] not know that the word he was shewn
would when turned round look like ‘pencil’”.
     

      In both cases 4) and 5) you might say something was hid-
den. But note the different application of “hidden”.
6).   Compare with this: You read a letter and can't read one
of its words. You guess what it must be from the context,
and now can read it. You recognize this scratch as an e, the
second as an a, the third as a t. This is different from the
case where the word “eat” was covered by a blotch of ink, and
you only guessed that the word “eat” must have been in this
place.
7).   Compare: You see a word and can't read it. Someone
alters it slightly by adding a dash, lengthening a stroke, or
suchlike. Now you can read it. Compare this alteration
with the turning in 5), and note that there<…> is a sense in
which while the word was turned round you saw that it was no[y|t]
altered. I.e., there is a case in which you say, “I looked
at the word while it was turned, and I know that it is the same
now as it was when I didn't recognize it”.
8).   Suppose the game between A and B just consisted in this,
79.
that B should say whether he knows the object or not but does
not say what it is. Suppose he was shewn an ordinary pencil,
after having been shewn a hygrometer which he had never seen
before. On being shewn the hygrometer he said that he was not
familiar with it, on being shewn the pencil, that he knew it.
What happened when he recognized it? Must he have told him-
self, though he didn't tell A, that what he saw was a pencil?
Why should we assume this?
     

      Then, when he recognized the pencil, what did he recognize
it as?
9).   Suppose even that he had said to himself, “Oh, this is a
pencil”, could you compare this case with 4) or 5)? In these
cases one might have said, “He recognized this as that” (point-
ing, e.g., for “this” to the covered up pencil and for “that”
to an ordinary pencil, and similarly in <…> 5)).
     

      In 8) the pencil underwent no change and the words, “Oh,
this is a pencil” did not refer to a paradigm, the similarity
of which with the pencil shewn B had recognized.
     

      Asked, “What is a pencil?”, B would not have pointed to
another object as the paradigm or sample, but could straight
away have pointed to the pencil shewn to him.
     

      “But when he said, ‘Oh, this is a pencil’, how did he know
that it was if he didn't recognize it as something?” –
This
really comes to saying, “How did he recognize ‘pencil’ as the <…>
name of this sort of thing?” Well, how did he recognize it?
He just reacted in this particular way by saying this word.

10).   Suppose someone shews you colours and asks you to name
80.
them. Pointing to a certain object you say, “This is red”.
What would you answer if you were asked, “How do you know that
this is red?”?
     

      Of course there is the case in which a general explanation
was given to B, say, “We shall call ‘pencil’ anything that one
can easily write with on a wax tablet”. Then A shews B amongst
other objects a small pointed object, and B says, “Oh, this is
a pencil”, after having thought, “One could write with this
quite easily”. In this case, we may say, a derivation takes
place. In 8), 9), 10) there is no derivation. In 4) we
might say that B derived that the object shewn to him was a
pencil by means of a paradigm, or else no such derivation might
have taken place.
     

      Now <…> should we say that B on seeing the pencil after seeing
instruments which he didn't know had a feeling of familiarity?
Let us imagine what really might have happened. He saw a pen-
cil, smiled, felt relieved, and the name of the object which he
saw came into his mind or mouth.
     

      Now isn't the feeling of relief just that which character-
izes the experience of passing from unfamiliar to familiar
things?
     

      We say we experience tension and relaxation, relief, strain
and rest in cases as different as these: a man holds a weight
with outstretched arm; his arm, his whole body is in a state of
tension. We let him put down the weight, the tension relaxes.
A man runs, then rests. He thinks hard about the solution of
a problem in Euclid, then finds it, and relaxes. He tries to
remember a name, and relaxes on finding it.
81.
     

      What if we asked, <…> “What do all these cases have in com-
mon that makes us say that they are cases of strain and relax-
ation?”
     

      What makes us use the expression, “seeking in our memory”,
when we try to remember a word?
     

      Let us ask the question, “What is the similarity between
looking for a word in your memory and looking for my friend in
the park?” What would be the answer to such a question?
     

      One kind of answer certainly would consist in describing a
series of intermediate cases.
One might say that the case
which looking in your memory for something is most similar to
is not that of looking for my friend in the park, but, say, that
of looking up the spelling of a word in the dictionary. And
one might go on interpolating cases. Another way of pointing
out
the similarity would be to say, e.g., “In both these cases
at first we can't write down the word and then we can”. This
is what we call pointing out a common feature.
     

      Now it is important to note that we needn't be aware of
such similarities thus pointed out when we<…> are prompted to use
the words “seeking”, “looking for”, etc. in the case of trying
to remember.
     

      One might be inclined to say, “Surely a similarity must
strike us, or we shouldn't be { inclined driven moved to use the same word”. –
Compare this statement with that: “A similarity between these
cases must strike us in order that we should be inclined to use
the same picture to represent both”. This says that some act
must precede the act of using this picture. But why shouldn't
82.
what we call “the similarity striking us” consist partially or
wholly in our using the same picture?
And why shouldn't it
consist partially or wholly in our being prompted to use the
same phrase?
     

      We say: “This picture (or this phrase) suggests itself to
us irresistibly”. Well, isn't this an experience?
     

      We are treating here of cases in which, as one might roughly
put it, the grammar of a word seems to suggest the “necessity”
of a certain intermediary step stage, although in fact the word is
used in cases in which there<…> is no such intermediary step.
Thus we are inclined to say, “A man must understand an order
before he obeys it”, “He must know where his pain is before he
can point to it”, “He must know the tune before he can sing it”,
& such like.)
     

      Let us ask the question: Suppose I had explained to someone
the word “red” (or the meaning of the word “red”) by having
pointed to various red objects and given the ostensive explan-
ation. – What does it mean to say, “Now if he has understood
the meaning, he will bring me a red object if I ask him to”?
This seems to say: If he has really got hold of what is in com-
mon between to all the objects I have shewn him, he will be in the
position to follow my order. But what is it that is in common
to these objects?
     

      Could you tell me what is in common between a light red and
a dark red?
Compare with this the following case: I shew you
two pictures of two different landscapes. In both pictures,
amongst many other objects, there is the picture of a bush,
and it is exactly alike in both. I ask you, “Point to what
83.
these two pictures have in common”, and as answer you point to
this bush.
     

      Now consider this explanation: I give someone two boxes
containing various things, and say, “The object which both these
boxes have in common is called a toasting fork”. The person I
give this explanation to has to sort out the objects in the two
boxes until he finds the one they have in common, and thereby
we may say, he arrives at the ostensive explanation. Or, this
explanation: “In these two pictures you see patches of many
colours; the one colour which you find in both is called ‘mauve’”.
– In this case it makes a clear sense to say, “If he has seen
(or found) what is in common between these two pictures, he can
now bring me a mauve object.”
     

      There is this case game: I say to someone, “I shall explain to
you the word ‘w’ by shewing you various objects. What's in
common to them all is what ‘w’ means.” I first shew him two
books, and he ask[d|s] himself, “Does ‘w’ mean ‘book’?” I then
point to a brick, and he says to himself, “Perhaps ‘w’ means
‘parallelepiped’”. Finally I point to glowing coal, and he
says to himself, “Oh, it's ‘red’ he means, for all these objects
had something red about them.” It would be interesting to con-
sider another form of this game where the person has at each
stage to draw or paint what he thinks I mean. The interest of
this version lies in this, that in some cases it would be quite
obvious what he has got to draw, say, when he sees that all the
objects I have shewn him so far bear a certain trademark (; he'd
draw the trademark). – What, on the other hand, should he paint
if he recognizes that there is something red on each object?
84.
A red patch? And of what shape and shade? Here a convention
would have to be laid down, say, that of painting a red patch
with ragged edges does not mean that the objects have that red
patch with ragged e[g|d]ges in common, but something red.
     

      If, pointing to patches of various shades of red, you asked
a man, “What have these in common that makes you call them
red?”, he'd be inclined to answer, “Don't you see?” And this
of course would not be pointing out a common element.
     

      There are cases where experience teaches us that a person
is not able to carry out an order, say, of the form, “Bring me
x” if he did not see what was in common between the various
objects to which I pointed as an explanation of “x”. And
“seeing what they have in common” in some cases consisted in
pointing to it, in letting one's glance rest on a coloured patch
after a process of scrutiny and comparing, in saying to oneself,
“Oh, it's red he means,” and perhaps at the same time glancing
at all the red patches on the various objects, and so on. <…>
– There are cases, on the other hand, in which no process takes
place comparable with this intermediary “seeing what's in common”,
and where we still use this phrase, though this time we ought
to say, “If after shewing him these things he brings me another
red object, then I shall say that he has seen the common feature
of the objects I shewed him.” Carrying out the order is now
the criterion for his having understood.
     

      ((Having now made a start, Wittgenstein resumes formal
dictation.))
     

      “Why do you call ‘strain’ all these different experiences?” –
“Because they have some element in common.” – “What is it
85.
that bodily and mental strain have in common?” – “I don't know,
but obviously there is some similarity.”
     

      Then why did you say the experiences had something in com-
mon? Didn't this expression just compare the present case
with those cases in which we primarily say that two experiences
have something in common? (Thus we might say that some exper-
iences of joy and of fear have the feleling of heart beat in
common.) But when you said that the two experiences of strain
had something in common, these were only different words for
saying that they were similar: It was then no explanation to
say that the similarity consisted in the occurrence of a common
element.
     

      Also, shall we say that you had a feeling of similarity
when you compared the two experiences, and that this made you
use the same word for both? If you say you have a feeling of
similarity, let us ask a few questions about it:
     Could you say the feeling was located here or there?
     

      When did you actually have this feeling? For, what we
call comparing the two experiences is quite a complicated act-
ivity: perhaps you called the two experiences before your mind,
and imagining a bodily strain, and imagining a mental strain,
was each in itself imagining a process and not a state [i|u]niform
through time. Then ask yourself at what time during all this
you had the feeling of similarity.
     

      “But surely I wouldn't say they are similar if I had no
experience of their similarity.” – But must this experience
be anything you should call a feeling? Suppose for a moment
86.
it were the experience that the word “similar” suggested itself
to you. Would you call this a feeling?
     

      “But is there no feeling of similarity?” – I think there
are feelings which one might call feelings of similarity. But
you don't always have any such feeling if you “notice similar-
ity”. Consider some of the different experiences which you
have if you do so.
     

      a)  There is a kind of experience which one might call being
hardly able to distinguish. You see, e.g., two lengths, two
colours, almost exactly alike. But if I ask myself, “Does this
experience consist in having a peculiar feeling?”, I should
have to say that it certainly isn't characterized by any such
feeling alone, that a most important part of the experience is
that of letting my glance oscillate between the two objects,
fixing it intently, now on the one, now on the other, perhaps
saying words expressive of doubt, shaking my head, etc. etc.
There is, one might say, hardly any room left for a feeling of
similarity between these manifold experiences.
     

      b)  Compare with this the case in which it is impossible
to have any difficulty of distinguishing the two objects.
Supposing I say, “I like to have the two kinds of flowers in
this bed of similar colours to avoid a strong contrast.” The
experience here<…> might be one which one may describe as an easy
sliding of the glance from one to the other.
     

      c)   I listen to a variation on a theme and say, “I don't
see yet how this is a variation of the theme, but I see a cert-
ain similarity.” What happened was that at certain points of
87.
the variation, at certain turning points of the key, I had an
experience of “knowing where I was in the theme”. And this
experiences might again have consisted in imagining certain
figures of the theme, or in seeing them written before my mind
or in actually pointing to them in the score, etc.
     

      “But when two colours are similar, the experience of sim-
ilarity should surely consist in noticing the similarity which
there is between them.” – But is a bluish green similar to a
yellowish green or not? In certain cases we should say they
are similar and in others that they are most dissimilar.
Would it be correct to say that in the two cases we noticed
different relations between them? Suppose I observed a proc-
ess in which a bluish green gradually changed into a pure green,
into a yellowish green, into yellow, and into orange. I say,
“It only takes a short time from bluish green to yellowish green,
because these colours are similar.” – But mustn't you have had
some experience of similarity to be able to say this? – The
experience may be this, of seeing the two colours and saying
that they are both green. Or it may be this, of seeing a band
whose colour changes from one end to the other in the way des-
cribed, and having some one of the experiences which one may
call noticing how close to each other bluish green and yellowish
green are, compared to bluish green and orange.
     

      We use the word “similar” in a huge [g|f]amily of cases.
     

      There is something remarkable about saying that we use the
word “strain” for both mental and physical strain because there
is a similarity between them. Should you say we use the word
“blue” both for light blue and dark blue because there is a sim-
88.
ilarity between them? If you were asked, “Why do you call this
‘blue’ also?”, you would say, “Because this is blue, too”.
     

      One might suggest that the explanation is that in this
case you call “blue” what is in common between the two colours,
and that, if you called “strain” what was in common between the
two experiences of strain, it would have been wrong to say, “I
called them both ‘strain’ because they had a certain similarity”,
but that you would have had to say, “I used the word ‘strain’
in both cases because there is a strain present in both.”
     

      Now what should we answer to the question, “What do light
blue and dark blue have in common?”? At first sight the ans-
wer seems obvious: “They are both shades of blue.” But this
is really a tautology. So let us ask, “What do these colours
I am pointing to have in common?” (Suppose one is light blue,
the other dark blue.) The answer to this really ought to be,
“I don't know what game you are playing.” And it depends upon
this game whether I should say they had anything in common, and
what I should say they had in common.
     

      Imagine this game: A shews B different patches of colours
and asks him what they have in common. B is to answer by
pointing to a particular primary pure colour. Thus if A points to
pink and orange, B is to point to pure red. If A points to
two shades of greenish blue, B is to point to pure green and
pure blue, etc. If in this game A shewed B a light blue and
a dark blue and asked what they had in common, there would be
no doubt about the answer. If then he pointed to pure red and
pure green, the answer would be that these have nothing in com-
mon. But I could easily imagine circumstances under which
89.
we should say that they had something in common and would not
not hesitate to say what it was: Imagine a use of language (a
culture) in which there was a common name for green and red on
the one hand, and yellow and blue on the other. Suppose, e.g.,
that there were two castes, one the patrician caste, wearing red
and green garments, the other, the plebeian, wearing blue and
yellow garments. Both yellow and blue would always be referred
to as plebeian colours, green and red as patrician colours.
Asked what a red patch and a green patch have in common, a man
of our tribe would not hesitate to say they were both patrician.
     

      We could also easily imagine a language (and that means
again a culture) in which there existed no common expressions
for light blue and dark blue, in which the former, say, was
called “Cambridge”, the latter “Oxford”. If you ask a man of
this tribe what Cambridge and Oxford have in common, he'd be
inclined to say, “Nothing”.
     

      Compare this game with     ). B is shewn certain pictures,
combinations of coloured patches. On being asked what these
pictures have in common, he is to point to a sample of red, say,
if there is a red patch in both, to green if there is a green
patch in both, etc. This shews you in what different ways this
same answer may be used.
     

      Consider such a proposition an explanation as, “I mean by ‘blue’ what
these two colours have in common.” – Now isn't it possible that
someone should understand this explanation? He would, e.g.,
on being ordered to bring another blue object, carry out this
order satisfactorily. But perhaps he will bring a red object
and we shall be inclined to say: “He seems to notice some sort
90.
of similarity between samples we shewed him and that red thing.
     

      Note: Some people when asked to sing a note which we strik
for them on the piano, regularly sing the fifth of that note.
That makes it easy to imagine that a language might have one
name only for a certain note and its fifth. On the other hand
we should be embarrassed to answer the question: What do a
note and its fifth have in common? For of course it is no
answer to say: “They have a certain affinity.”
     

      It is one of our tasks here to give a picture of the gram-
mar (the use) of the word “a certain.”
     

      To say that we use the word “blue” to mean “what all these
shades of colour have in common” by itself says nothing more
than that we uses the word “blue” in all these cases.
     

      And the phrase, “He sees what all these shades have in
common,” may refer to all sorts of different phenomena, i.e.,
all sorts of phenomena are used as criteria for “his seeing
that …” Or all that happens may be that on being asked to
bring another shade of blue he carries out our order satisfact-
orily. Or a patch of pure blue may appear before his mind's
eye when we shew him the different samples of blue: or he may
instinctively turn his head towards some other shade of blue
which we haven't shewn him for sample, etc. etc.
     

      Now should we say that a mental strain and a bodily strain
were “strains” in the same sense of the word or in different
(or “slightly different”) senses of the word? – There are cases
of this sort in which we should not be doubtful about the ans-
wer.
     

      Consider this case: We have taught someone the use of the
91.
words “darker” and “lighter”. He could, e.g., carry out such
an order as, “Paint me a patch of colour darker than the one I
am shewing you.” Suppose now I said to him: “Listen to the
five vowels a, e, i, o, u and arrange them in order of their
darkness.” He may just look puzzled and do nothing, but he
may (and some people will) now arrange the vowels in a certain
order (mostly i, e, a, o, u). Now one might imagine that arr-
anging the vowels in order of darkness presupposed that when a
vowel was sounded a certain colour came before a man's mind,
that he then arranged these colours in their order of darkness
and told you the corresponding arrangement of the vowels. But
this actually need not happen. A person will comply to the
order: “Arrange the vowels in their order of darkness”, without
seeing any colours before his mind's eye.
     

      Now if such a person was asked whether u was “really
darker than e, he would almost certainly answer some such thing
as, “It isn't really darker, but it somehow gives me a darker
impression.”
     

      But what if we asked him, “What made you use the word
‘darker’ ˇin this case at all?”?
     

      Again we might be inclined to say, “He must have seen some-
thing that was in common both to the relation between two col-
ours and to the relation between two vowels.” But if he isn't
capa<…>ble of specifying what this common element was, this leaves
us just with the fact that he was prompted to use the words
“darker”, “lighter” [o|i]n both these cases.
     

      For, note the word “must” in “He m[i|u]st have seen something
…” When you said that, you didn't mean that from past
92.
experience you conclude that he probably did see something,
and that's just why this sentence adds nothing to what we know
and in fact only suggests a different form of words to describe
it.
     

      If someone said: “I do see a certain similarity, only I
can't describe it”, I should say: “This itself “Saying this also characterizes
your experience.”
     

      Suppose you look at two faces and say, “They are similar,
but I don't know what it is that's similar about them.” And
suppose that after a while you said: “Now I know; their eyes
have the same shape”, I should say, “Now your experience of thei
similarity is different from what it was when you saw similar-
ity and didn't know what it consisted in.”
Now to the question
“What made you use the word ‘darker’ …?” the answer may be,
“Nothing made me use the word ‘darker’, – that is, if you ask
me for a reason why I use it. I just used it, and what is more
I used it with the same intonation of voice, and perhaps with
the same facial expression and gesture which I should in cert-
ain cases be inclined to use when applying the word to colours.”
It is easier to see this when we speak of ˇa deep sorrow, a deep sound, a
deep well. Some people are able to distinguish between fat
and lean days of the week. And their experience when they con-
ceive a day as a fat one consists in applying this word together
perhaps with a gesture expressive of fatness and a certain
comfort.
     

      But you may be tempted to say: This use of the word and
gesture is not their primary experience. First of all they
93.
have to conceive the day as fat and then they express this con-
ception by word and or gesture.
     

      But why do you use the expression, “They have to”? Do
you know of an experience in this case which you call “the con-
ception, etc.”? For if you don't, isn't it just what one might
call a linguistic prejudice that made you say, “He had to have
a conception before, etc.”?
     

      Rather, you can learn from this example and from others
that there are cases in which we may call a particular exper-
ience “noticing, seeing, conceiving that so & so is the case”,
before expressing it by word or gestures, and that there are
other cases in which if we talk of an experience of conceiving
at all, we have to apply this word to the experience of using
certain words, gestures, etc.
     

      When the man said, “u isn't really darker than e …”, it
was essential that he meant to say that the word “darker” was
used in different senses when one talked of one colour being
darker that another and, on the other hand, of one vowel being
darker than another.
     

      Consider this example: Suppose we had taught a man to use
the words “green”, “red”, “blue” by pointing to patches of these
colours. We had taught him to fetch us objects of a certain
colour on being ordered, “Bring me something red!”, to sort out
objects of various colours from a heap, and such like. Sup-
pose we now shew him a heap of leaves, some of which are a slight-
ly reddish brown, [i|o]thers a slightly greenish yellow, and give
him the order, “Put the red leaves and the green leaves on sep-
arate heaps.” It is quite likely that he will upon this
94.
separate the greenish yellow leaves from the reddish brown ones.
Now should we say that we had here used the words “red” and
“green” in the same sense as in the previous cases, or did we
use them in different but similar senses? What reasons would
one give for adopting the latter view? One could point out
that on being asked to paint a red patch, one should certainly
not have painted a slightly reddish brown one, and therefore
one might say “red” means something different in the two cases.
But why shouldn't I say that it had one meaning only but was,
of course, used according to the circumstances?
     

      The question is: Do we supplement our statement that the
word has two meanings by a statement saying that in one case it
had this, in the other that meaning? As the criterion for a
word's having two meanings, we may use the fact of there being
two explanations given for a word. Thus we say the word “bank”
has two meanings; for in one case it means this sort of thing,
(pointing, say, to a river bank) in the other case that sort of thing, (pointing to the Bank of England). Now what I point to here
are paradigms for the use of the words. One could not say:
“The word ‘red’ has two meanings because in one case it means
this (pointing to a light red), in the other that (pointing to
a dark red)”, if, that is to say, there had been only one osten-
sive definition for the word “red” used in our game. One could,
on the other hand, imagine a language-game in which two words,
say “red” and “reddish”, were explained by two ostensive defin-
itions, the first shewing a dark red object, the second a light
red one. Whether two such definitions explanations were given or only one
might depend on the natural reactions of the people using the
95.
language. We might find that a person to whom we give the
ostensive definition, “This is called ‘red’” (pointing to one
red object) thereupon fetches any red object of whatever shade
of red on being ordered: “Bring me something red!” Another
person might not do so, but bring objects of a certain range of
shades only in the neighborhood of the shade pointed out to him
in the explanation. We might say that this person “does not
see what is in common between all the different shades of red”.
But remember please that our only criterion for that is the
behaviour we have described.
     

      Consider the following case: B has been taught a use of the
words “lighter” and “darker”. He has been shewn objects of
various colours and has been taught that one calls this a darker
colour than that, trained to bring an object on being ordered,
“Bring something darker than this”, and to describe the colour
of an object by saying that it is darker or lighter than a cert-
ain sample, etc., etc. Now he is given the order to put down
a series of objects, arranging them in the order of their dark-
ness. He does this by laying out a row of books, writing down
a series of names of animals, and by writing down the five vow-
els in the order u, o, a, e, i. We ask him why he put down
that latter series, and he says, “Well o is lighter than u, and
e lighter than o.” – We shall be ast[i|o]nished at his attitude,
and at the same time admit that there is something in what he
says. Perhaps we shall say: “But look, surely e isn't lighter
than o in the way this book is lighter than that.” – But he
may shrug his shoulders and say, “I don't know, but e is lighter
than o, isn't it?”
96.
     

      We may be inclined to treat this case as some kind of
abnormality, and to say, “B must have a different sense, with
the help of which he arranges both coloured objects and vowels.”
And if we <…> tried to make this idea of ours (quite) explicit,
it would come to this: The normal person registers lightness and
darkness of visual objects on one instrument, and, what one
might call the lightness and darkness of sounds (vowels) on
another, in the sense in which one might say that we record
rays of a certain wave length with the eyes, and rays of another
range of wave length by with our sense of temperature. B on the other
hand, we wish to say, arranges both sounds and colours by the
readings of one instrument (sense organ) only (in the sense in
which a photographic plate might record rays of a range which
we could only cover with two of our senses).
     

      This roughly is the picture standing behind our idea that
B must have “understood” the word “darker” differently from the
normal person. On the other hand let us put side by side with
this picture the fact that there is in our case no evidence for
<…>“another sense”. – And in fact the use of the word “must”
when we say, “B must have understood the word differently”,
already shews us that this sentence (really) expresses our
determination to look at the phenomena we have observed after
the picture outlined in this sentence.
     

      “But surely he used ‘lighter’ in a different sense when he
said e was lighter than u”. – What does this mean? Are you
distinguishing between the sense in which he used the word and
his usage of the word? That is, do you wish to say that if
someone uses the word as he does, some other difference, say in
97.
his mind, must go along with the difference in usage? Or is
all you want to say that surely the usage of “lighter” was a
different one when he applied it to vowels?
     

      Now is the fact that the usages differ anything over and
above what you describe when you point out the particular dif-
ferences?
     

      What if somebody said, pointing to two patches which I had
called red, “Surely [t|y]ou are using the word ‘red’ in two differ-
ent ways.” – I should say, “This is light<…> red and the other
dark red, – but why should I have to talk of two different
usages?ˇ
     

      It certainly is easy to point out differences between that
part of the game in which we applied “lighter” and “darker” to
coloured objects and that part in which we applied these words
to vowels. In the first part there was comparison of two
objects by laying them side by side and looking from one to the
other, there was painting a darker or lighter shade than a
certain sample given; in the second there was no comparison by
the eye, no painting, etc. But when these differences are
pointed out, we are still free to speak of two parts of the same
game (as we have done just now) or of two different games.
     

      “But don't I perceive that the relation between a lighter
and a darker bit of material is a different one than tha[n|t]
between the vowels e and u, – as on the other hand I perceive
that the relation between u and e is the same as that between
e and i?” – Under certain circumstances we shall in these cases
be inclined to talk of different relations, under certain others
to talk of the same relation.
One might say, “It depends how
98.
one compares them.”
     

      Let us ask the question, “Should we say that the arrows
and point in the same direction or in different
directions?” – At first sight you might be inclined to say,
“Of course, in different directions.” But look at it this
way: If I look into a looking glass and see the reflection of
my face, I can take this as a criterion for seeing my own head.
If on the other hand, I saw in it the back of a head I might
say, “It can't be my own head I am seeing, but a head looking in
the opposite direction.” Now this could lead me on to say
that an arrow and the reflection of an arrow in a glass have the
same direction when they point at towards each other, and opposite dir-
ections when the head of the one points to the tail end of the
other. Imagine the case that a man had been taught the ordin-
ary use of the word “the same” in the cases of “the same colour”,
& “the same shape”, “the same length.” He had also been taught
the use of the word “to point to” in such contexts as, “The
arrow points to the tree.” Now we shew him two arrows facing
each other, and two arrows one following the other, and ask
him in which of these two cases he'd apply the phrase, “The
arrows point the same way.” Isn't it easy to imagine that if
certain applications were uppermost in his mind, he would be
inclined to say that the arrows point “the same way”?
     

      When we hear the diatonic scale we are inclined to say that
after every seven notes the same note recurs, and, asked why we
call it the same note again one might answer, “Well it's a c
again.” But this isn't the explanation I want, for I should
ask, “What made one call it a c again?” And the answer to this
99.
would seem to be, “Well, don't you hear that it's the same tone
only an octave higher?” – Here too we could imagine that a
man had been taught our use of the word “the same” when applied
to colours, lengths, directions, etc., and that we now played
the diatonic scale for him and asked him whether he'd say that
he heard the same notes again and again at certain intervals,
and we could easily imagine several answers, in particular for
instance, this, that he heard the same note alternately after
every four or three notes (he calls the tonic, the dominant,
and the octave the same tone).
     

      If we had made this experiment with two people A and B,
and A had applied the expression “the same tone” to the octave
only, B to the dominant and octave, should we have a right to
say that the two hear different things when we play to them the
diatonic scale? – If we say they do, let us be clear whether
we wish to assert that there must be some other difference be-
tween the two cases besides the one we have observed, or whether
we wish to make no such statement.
     

      All the questions considered here link up with this prob-
lem: Suppose you had taught someone to write down series of num-
bers according to rules of the form: Always write down a number
n greater than the preceding.
(This rule is abbreviated to
“Add n”). The numerals in this game are to be groups of dashes
-, --, ---, etc. What I call teaching this game of course
consisted in giving general explanations and doing examples. –
These examples are taken from the range, say, between 1 and 85.
We now give the pupil the order, “Add 1”. After some time we
observe that after passing 100 he did what we should call
100.
adding 2; after passing 300 he does what we should call adding
3. We have him up for this: “Didn't I tell you always to add
<…> 1? Look what you have done before you got to 100!” –
Suppose the pupil said, pointing to the numbers 102, 104, etc.
“Well, didn't I do the same here? I thought this was what you
wanted me to do”. – You see that it would get us no further
here again to say, “But don't you see …?”, pointing out to
him again the rules and examples we had given to him. We might
in such a case, say that this person naturally understands
(interprets) the rule (and examples) we have given as we should
understand the rule (and examples) telling us: “Add 1 up to
100, then 2 up to 200, etc.”
     

      (This would be similar to the case of a man who did not
naturally follow an order given by a pointing gesture by mov-
ing in the direction shoulder to hand, but in the opposite
direction. And understanding here means the same as reacting.)
     

      “I suppose what you say comes to this, that in order to
follow the rule “Add 1” correctly a new insight, intuition,
is needed at every step.” – But what does it mean to follow the
rule correctly? How and when is it to be decided which at a
particular point is the correct step to take? – “The correct
step at every point is” that which is in accordance with the
rule as it was meant, intended.” // … with the meaning, intention,
of the rule.”// – I suppose the idea is this: When you gave the
rule, “Add 1”, and meant it, you meant him to write 101 after
100, 199 after 198, 1041 after 1040, and so on. But how did
you do all these acts of meaning (I suppose an infinite number
of them) when you gave him the rule? Or is this misrepresenting
101.
it? And would you say that there was only one act of meaning,
from which, however, all these others, or any one of them,
followed in turn? But isn't the point just: “what does follow
from the general rule?” You might say, “Surely I knew when I
gave him the rule that I meant him to follow up 100 by 101.”
But here you are misled by the grammar of the word “to know”.
Was knowing this some mental act by which you at the time made
the transition from 100 to 101, e.g., some act like saying to
yourself: “I want him to write 101 after 100”? In this case
ask yourself how many such acts you performed when you gave him
the rule. Or do you mean by knowing some kind of disposition,
– then only experience can teach us what it was a disposition
for. – “But surely if one had asked me which number he should
write after 1568, I should have answered ‘1569’.” – I dare- you would, but how can you be sure of it? Your idea really
is that somehow in the mysterious act of meaning the rule you
made the transitions without really making them. You crossed
all the bridges before you were there. – This queer idea is
connected with a peculiar use of the word “to mean”. Suppose
our man got the number 100 and followed it up by 102. We
should then say, “I meant you to write 101.” Now the past
tense in the word “to mean” suggests that a particular act of
meaning had been performed when the rule was given, though as a
matter of fact this expression alludes to no such act. The
past tense could be explained by putting the sentence into the
form, “Had you asked me before what I wanted you to do at this
stage, I should have said …” But it is a hypothesis that you
would have said that.
     
102.

      To get this clearer, think of this example: Someone says,
“Napoleon was crowned in 1804.” I ask him, “Did you mean the
man who won the battle of Austerlitz?” He says, “Yes, I meant
him.” – Does this mean that when he “meant him” he in some way
thought of Napoleon's winning the battle of Austerlitz? –
     

      The expression, “The rule meant him to follow up 100 by
101,” makes it appear that this rule, as it was meant, foreshad-
owed
all the transitions which were to be made according to it.
But the assumption of a shadow of a transition does not get us
any further, because it does not bridge the gulf between it and
the transition itself. real transition. If the mere words of the rule could not
anticipate a future transition, no more could any mental act
accompanying these words.
     

      We meet again and again with this curious superstition, as
one might be inclined to call it, that the mental act is capable
of crossing a bridge before we've got to it. This trouble
crops up whenever we try to think about the ideas of thinking,
wishing, expecting, believing, knowing, trying to solve a math-
ematical problem, mathematical induction, and so forth.
     

      It is no act of insight, intuition, which makes us use the
rule as we do at the particular stage // point of the series //.
It would be less confusing to call it an act of decision, though
this too is misleading, for nothing like an act of descision
must take place, but possibly just an act of writing or speaking.
And the mistake which we here and in a thousand similar cases are
inclined to make is labelled by the word “to make” as we have
used it in the sentence, “It is no act of insight which makes
us use the rule as we do,” because there is an idea that
103.
“something must make us” do what we do. And this again joins
on to the confusion between cause and reason. We need have no
reason [f|t]o follow the rule as we do
. The chain of reasons has
an end.
     

      Now compare these sentences: “Surely it is using the rule
‘Add 1’ in a different way if after 100 you go on to 102, 104,
etc.” and “Surely it is using the word ‘darker’ in a new different way
if after applying it to coloured patches we apply it to the
vowels.” – I should say: “That depends on what you call a
‘different way’”. –
     

      But I should certainly say that I would should call the applicat-
ion of “lighter” and “darker” to vowels “another usage of the
words”; and I also should carry on the series Add 1” in the
way 101, 102, etc., but not – or not necessarily – because of
some other justifying mental act.
     

      There is a kind of general disease of thinking which
always looks for (and finds) a mental state // what would be
called a mental state // from which all our acts spring as from
a reservoir. Thus one says, “The fashion changes because the
taste of people changes.” The taste is the mental reservoir.
But if a tailor today designs a cut of dress different from that
which he designed a year ago, can't what is called his change
of taste have consisted, partly or wholly, in doing just this?
     

      And here we say, “But surely designing a new shape isn't
in itself changing one's taste, – and saying a word isn't
meaning it, – and saying that I believe isn't believing; there
must be feelings, mental acts, going along with these lines
and these words.” – And the reason we give for saying this is
104.
that a man certainly could design a new shape without having
changed his taste, say that he believes something without be-
lieving it, etc. And this obviously is true. But it doesn't
follow that what distinguishes a case of having changed one's
taste from a case of not having done so isn't under certain
circumstances just designing what one hasn't designed before.
Nor does it follow that in cases in which designing a new shape
is not the criterion for a change of taste, the criterion must
be a change in some particular region of our mind.
     

      That is to say, we don't use the word “taste” as the name
of a feeling.
To think that we do is to imagine represent the structure practice
of our language in undue simplification. This, of course, is
the way in which philosophical puzzles generally arise; and our
case is quite analogous to that of thinking that wherever we
make a predicative statement we state that the subject has a
certain ingredient (as we really do in the case, “Beer is alc-
oholic.”)
     

      It is advantageous in treating our problems to consider
parallel with the feeling or feelings characteristic for having
a certain taste, changing one's taste, meaning what one says,
etc. etc. the facial expression (gestures or tone of voice)
characteristic for the same states or events. If someone should
object, saying that feelings and facial expressions can't be
compared, as the former are experiences and the latter aren't,
let him consider the muscular, kinaesthetic and tactile exper-
iences bound up with gestures and facial expressions.
     

      Let us then consider the proposition, “Believing something
can not merely consist in saying that you believe it, you must
105.
say it with a particular facial expression, gesture, and tone
of voice.” Now it cannot be doubted that we regard certain
facial expressions, gestures, etc. as characteristic for the
expression of belief. We speak of a “tone of conviction”.
And yet it is clear that this tone of conviction isn't always
present whenever we rightly speak of conviction // wherever we
should say there was conviction //. “Just so”, you might say,
“this shews that there is something else, something behind these
gestures, etc. which is the real belief as opposed to mere ex-
pressions of belief.” – “Not at all”, I should say, “many dif-
ferent criteria distinguish, under different circumstances,
cases of believing what you say from those of not believing what
you say.” There may be cases where the presence of a sensation
other than those bound up with gestures, tone of voice, etc.
distinguishes meaning what you say from not meaning it. But
sometimes what distinguishes these two is nothing that happens
while we speak, but a variety of actions and experiences of dif-
ferent kinds before and after.
     

      To understand this family of cases it will again be help-
ful to consider an analogous case drawn from facial expressions.
There is a family of friendly facial expressions. Suppose we
had asked, “What feature is it that characterizes a friendly
face?” At first one might think that there are certain friend-
ly
traits which one might call friendly traits, each of which
makes the face look friendly to a certain degree, and which when
present in a large number constitute the friendly expression.
This idea would seem to be borne out by our common speech, talk-
106.
ing of “friendly eyes”, “friendly mouth”, etc. But it is easy
to see that the same eyes of which we say they make a face look
friendly, do not look friendly, or even ˇlook unfriendly, with certain
other wrinkles of the forehead, lines round the mouth, etc.
Why then do we ever say that it is these eyes which look friend-
ly? Isn't it wrong to say that they characterize the face as
friendly, for if we say they do so “under certain circumstances”
(these circumstances being the other features of the face) why
did we single out the one feature from amongst the others?
The answer is that in the wide family of friendly faces there
is what one might call a main branch characterized by a certain
kind of eyes, another by a certain kind of mouth, etc.; although
in the large family of unfriendly faces we meet these same eyes
when they don't mitigate the unfriendliness of the expression.
– There is further the fact that when we notice the friendly
expression of a face, our attention, our gaze, is drawn to a
particular feature in the face, the “friendly eyes” or the
“friendly mouth”, etc., and that it does not rest on other feat-
ures although these too are responsible for the friendly expres-
sion.
     

      “But is there no difference between saying something and
meaning it, and saying it without meaning it?” – There needn't
be a difference while he says it, and if there is, this differ-
ence may be of all sorts of different kinds according to the
surrounding circumstances. It does not follow from the fact
that there is what we call a friendly and an unfriendly expres-
sion of the eye that there must be a difference between the eye
107.
of a friendly and the eye of an unfriendly face.
     

      One might be tempted to say, “This trait can't be said to
make the face look friendly, as it may be belied by another
trait.” And this is like saying, “Saying something with the
tone of conviction can't be the characteristic of conviction,
as it may be belied by experiences going along with it.” But
neither of these sentences is correct. It is true that other
traits in this face could take away the friendly character of
this eye, and yet in this face it is the eye which is the out-
standing friendly feature.
     

      It is such phrases as, “He said it and meant it”, which
are most liable to mislead us. – Compare meaning “I shall be
delighted to see you” with meaning “The train leaves at 3.30”.
Suppose you had said the first sentence to someone and were
asked afterwards, “Did you mean it?”, you would then probably
think of the feelings, the experiences, which you had while you
said it. And accordingly you would in this case be inclined
to say, “Didn't you see that I meant it?” Suppose that on the
other hand, after having given someone the information, “The
train leaves at 3.30”, he asked you, “Did you mean it?”, you
might be inclined to answer, “Certainly. Why shouldn't I have
meant it?”
     

      In the first case we shall be inclined to speak of a feel-
ing characteristic of meaning what we said, but not in the
second. Compare also lying in both these cases. In the first
case we should be inclined to say that lying consisted in say-
ing what we did but without the appropriate feelings or even
with the opposite feelings. If we lied in giving the inform-
108.
ation about the train, we would be likely to have different
experiences while we gave it than those which we have in giving
truthful information, but the difference here would not consist
in the absence of a characteristic feeling, but perhaps just in
the presence of a feeling of discomfort.
     

      It is even possible while lying to have quite a strong
experience of what might be called the characteristic for meaning
what one says, – and yet under certain circumstamces, and per-
haps under the ordinary circumstances ones, one refers to just this
experience in saying, “I meant what I said”, because the cases
in which something might give the lie to these experiences do
not come into the question. In many cases therefore we are
inclined to say, “Meaning what I say” means having such-and-such experiences while I say it.
     

      If by “believing” we mean an activity, a process, taking
place while we say that we believe, we may say that believing is
something similar to or the same as expressing a belief.
     

      It is interesting to consider an objection to this: What
if I said, “I believe it will rain” (meaning what I say) and
someone wanted to explain to a Frenchman who doesn't understand
English what it was I believed. Then, you might say, if all
that happened when I believed what I did was that I said the
sentence, the Frenchman ought to know what I believe if you tell
him the exact words I used, or say, “Il croit ‘It will rain’”.
Now it is clear that this will not tell him what I believe and
consequently, you might say, we failed to convey just that to
him which was essential, my real mental act of believing. –
But the answer is that even if my words had been accompanied by
109.
all sorts of experiences, and if we could have transmitted
these experiences to the Frenchman, he would still not have
known what I believed. For “knowing what I believe” just
doesn't mean: feel what I do just while I say it; just as know-
ing what I intend with this move in our game of chess doesn't
mean knowing my exact state of mind while I'm making the move.

Though, at the same time, in certain cases, knowing this state
of mind might furnish you with very exact information about my
intention.
     

      We should say that we had told the Frenchman what I believ-
ed if we translated my words for him into French. And it
might be that thereby we told him nothing – even indirectly –
about what happened “in me” when I uttered my belief. Rather,
we pointed out to him a sentence which in his language holds a
similar position to my sentence in the English language. –
Again one might say that, at least in certain cases, we could
have told him much more exactly what I believed if he had been
at home in the English language, because then, he would have
known exactly what happened within me when I spoke.
     

      We use the words “meaning”, “believing”, “intending” in
such a way that they refer to certain acts, states of mind given
certain circumstances; as by the expression “checkmating some-
body” we refer to the act of taking his king. If on the other
hand someone, say a child, playing about with chessmen, placed
a few of them on a chess board and went through the motions of
taking a king, we should not say the child had checkmated any-
one.– And here too one might think that what distinguished this
110.
case from real checkmating was what happened in the child's
mind.
     

      Suppose I had made a move in chess and someone asked me,
“Did you intend to mate him?”, I answer, “I did”, and he now
asks me, “How could you know you did, as all you knew was what
happened within you when you made the move?”, I might answer,
“Under these circumstances this was intending to mate him.”
     

      What holds for “meaning” holds for “thinking”. – We very
often find it impossible to think without speaking to ourselves
half aloud, – and nobody asked to describe what happened in
this case would ever say that something – the thinking –
accompanied the his speaking, were they he not led into doing so by
the pair of verbs, “speaking”: :“thinking”, and by many of our
common phrases in which their uses run parallel. Consider
these examples: “Think before you speak!”, “He speaks without
thinking”, “What I said didn't quite express my thought”, “He
says one thing and thinks just the opposite”, “I didn't mean a
word of what I said”, “The French language uses its words in
that order in which we think them.”
     

      If anything in such a case can be said to go with the speak-
ing, it would be something like the modulation of voice, the
changes in timbre, accentuation, and the like, all of which one
might call means of expressiveness. Some of these like the ton
of voice and the accent, nobody for obvious reasons would call
the accompaniments of the speech; and such means of expressive-
ness as the play of facial expression or gestures which can be
said to accompany speech nobody would dream of calling thinking.
     

      Let us revert to our example of the use of “lighter” and
111.
“darker” for coloured objects and the vowels. A reason which
we should like to give for saying that here we have two dif-
ferent uses and not one is this: “We don't think that the words
‘darker’, ‘lighter’ actually fit the relation between the vowels,
we only feel a resemblance between the relation of the sounds
and the darker and lighter colours.” Now if you wish to see
what sort of feeling this is, try to imagine that without pre-
vious introduction you asked someone, “Say the vowels a, e, i,
o, u, in the order of their darkness.” If I did this, I should
certainly say it in a different tone from that in which I should
say, “Arrange these books in the order of their darkness”, that
is, I should say it haltingly in a tone similar to that of, “I
wonder if you understand me”, perhaps smiling slyly as I say it.
And this, if anything, describes my feeling.
     

      And this brings me to the following point: When someone
asks me, “What colour is the book over there?”, and I say, “Red”,
and then he asks, “What made you call this colour ‘red’?”, I
shall in most cases have to say: “Nothing makes me call it red;
that is, no reason. I just looked at it and said, ‘It's red’”.
One is then inclined to say: “Surely this isn't all that hap-
pened; for I could look at a colour and say a word and still
not name the colour.” And then one is inclined to go on to
say: “The word ‘red’ when we pronounce it, naming the colour we
look at, comes in a particular way.” But, at the same time,
asked, “Can you describe the way you mean?” – one wouldn't
feel prepared to give any description. Suppose we nownow we asked:
“Do you, at any rate, remember that the name of the colour
112.
came to you in that particular way whenever you named colours
on former occasions? – he would have to admit that he didn't
remember a particular way in which this always happened. In
fact one could easily make him see that naming a colour could
go along with all sorts of different exper[e|i]ences. Compare
such cases as these: a) I put an iron in the fire to heat it to
light red heat. I am asking you to watch the iron and want
you to tell me from time to time what stage of heat it has
reached. You look and say: “It is beginning to get light red.”
b) We stand at a street crossing and I say: “Watch out for the
red light. When it comes on, tell me and I'll run across.”
Ask yourself this question: If in one such case you shout
“Green!” and in another “Run!”, do these words come in the same
way or different ways? Can you one say anything about this in a
general way? c) I ask you: “What's the colour of the bit of
material you have in your hand?” (and I can't see). You think:
“Now what does one call this? Is this ‘Prussian blue’ or
‘indigo’?”
     

      Now it is very remarkable that when in a philosophical
conversation we say: “The name of a colour comes in a particular
way”, we don't trouble to think of the many different cases
and ways in which such a name comes. – And our chief argument
is really that naming the colour is different from just pro-
nouncing a word on some different occasion while looking at a
colour. Thus one might say: “Suppose we counted some objects
lying on our table, a blue one, a red one, a white one, and a
black one, – looking at each in turn we say: ‘One, two, three,
113.
four’. Isn't it easy to see that something different happens
in this case when we pronounce the words than what would hap-
pen if we had to tell someone the colours of the objects?
And couldn't we, with the same right as before, have said,
‘Nothing happens when we say the numerals than just saying them
while looking at the object’?” – Now two answers can be given
to this: First, undoubtedly, at least in the great majority of
cases, counting the objects will be accompanied by different
experiences from naming their colours. And it is easy to des-
cribe roughly what the difference will be. In counting we know
a certain gesture, as it were, beating the number out with one's
finger or by nodding one's head. There is on the other hand
an experience which one might call “concentrating one's attent-
ion on the colour”, getting the full impression of it. And
these are the sort of things one recalls when one says, “It is
easy to see that something different happens when we count the
objects and when we name their colours.” But it is in no way
necessary that certain peculiar experiences more or less charac-
teristic for counting take place while we are counting, nor
that the peculiar phenomenon of gazing at the colour takes place
when we look at the object and name its colour. It is true
that the processes of counting four objects and of naming their
colours will, in most cases at any rate, be different taken as
a whole, and this is what strikes us; but that doesn't mean at
all that we know that something different happens every time in
these two cases when we pronounce a numeral on the one hand and
a name of a colour on the other.
     
114.

      When we philosophize about this sort of thing we almost
invariably do something of this sort: We repeat to ourselves a
certain experience, say, by looking fixedly at a certain object
and trying to “read off” as it were the name of its colour.
And it is quite natural that doing so again and again we should
be inclined to say, “Something particular happens while we say
the word ‘blue’”. For we are aware of going again and again
through the same identical process. But ask yourself: Is this also the
process which we usually go through when on various occasions
– not philosophizing – we name the colour of an object?
     

      The problem which we are concerned with we also encounter
in thinking about volition, deliberate and involuntary action.

Think, say, of these examples: I deliberate whether to lift a
certain heavyish weight, decide to do it, I then apply my force
to it and lift it. Here, you might say, you have a full-fledged
case of willing and intentional action. Compare with this
such a case as reaching a man a lighted match after having lit
with it one's own cigarette and seeing that he wishes to light
his; or again the case of moving your hand while writing a let-
ter, or moving your mouth, larynx, etc. while speaking. – Now
when I called the first example a full fledged case of willing,
I deliberately used this misleading expression. For this
expression indicates that one is inclined in thinking about vol-
ition to regard this sort of example as one exhibiting most
clearly the typical [s|c]haracteristic of willing. One takes one's
ideas, and one's language, about volition from this kind of
example and thinks that they must apply – if not in such an
114.
obvious way – to all cases which one can properly call cases
of willing. – It is the same case that we have met over and
over again: The forms of expression of our ordinary language
fit most obviously certain very special applications of the
words “willing”, “thinking”, “meaning”, <…> “reading”,
etc. etc. And thus we might have called the case in which a
man “first thinks and then speaks” as the full fledged case of
thinking and the case in which a man spells out the words he is
reading as the full fledged case of reading. We speak of an
“act of volition” as different from the action which is willed,
and in our first example there are lots of different acts
clearly distinguishing this case from one in which all that
happens is that the hand and the weight lift: theres are the
preparations of deliberation and decision, there is the effecort
of lifting. But where do we find the analogues to these pro-
cesses in our other examples and in innumerable ones we might
have given?
     

      Now on the other hand it has been said that when a man,
say, gets out of bed in the morning, all that happens may be
this: he deliberates, “Is it time to get up?”, he tries to make
up his mind, and then suddenly he finds himself getting up.
Describing it this way emphasizes the absence of an act of vol-
ition. Now first: where do we find the<…> paradigm prototype of such a
thing, i.e., how did we come by the idea of such an act? I
think the prototype of the act of volition is the experience of
muscular effort. –
Now there is something in this above descrip-
tion which tempts us to contradict it; we say: “We don't just
116.
‘find’, observe, ourselves getting up, as though we were ob-
serving someone else: It isn't like, say, watching certain
reflex actions. If, e.g., I place myself sideways close to a
wall, my wall side arm hanging down outstretched, the back of
the hand touching the wall, and if now keeping the arm rigid I
press the back of the hand hard against the wall, doing it all
by means of the delta muscle, if then I quickly step away from
the wall, letting my arm hang down loosely, my arm without any
action of mine, of its own accord begins to rise; this is the
sort of case in which it would be proper to say, ‘I find my arm
rising’.”
     

      Now here again it is clear that there are many striking
differences between the cases of observing my arm rising in this
experiement or watching someone else getting out of bed and the
case of finding myself getting up. There is, e.g., in this
case a perfect absence of what one might call surprise, also I
don't look at my own movements as I might look at someone
turning about in bed, e.g., saying to myself, “Is he going to
get up?”. There is a difference between the voluntary act of
getting out of bed and the involuntary rising of my arm. But
there is not one common difference between so-called voluntary
acts and involuntary ones, viz., the presence or absence of one
element, the “act of volition.”
     

      The description of getting up in which a man says, “I just
find myself getting up”, suggests that he wishes to say that he
observes himself getting up. And we may certainly say that an
attitude of observing is absent in this case. But the observ-
ing attitude again is not one continuous state of mind or
117.
otherwise which we are in the whole time while, as we should
say, we are observing. Rather, there is a family of groups
of activities and experiences which we call observing attit-
udes. Roughly speaking one might say there are observation
elements of curiosity, observant expectation, surprise, and
there are, we should say, facial expressions and gestures of
curiosity, of observant expectation, and of surprise; and if
you agree that there is more than one facial expression char-
acteristic for each of these cases, and that there can be these
cases without any characteristic facial express[o|i]on, you will
admit that to each of these three words a family of phenomena
corresponds.
     

      If I had said, “When I told him that the train was leaving
at 3.30, believing that it did, nothing happened than that I
just uttered the sentence”, and if someone contradicted me say-
ing, “Surely this couldn't have been all, as you might ‘just
say a sentence’ without believing it”, – my answer should be,
“I didn't wish to say that there is was no difference between speak-
ing, believing what you say, and speaking, not believing what
you say; but the pair ‘believing’::‘not believing’ refers to
various differences in different cases (differences forming a
family), not to one difference, that between the presence and
the absence of a certain mental state.”
     

      Let us consider various characteristics of voluntary and
involuntary acts. In the case of lifting the heavy weight,
the various experiences of effort are obviously most character-
istic for lifting the weight voluntarily.
On the other hand,
compare with this the case of writing, voluntarily, here in most
118.
of the ordinary cases there will be no effort; and even if we
feel that the writing tires our hands and strains their muscles,
this is not the experience of “pulling” and “pushing” which we
would call typical voluntary actions. Further compare the
lifting of your hand when you lift a weight with lifting your
hand when, e.g., you point to some object above you. This
will certainly be regarded as a voluntary act, though the elem-
ent of effort will most likely be entirely absent; in fact this
raising of the arm to point at an object is very much like
raising the eye to look at it, and here we can hardly conceive
of an effort. –
Now let us describe an act of involuntary
raising your arm.
There is the case of our experiment, and
this was characterized by the utter absence of muscular strain
and also by our observant attitude towards the lifting of the
arm. But we have just seen a case in which muscular strain
was absent, and there are cases in which we should call an act-
ion voluntary although we take an observant attitude towards it.
But in a large class of cases it is the peculiar impossibility
of taking an observant attitude towards a certain action which
characterizes it as a voluntary one:
Try, e.g., to observe your
hand rising when you voluntarily raise it. Of course you see it
rising as you do, say, in the experiment; but you can't some-
how follow it in the same way with your eye. This might get
clearer if you compare two different cases of following lines
on a piece of paper with your eye; A) some irregular line like
this: , B) a written sentence. You will find that in A)
the eye, as it were, alternately slips and gets stuck, whereas
119
in reading a sentence it glides along smoothly.
     

      Now consider a case in which we do take up an observant
attitude towards a voluntary action, I mean the very instruct-
ive case of trying to draw a square with its diagonals by plac-
ing a mirror on your drawing paper and directing your hand by
what you see by looking at it in the mirror. And here one is
inclined to say that our real actions, the ones to which volit-
ion immediately applies // for which volition is immediately
responsible //, are not the movements of our hand but something
further back, say, the actions of our muscles.
We are inclined
to compare the case with this: Imagine we had a series of levers
before us, through which, by a hidden mechanism, we could direct
a pencil drawing on a sheet of paper. We might then be in
doubt which levers to pull in order to get the desired move-
ment of the pencil; and we could say that we deliberately
pulled this particular lever, although we didn't deliberately
produce the wrong result that we thereby produced. But this
comparison, though it easily suggests itself, is very mislead-
ing.
For in the case of the levers which we saw before us,
there was such a thing as deciding which one we were going to
pull before pulling it. But does our volition, as it were,
play on a keyboard of muscles, choosing which one it was going
to use next? – For some actions which we call deliberate it is
characteristic that we, in some sense, “know what we are going
to do” before we do it. In this sense we say that we know
what object we are going to point to, and what we might call
“the act of knowing” might consist in looking at the object
before we point to it or in describing its position by words or
120.
pictures. Now we could describe our drawing the square through
the mirror by saying that our acts were deliberate as far as
their motor aspect is concerned but not as far as their visual
aspect is concerned.
This could would, e.g., be demonstrated by our
ability to repeat a movement of the hand which had produced a
wrong result, on being told to do so. But it would obviously
be absurd to say that this motor character of voluntary motion
consisted in our knowing beforehand what we were going to do,
as though we had had a picture of the kinaesthetic sensation
before our mind and decided to bring about this sensation.

Remember the experiment <…> (?) p. 62; if here, instead
of pointing from a distance to the finger which you order the
subject to move, you touch that finger, the subject will always
move it without the slightest difficulty. And here it is tempt-
ing to say, “Of course I can move [o|i]t now, because now I know
which finger it is I'm asked to move.” This makes it appear
as though I had now shown you which muscle to contract in order
to bring about the desired result. The word “of course” makes
it appear as though by touching your finger I had given you an
item of information telling you what to do. (As though norm-
ally when you tell a man to move such-and-such a finger he could
follow your order because he knew how to bring the movement about.)
     

      (It is interesting here to think of the case of sucking a
liquid through a tube; if asked what part of your body you suck-
ed with, you would be inclined to say your mouth, although the
work was done by the muscles by which you draw your breath.)
     

      Let us now ask ourselves what we should call “speaking
121.
involuntarily”. First note that when normally you speak,
voluntarily, you could hardly describe what happened by saying
that by an act of volition you move your mouth, tongue, larynx,
etc. as a means to producing certain sounds. Whatever happens
in your mouth, larynx, etc. and whatever sensations you have in
these parts while speaking would almost seem secondary phenom-
ena accompanying the production of sounds, and volition, one
wishes to say, operates on the sounds themselves without inter-
mediary mechanism. This shews how loose our idea of this agent
“volition” is.
     

      Now to involuntary speaking. Imagine you had to describe
a case, – what would you do? There is of course the case of
speaking in one's sleep; here the characteristic is that you
know nothing about it while it happens and don't remember hav-
ing done it afterwards. this is characterized by our doing it
without being aware of it and not remembering having done it.

But this obviously you wouldn't call
the characteristic of an involuntary action.
     

      A better example of involuntary speaking would I suppose
be that of involuntary exclamations: “Ch!”, “Help!”, and such
like, and these utterances are akin to shrieking with pain.
(This, by the way, could set us thinking about “words as expres-
sions of feelings.”) One might say, “Surely these are good
examples of involuntary speech, because there is in these cases
not only no act of volition by which we speak, but in many cases
we utter these words against our will.” I should say: I cert-
ainly should call this involuntary speaking; and I agree that an
act of volition preparatory to or accompanying these words is
absent, – if by “act of volition” you refer to certain acts of
122.
intention, premediatation, or effort. But then in many cases
of voluntary sp[p|e]ech I don't feel an effort, much that I speak say
voluntarily is not premediatated, and I don't know of any acts
of intention preceding it.
     

      Crying out with pain against our will could be compared with
raising our arm against our will when someone forces it up
while we are struggling against him. But it is important to
notice that the will – or should we say “wish” – not to cry
out i[l|s] overcome in a different way from that in which our res-
istance is overcome by the strength of the opponent. When we
cry out against our will, we are as it were taken by surprise;
as though someone forced up our hands by unexpectedly sticking
a gun into our ribs, commanding, “Hands up!”
     

      Consider now the following example, which is of great help
in all these considerations: In order to see what happens when
one understands a word, we play this game: You have a list of
words, partly these words are words of my native language, partly
words of languages entirely unknown to me, (or, which comes to
the same, nonsensical words invented for the<…> occasion.) Some
of the words of my native tongue, again, are words of ordinary,
everyday usage; and some of these, like “house”, “table”, “man”,
are what we might call primitive words, being among the first
words a child learns, and some of these again, words of baby
talk like “Mamma”, “Papa”. Again there are more or less common
technical terms such as “carburetor”, “dynamo”, “fuse”; etc. etc.
All these words are read out to me, and after each one I have to
say “Yes” or “No” according to whether I understand the word or
123.
not. I then try to remember what happened in my mind when I
understood the words I did understand, and when I didn't under-
stand the others. And here again it will be useful ˇto consider the part-
icular tone of voi[v|c]e and facial expression with which I say
“Yes” and “No”, alongside of the so-called mental events. –
Now it may surprise us to find that although this experiment
will shew us a multitude of different characteristic experi-
ences, it will not shew us any one experience which we should
be inclined to call the experience of understanding. There
will be such experiences as these: I hear the word “tree” and
say “Yes” with the tone of voi[v|c]e and sensation of “Of course”.
Or I hear “corrobo<…>ration” – I say to myself, “Let me see”,
vaguely remember a case of help[u|i]ng, and say “Yes”. I hear
“gadget”, I imagine the man who always used this word, and say
“Yes”. I hear “Mamma”, this strikes me as funny and childish,
– “Yes”. A foreign word I shall very often translate in my
mind into English before answering. I hear “spintheriscope”,
and say to myself, “Must be some sort of scientific instrument”,
perhaps try to think up its meaning from its derivation and
fail, and say “No”. In another case I might say to myself,
“Sounds like Chinese” – “No”. Etc. There will on the other
hand be a large class of cases in which I am not aware of any-
thing happening except hearing the word and saying the answer.
And there will also be cases in which I remember experiences
(sensations, thoughts), which, as I should say, had nothing to
do with the word at all. Thus amongst the experiences which I
can describe there will be a class which I might call typical
experiences of understanding and some typi[v|c]al experiences of
124.
not understanding. But opposed to these there will be a large
class of cases in which I should have to say, “I know of no
particular experience at all, I just said ‘Yes’, or ‘No’.”
     

      Now if someone said, “But surely something did happen when
you understood the word ‘tree’, unless you were utterly absent
minded when you said ‘Yes’”, I might be inclined to reflect and
say to myself, “Didn't I have a sort of homely feeling sensation when I
tookm in the word ‘tree’?” But then, do I always have this
feeling which now I referred to when I hear that word used or
use it myself, do I remember having had it, do I even remember
a set of, say, five sensations some one of which I had on every
occasion when I could be said to have understood the word?
Further, isn't that “homely feeling” I referred to an experience
rather characteristic for the particular situation I'm in at
present, i.e., that of philosophizing about “understanding”?
     

      Of course in our experiment we might call saying “Yes” or
“No” characteristic experiences of understanding or not under-
standing, but what if we just hear a word in a sentence where
there isn't even a question of this reaction to it? – We are
here in a curious difficulty: on the one hand it seems we have
no reason to say that in all cases in which we understand a
word one particular experience – or even one of a set – is
present. On the other hand we may feel it's plainly wrong to
say that in such a case all that happens may be that I hear or
say the word. For that seems to be saying that part of the
time we act as mere automatons. And the answer is that in a
sense we do and in a sense we don't.
     
125.

      If someone talked to me with a kinˇdly play of facial expres-
sions, is it necessary that in any short interval his face
should have been looked such that seeing it at any other time under any other circumstances I should
have called its expression distinctly kindly? And if not,
does this mean that his “kindly play of expression” was inter-
rupted by periods of inexpressiveness? – We certainly should
not say this under the circumstances which I am assuming, and we
don't feel that the look at this moment interrupts interrupted the expres-
siveness, although taken alone we should call it inexpressive.
     

      Just in this way we refer by the phrase “understanding a
word” not necessarily to that which happens while we are saying
or hearing it, but to the whole environment of the event of
saying it. And this also applies to our saying that someone
speaks like an automaton or like a parrot. Speaking with under-
standing certainly differs from speaking like an automaton, but
this doesn't mean that the speaking in the first case is all the
time accompanied by something which is lacking in the second
case. Just as when we say that two people move in different
circles this doesn't mean that they mayn't walk the street in
identical surroundings.
     

      Thus also, acting voluntarily (or involuntarily) is, in
many cases, characterized as such by a multitude of circumstances
under which the action takes place rather than by an experience
which we should call characteristic of voluntary action.
And
in this sense it is true to say that what happened when I got
out of bed – when I should certainly not call it involuntary
– was that I found myself getting up. Or rather, this is a
126.
possible case; for of course every day something different
happens.
     

      The troubles which since    ) we have been discussing turning over
were all closely bound up connected with the use of the word “particular”.
We have been inclined to say that seeing familiar objects we
have a particular feeling, that the word “red” came in a part-
icular way when we recognized the colour as red, that we had a
particular experience when we acted voluntarily.
     

      Now the use of the word “particular” is apt to produce a
kind of delusion and roughly speaking this delusion is produced
by the double usage of this word. On the one hand, we may say,
it is used preliminary to a specification, description, compar-
ison; on the other hand, as what one might describe as an em-
phasis. The first usage I shall call the transitive one, the
second the intransitive one. Thus, on the one hand I say,
“This face gives me a particular impression which I can't des-
cribe.” The latter sentence may mean something like: “This
face gives me a strong impression.”
These examples would per-
haps bec more striking if we substituted the word “peculiar” for
“particular”, for the same applies same comments apply to “peculiar”. If I say,
“This soap has a peculiar smell: it is the kind we used as
children”, the word “peculiar” may be used merely as an intro-
duction to the comparison which follows it, as though I said,
“I'll tell you what this soap smells like: ….” If on the
other hand, I say, “This soap has a peculiar smell!” or “It has
a most peculiar smell”, “peculiar” here stands for some such
expression as “out of the ordinary”, “uncommon”, “striking”.
     

      We might ask, “Did you say it had a peculiar smell, as
127.
opposed to no peculiar smell, or that it had this smell, as
opposed to some other smell, or did you wish to say both the
first and the second?” – Now what was it like when, philosoph-
izing, I said that the word “red” came in a particular way
when I described something I saw as red? Was <…> it that I was
going to describe the way in which the word “red” came, like
saying, “It always comes quicker than the word ‘two’ when I'm
counting coloured objects” or “It always comes with a shock,”
etc.? – Or was it that I wished to say that “red” comes in a
striking way? – Not exactly that either. But certainly rather
the second than the first. To see this more clearly, consider
another example: You are, of course, constantly changing the
position of your body throughout the day; arrest yourself in
any such attitude (while writing, reading, talking, etc. etc.)
and say to yourself in the way in which you say, “‘Red’ comes
in a particular way …”, “I am now in a particular attitude.”
You will find that you can quite naturally say this. But aren't
you always in a particular attitude? And of course you didn't
mean that you were just then in a particularly striking attit-
ude. What was it that happened. You concentrated, as it were
stared at, your sensations. And this is exactly what you did
when you said that “red” came in a particular way.
     

      “But didn't I mean that ‘red’ came in a different way from
‘two’?” – You may have meant this, but the phrase, “They come
in different ways”, is itself liable to cause confusion. Sup-
pose I said, “Smith and Jones always enter my room in different
ways”: I might go on and say, “Smith enters quickly, Jones
128.
slowly”, I am specifying the ways. I might on the other
hand say, “I don't know what the difference is”, intimating
that I'm trying to specify the difference, and perhaps later on
I shall say, “Now I know what it is; it is …” – I could on
the other hand tell you that they came in different ways, and
you wouldn't know what to make of this statement, and perhaps
answer, “Of course they come in different ways; they just are
different.” – We could describe our trouble by saying that we
feel as though we could give an experience a name without at
the same time committing ourselves about its use, and in fact
without any intention to use [a|i]t at all.
Thus when I say “red”
comes in a particular way …, I feel that I might now give
this way a name if it hasn't already got one, say “A”. But
at the same time I am not at all prepared to say that I recog-
nize this to be the way “red” has always come on such occasions,
nor even to say that there are, say, for ways, say A, B, C, D,
in one of which it always comes. You might say that the two
ways in which “red” and “two” come can be identified by, say,
exchanging the meaning of the two words, using “red” as the
second cardinal numeral, “two” as the name of a colour. Thus,
on being asked how many eyes I had, I should answer “red”, and
to the question, “What is the colour of blood?”, “two”. But
the question now arises whether you can <…> identify the “way
in which these words come” independently of the ways in which
they are used, – I mean the ways just described. Did you
wish to say that as a matter of experience, the word when used
in this way always comes in the way A, but may, the next time,
come in the way “two” usually comes? You will see then that
129.
you meant nothing of the sort.
     

      What is particular about the way “red” comes is that it
comes while you're philosophizing about it, as what is particul-
ar about the position of your body when you concentrated on it
was concentration.
We appear to ourselves to be on the verge
of giving a characterization of the “way” describing the way, whereas we aren't
really opposing ˇit to any other way. We are emphasizing, not
comparing, but we express ourselves as though this emphasis was
really a comparison of the object with itself; there seems to
be a reflexive comparison.
Let me express myself in this way:
suppose I speak of the way in which A enters the room, I may
say, “I have noticed the way in which A enters the room”, and on
being asked, “What is it?”, I may answer, “He always sticks his
head into the room before coming in.” Here I'm referring to
a definite feature, and I could say that B had the same way, or
that A no longer had it. Consider on the other hand the state-
ment, “I've now been observing the way A sits and smokes.” I
want to draw him like this. In this case I needn't be ready
to give any description of a particular feature of his attitude,
and my statement may just mean, “I've been observing A as he sat
and smoked.” – “The way” can't in this case be separated from
him. Now if I wished to draw him as he sat there, and was
contemplating, studying, his attitude, I should while doing so
be inclined to say and repeat to myself, “He has a particular
way of sitting.” But the answer to the question, “What way?”
would be, “Well, this way”, and per[j|h]aps one would give it by
drawing the characteristic outlines of his attitude. On the
other hand, my phrase, “He has a particular way …”, might
130.
just haves to be translated into, “I'm contemplating his attit-
ude.” Putting it in this form we have, as it were, straight-
ened out the proposition; our expression; whereas in its first form its meaning
seems to describe a loop, that is to say, the word “particular”
here seems to be used transitively and, more particularly, ref-
lexively, i.e., we are regarding its use as a special case of
the transitive use. We are inclined to answer the question,
“What way do you mean?” by “This way”, instead of answering: “I
didn't refer to any particular feature; I was just contemplating
his position.” My expression made it appear as though I was
pointing out something about his way of sitting, or, in our pre-
vious case, about the way the word “red” came, whereas what makes
me use the word “particular” here is that by my attitude tow-
ards the phenomenon I am laying an emphasis on it[;|:] I am con-
centrating on it, or retracing it in my mind, or drawing it, etc.
     

      Now this is a characteristic situation to find ourselves
in when thinking about philosophical problems. There are many
troubles which arise in this way, that a word has a transitive
and an intransitive use, and that we regard the latter as a par-
ticular case of the former, explaining the word when it is used
intransitively by a reflexive construction.
     

      Thus we say, “By ‘kilogram’ I mean the weight of one liter
of water”, “By ‘A’ I mean ‘B’”, where B is an explanation of
“A”. But there is also the intransitive use: “I said that I
was sick of it and meant it.” Here again, meaning what you said
could be called “retracing it”, “laying an emphasis on it.” But
using the word “meaning” in this sentence makes it appear that
131.
it must have sense to ask, “What did you mean?”, and to answer,
“By what I said I meant what I said”; treating the case of “I
mean what I say” as a special case of “By saying ‘A’ I mean
‘B’.” In fact one uses the expression, “I mean what I mean”
to say, “I have no explanation for it.” The question, “What
does this sentence p mean?”, if it doesn't ask for a translation
of p into other symbols, has no more sense than “what sentence
is formed by this sequence of words?”
     

      Suppose to the question, “What's a kilogram?” I answered,
“It is what a liter of water weighs”, and someone asked, “Well,
what does a liter of water weigh?” –
     

      We often use the reflexive form of speech as a means of
emphasizing something. And in all such cases our reflexive
expressions can be “straightened out”.
Thus we use the expres-
sion, “If I can't, I can't”, “I am as I am”, “It is just what
it is”, also “That's that.” This latter phrase means as much
as, “That's settled”, but why should we express “That's settled”
by “That's that”? The answer can be given by laying before
ourselves a series of interpretations which make a transition
between the two expressions. Thus So for “That's settled” I will
say, “The matter is closed.” And this expression, as it were,
files the matter and shelves it. And filing it is like drawing
a line around it, as one sometimes draws a line around the res-
ult of a calculation, thereby marking it as final. But this
also makes it stand out, it is a way of emphasizing it. And
what the expression, “That's that” does is to emphasize the
“That”.
     

      Another expression akin to those we have just considered
132.
is this: “Here it is; take it or leave it!” And this again
is akin<…> to a kind of introductory statement which we somet[o|i]mes
make before remarking on certain alternatives, as when we say:
“It either rains or it doesn't rain; if it rains we'll stay in
my room, if it doesn't …” The first part of this sentence
is no piece of information (just as “Take it or leave it” is no
order). Instead of, “It either rains or it doesn't rain” we
could have said, <…> “Consider the two cases …” Our expres-
sion underlines these cases, presents them to your attention.
     

      It is closely connected with this that in describing a
case like 30) // or 31) (?) // we are tempted to use the phrase,
“There is, of course, a number beyond which no one of the tribe
has ever counted; let this number be …” Straightened out
this reads: “Let the number beyond which no one of the tribe
has ever counted be …” Why we tend to prefer the first ex-
pression to the one straightened out is that it more strongly
directs our attention to the upper end of the range of numerals
used by our tribe in their actual practice.
     

      Let us now consider a very instructive case of that use of
the word “particular” in which it does not point to a compar-
ison // in which it doesn't indicate that I'm making a compar-
ison //, and yet seems most strongly to do so, – the case when
we contemplate the expression of a face primitively drawn in
this way: . Let this face produce an impression on you.
You may then feel inclined to say: “Surely I don't see mere
strokes. dashes. I see a face with a particular expression.” But you
don't mean that it has an outstanding expression nor is it said
as an introduction to a description of the expression though we
133.
might give such a description and say, e.g., “It looks like a
complacent business man, stupidly supercilious, who though fat,
imagines he's a lady killer.” But this<…> would only be meant as
an approximate description of the expression. “Words can't
exactly describe it”, one sometimes says. And yet one feels
that what one calls the expression of the face is something
that can be detached from the drawing of the face. It is as
though we could say: “This face has a particular expression:
namely this” (pointing to something). But if I had to point
to anything in this place it would have to be the face drawing I am
looking at. (We are, as it were, under an optic delusion which
by some sort of reflection makes us think that there are two
objects where there is only one.) The delusion is assisted
by our using the verb “to have”, saying “The face has a partic-
ular expression.” Things look different when, instead of this,
we say: “This is a peculiar face.” (What a thing is, we mean,
is bound up with it; what it has can be separated from it.)
     

      “This face has a particular expression.” – I am inclined
to say this when I am letting it make trying to let it make its full impression upon
me.
     

      What goes on here is an act, as it were, of digesting it,
getting hold of it, and the phrase, “getting hold of the expres-
sion of this face” suggests that we are getting ho[o|l]d of a thing
which is in the face and different from it. It seems we are
looking for something, but we don't do so in the sense of look-
ing for a model of the expression outside the face we see, but
in the sense of sounding the thing with our attention. It is,
134.
when I let the face make an impression on me, as though there
existed a double of its expression, as though the double was
the prototype of the expression and as though seeing the expres-
sion of the face was finding the prototype to which it corres-
ponded – as though in our mind there had been a mould and the
picture we see had fallen into that mould, fitting it. But it
is rather that we let the picture sink into our mind and make
a mould there.
     

      When we say, “This is a face, and not mere strokes”, we
are, of course, distinguishing such a drawing from such a
one . And it is true: If you ask anyone: “What is this?”
(pointing to the first drawing) he will certainly say: “It's a
face”, and he will be able straight away to reply to such quest-
ions as, “Is it male or female?”, “Smiling or sad?”, etc. If
on the other hand you ask him: “What is this?” (pointing to the
second drawing), he will most likely say, “This is nothing at
all”, or “These are just das[k|h]es”. Now think of looking for a
man in a picture puzzle; there it often happens that what at
first sight appears as “mere dashes” later appears as a face.
We say in such cases: “Now I see it is a face.” It must be
quite clear to you that this doesn't mean that we recognize it
as the face of a friend or that we are under the delusion of
seeing a “real” face: rather, this “seeing it as a face” must be
compared with seeing this drawing either as a cube or as
a plane figure consisting of a square and two rhombuses; or with
seeing this “as a square with diagonals”, or “as a swastika”,
that is, as a limiting case of this ; or again with seeing
these four dots .... as two pairs of dots side by side with
135.
each other, or as two interlocking pairs, or as one pair inside
the other, etc.
     

      The case of “seeing as a swastika” is of special inter-
est because this expression might mean being, somehow, under
the optical delusion that the square is not quite closed, that
there are the gaps which distinguish the swastika from our draw-
ing. On the other hand it is quite clear that this was not
what we meant by “seeing our drawing as a swastika”. We saw
it in a way which suggested the description, “I see it as a
swastika.” One might suggest that we ought to have said, “I
see it as a closed swastika”; – but then, what is the difference
between a closed swastika and a square with diagonals? I think
that in this case it is easy to recognize “what happens when we
see our figure as a swastika.” I believe it is that we retrace
the figure with our eyes in a particular way, viz., by starting
at the centre, looking along a radius, and along a side adjacent
to it, starting at the centre again, taking the next radius and
the next side, say in a right handed sense of rotation, etc.
But th[s|i]s explanation of the phenomenon of seeing the figure as
a swastika is of no fundamental interest to us. It is of inter-
est to us only in so far as it helps one to see that the expres-
sion, “seeing the figure as a swastika” did not mean seeing
this as that, seeing one thing as something else, when, essent-
ially, two visual objects entered the process of doing so. –

Thus also seeing thes the first figure as a cube did not mean
“taking it to be a cube.” (For we might never have seen a cube
and still have this experience of “seeing it as a cube”).
     

      And in this way “seeing dashes as a face” does not involve
136.
a comparison between a group of dashes and a real human face;
and on the other hand, this form of expression most strongly
suggests that we are alluding to a comparison.
     

      Consider also this example: Look at W once “as a capital
double-U”, and another time as a capital M upside down. Ob-
serve what doing the one and doing the other consists in.
     

      We distinguish seeing a drawing as a face and seeing it as
something else or as “mere dashes.” And we also distinguish
between superficially glancing at a drawing (seeing it as a
face), and making letting the face make its full impression on us.
But it would be queer to say: “I am letting the face make a par-
ticular
impression on me”, (except in such cases in which you
can say that you can let the same face make different impres-
sions on you). And in letting the face impress itself on me
and contemplating its “particular impression”, no two things
of the multiplicity of a face are compared with each other; there
is only one which is laden with emphasis. Absorbing its expres-
sion, I don't find a proto[y|t]ype of this expression in my mind;
rather, I, as it were, cut a seal from after the impression.
     

      And this also describes what happens when in    ) we say
to ourselves, “The word ‘red’ comes in a particular way …”
The reply could be: “I see, you're repeating to yourself some
experience and again and again gazing at it.”
     

      We may shed light on all these considerations if we com-
pare what happens when we remember the face of someone who
enters our room, when we recognize him as Mr. So-andso, –
when we compare what really happens in such cases with the
representation we are sometimes inclined to make of the events.
137.
For here we are often obsessed by a primitive conception, viz.,
that we are comparing the man we see with a memory image in
our mind and we find the two to agree. I.e., we are represent-
ing “recognizing someone” as a process of identification by
means of a picture (as a criminal is identified by his photo.)
I needn't say that in most cases in which we recognize some-
one no comparison between him and a mental picture takes place.
We are, of course, tempted to give this description by the fact
that there are memory images. Very often, for instance, such
an image comes before our mind immediately after having recog-
nized someone. I see him as he stood when we last saw each
other ten years ago.
     

      I will here again describe the kind of thing that happens
in your mind and otherwise when you recognize a person coming
into your room by means of what you might say<…> when you recog-
nize him. Now this may just be: “Hello!” And thus we may
say that one kind of event of recognizing a thing we see con-
sists in saying “Hello!” to it in words, gestures, facial
expressions, etc. – And thus also we may think that when we
look at our drawing and see it as a face, we compare it with
some paradigm, and it agrees with it, or it fits into a mould
ready for it in our mind. But no such mould or comparison
enters into our experience, there is only this shape, not any
other to compare it with, and as it were, say “Of course!” to
it. As when in putting together a jig-saw puzzle, somewhere
a small space is left unfilled and I see a piece obviously fit-
ting it and put it in the place saying to myself “Of course!”
But here we say, “Of course!” because the<…> piece fits the mould
138.
whereas in our case of seeing the drawing as a face, we have
the same attitude for no reason.
     

      The same strange illusion which we are under when we seem
to seek the something which a face expresses whereas, in reality,
we are giving ourselves up to the features before us,– that
same illusion possesses us even more strongly if repeating a
tune to ourselves and letting it make its full impression on
us, we say, “This tune says something”, and it is as though I
had to find what it says. And yet I know that it doesn't say
anything in which I might express in words or pictures what it
says. And if, recognizing this, I resign myself to saying,
“It just expresses a musical thought”, this would mean no more
than saying, “It expresses itself.” – “But surely when you play
it you don't play it anyhow, you play it in this particular
way, making a crescendo here, a diminuendo there, a caesura in
this place, etc.”– Precisely, and that's all I can say about
it, or may be all that I can say about it. For in certain
cases I can justify, explain the particular expression with
which I play it by a comparison, as when I say, “At this point
of the theme, there is, as it were, a colon”, or, “This is, as
it were, the answer to what came before”, etc. (This, by the
way, shews what a “justification” and an “explanation” in aes-
thetics is like.)
It is true I may hear a tune played and say,
“This is not how it ought to be played, it goes like this”; and
I whistle it in a different tempo. Here one is inclined to
ask, “What is it like to know the tempo in which a piece of
music should be played?” And the idea suggests itself that there
must be a paradigm somewhere in our mind, and that we have
139.
adjusted the tempo to conform to that paradigm. But in most
cases if someone asked me, “How do you think [y|t]his melody should
be played?”, I will as an answer just whistle it in a partic-
ular way, and nothing will have been present to my mind but the
tune actually whistled (not an image of that).
     

      This doesn't mean that suddenly understanding a musical
theme may not co[m|n]sist in finding a form of verbal expression
which I conceive as the verbal counterpoint of the theme. And
in the same way I may say, “Now I understand the expression of
this face”, and what happened when the understanding came was
that I found the word which seemed to sum it up. characterize its expression.
     

      Consider also this expression: “Tell yourself that it's a
waltz, and you will play it correctly.”
     

      What we call “understanding a sentence” has, in many cases,
a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme
than we might be inclined to think.
But I don't mean that
understanding a musical theme is more like the picture which one
tends to make oneself of understanding a sentence; but rather
that this p[e|i]cture is wrong, and that understanding a sentence
is much more like what really happens when we understand a tune
than at first sight appears. For understanding a sentence,
“we say”, one says, points to a reality outside the sentence language. Whereas
one might say, “Understanding a sentence means getting hold of
its content; and the content of the sentence is in the sentence”.
     

      We may now return to the ideas of “recognizing” and “famil-
iarity”, and in fact to that example of recognition and famil-
iarity which started our reflections on the use of these terms
and of a multitude of terms connected with them. I mean the
140.
example of reading, say, a written sentence in a well-known
language. – I read such a sentence to see what the experience
of reading is like, what “really happens” when one reads, and
I get a particular experience which I take to be the experience
of reading. And, it seems, this doesn't simply consist in
seeing and pronouncing the words, but, besides, in an experience
of what I might call an intimate character // experience of an
intimate character, as I should like to say //. (I am am as it
were
on an intimate footing with the words “I read”).
     

      In reading the spoken words come in a particular way, I am
inclined to say; and the written words themselves which I read
don't just look at to me like any kind of scribbles. At the same
time I am unable to point to, or get a [f|g]rasp on, that “partic-
ular way.”
     

      The phenomenon of seeing and speaking the words seems
enshrouded by a particular atmosphere. But I don't recognize
this atmosphere as one which always characterized reading //
the situation of reading //. Rather, I notice it when I read
a line, trying to see what reading is like.
     

      When noticing this atmosphere I am in the situation of a
man wh[i|o] is working in his room, reading, writing, speaking,
etc., and who suddenly concentrates his attention on some soft
uniform noise, such as one can almost always hear, particularly
in a town (the dim noise resulting from all the various noises
of the street, the sounds of wind, rain, workshops, etc.).
We could imagine that this man might think that a particular
noise was a common element of all the experiences he had in this
141.
room. We should then draw his attention to the fact that most
of the time he hadn't noticed any noise going on outside, and
secondly, that the noise he could hear wasn't always the same
(there was sometimes wind, sometimes not, etc.)
     

      Now we have used a misleading expression when we said that
besides the experiences of seeing and speaking in reading there
was another experience, etc. This is saying that to certain
experiences another experience is added. – Now take the exper-
ience of seeing a sad face, say, in drawing, – we can say that
to see the drawing as a sad face is not “just” to see it as some
complex of strokes, (think of a puzzle picture). But the word
“just” here seems to intimate that in seeing the drawing as a
face some experience is added to the experience of seeing it as
mere strokes; as though I had to say that seeing the drawing as
a face consisted of two experiences, elements.
     

      You should now notice the difference between the various
cases in which we say that an experience consists of several
elements experiences or that it is a compound experience. We might say to
the doctor, “I don't have one pain; I [g|h]ave two: toothache and
headache.” And one might express this by saying, “My exper-
ience of pain is not simple, but compound, I toothache and
headache.” Compare with this case that in whic[j|h] I say, “I
have got both pains in my stomach and a general feeling of sick-
ness.” Here I don't separate the constituent experiences by
pointing to two localities of pain. Or consider this state-
ment: “When I drink sweet tea, my taste ˇexperience is a compound of the
taste of sugar and the taste of tea.” Or again: “If I hear
<…>142.
the C Major chord my experience is composed of hearing C, E,
and G.” And, on the other hand, “I hear a piano playing and
some noise in the street.” A most instructive example is
this: in a song words are sung to certain notes. In what sense
is the experience of hearing the vowel a sung to the note C a
composite one? Ask yourself in each of these cases: What is
it like to single out the constituent experiences in the com-
pound experience?
     

      Now although the expression that seeing a drawing as a
face is not merely seeing strokes seems to point to some kind of
addition of experiences, we certainly should not say that when
we see the <…> drawing as a face we also have the experience of
seeing it as mere strokes and some other experience besides.

And this becomes still clearer when we imagine that someone said
that seeing the drawing as a cube consisted in seeing it
as a plane figure plus having an experience of depth.
     

      Now when I felt that though while reading a certain con-
stant experience went on and on, I could not in a sense lay hold
of that experience, my difficulty arose through wrongly compar-
ing this case with one in which one part of my experience can
be said to be an accompaniment of another. Thus we are some-
times tempted to ask: “If I feel this constant hum going on while
I read, where is it?” I wish to make a pointing gesture, and
there is nothing to point to. And the words “lay hold of”
express the same misleading analogy.
     

      Instead of asking the question, “Where is this constant
experience which seems to go on all through my reading?”, we
should ask, “What is it in saying, ‘A particular atmosphere
143.
enshrouds the words which I am reading’, that I am contrasting
this case with?”
     

      I will try to elucidate this by an analogous case: We are
inclined to be puzzled by the three-dimensional appearance of
the drawing in a way expressed by the question, “What does
seeing it three-dimensionally consist in?” And this question
really asks, “What is it that is added to simply seeing<…> the
drawing when we see it three dimensionally?” And yet what
answer can we expect to this question? It is the form of this
question which produces the puzzlement. As [h|H]ertz says: “Aber
offenbar irrt die Frage in Bezug auf die Antwort, welche sie
erwartet” (p.9, Einleitung, Die Brinzipien der Mechanik).
The question itself keeps the mind pressing against a blank wall,
thereby preventing it from ever finding the outlet. To show a
man how to get out you have first of all to free him from the
misleading influence of the question.
     

      Look at a written word, say, <…> “read”, – “It isn't
just a scribble, it's ‘read’”, I should like to say, “It has one
definite physiognomy.” But what is it that I am really saying
about it?! What is this statement, straightened out? “The
word falls”, one is tempted to explain, “into a mould of my
mind long prepared for it.” But as I don't perceive both the
word and a mould, the metaphor of the word's fitting a mould
can't allude to an experience of comparing the hollow and the
solid shape before they are fitted together, but rather to an
experience of seeing the solid shape accentuated by a particular
background. 1) , 11) . is 1)
144.
<1)> would be the picture of the hollow and the solid shape before
they are fitted together. We see herehere see two circles and can com-
pare them. 11) is the picture of the solid shape in the hol-
low. There is only one circle, and what we call the mould
only accentuates, or as we sometimes said, emphasizes it.
     

      I am tempted to say, “This isn't just a scibble, but it's
this particular face.” – But I can't say, “I see this as this
face”, but ought to say, “I see this as a face.” But I feel
I want to say, “I don't see this as a face, I see it as this
face!” But in the second half of this sentence the word “face”
is redundant, and it should have run, “I don't see this as a
face, I see it like this.”
     

      Suppose I said, “I see this scribble like this”, and while
saying “this scribble” I look at it as a mere scribble, and
while saying, “What at one time appears to me like this
at another appears to me like that”, and here the “this” and the
“that” would be accompanied by ˇthe two different ways of seeing. –
But we must ask ourselves in what game is this sentence with
the processes accompanying it to be used. E.g., whom am I
telling this? Suppose the answer is, “I'm saying it to myself.”
But that is not enough. We are here in the grave danger of
believing that we know what to do with a sentence if it looks
more or less like one of the common sentences of our language.
But here in order not to be deluded we have to ask ourselves:
What is the use, say, of the words “this” and “that”? – or
rather, What are the different uses which we make of them?
What we call their meaning // the meaning of these words // is
145.
not anything which they have got in them or which is fastened
to them irrespective of what use we make of them. Thus it is
one use of the word “this” to go along with a gesture pointing
to something: We say, “I am seeing the square with the diagon-
als like this”, pointing to a swastika. And referring to the
square with diagonals I might have said, “What at one time ap-
pears to me like this at another time appears to me like
that .” And this is certainly not the use we made of the
sentence in the above case. – One might think the whole differ-
ence between the two cases is this, that in the first the pic-
tures are mental, in the second, real drawings. We should here
ask ourselves in what sense we can call mental images pictures,
for in some ways they are comparable to drawn or painted pic-
tures, and in others not.
It is, e.g., one of the essential
points about the use of a “material” picture that we say that it
remains the same not only on the ground that it seems to us to
be the same, but that we remember that it looked before as it looks
now. In fact we shall say under certain circumstances that
the picture hasn't changed although it seems to have changed;
and we say it hasn't changed because it has been kept in a cert-
ain way, certain influences have been kept out. Therefore the
expression, “The picture hasn't changed”, is used in a differ-
ent way when we talk of a material picture on the ˇone hand, and of
a mental one on the other.
Just as the statement, “These
ticks follow at equal intervals”, has got one grammar if the
ticks are the tick of a pendulum and the criterion for their
regularity is the result of measurements which we have made on
our apparatus, and another grammar if the ticks are ticks which
146.
we imagine. I might for instance ask the question: When I
said to myself, “What at one time appears to me like this,
at another …”, did I recognize the two aspects, this and that,
as the same which I got on previous occasions? Or were they
new to me and I tried to remember them for future occasions?
Or was all that I meant to say, “I can change the aspect of
this figure”?
     

      The danger of delusion which we are in becomes most clear
if we propose to ourselves to give the aspects “this” and “that”
names, say A and B. For we are most strongly tempted to imag-
ine that giving a name consists in correlating in a peculiar
and rather mysterious way a sound (or other sign) with something
How we make use of this peculiar correlation then seems to be
almost a secondary matter. (One could almost imagine that
naming was done by a peculiar sacramental act, and that this
produced some magic relation between the name and the thing.)
     

      But let us look at an example; consider this language-game: A sends B to various houses in their town to fetch goods
of various sorts from various people. A gives B various lists.
On top of every list he puts a scribble, and B is trained to go
to that house on the door of which he finds the same scribble,
this is the name of the house. In the first column of every
list he then finds one or more scribbles which he has been
taught to read out. When he enters the house he calls out thes
words, and every inhabitant of the house has been trained to
run up to him when a certain one of these sounds is called out,
these sounds are the names of the people. He then addresses
himself to each one of them in turn and shews to each two
147.
consecutive scribbles which stand on the list against his name.
The first of these two, people of that town have been trained
to associate with some particular kind of object, say, apples.
The second is one of a row series of scribbles which each man carries
about him on a slip of paper. The person thus addressed fetches
say, five apples. The first scribble was the generic name of
the objects required, the second, the name of their number.
     

      What now is the relation between a name and the object
named, say, the house and its name? I suppose we could give
either of two answers. The one is that the relation consists
in certain strokes having been painted on to the door of the
house. The second answer I meant is that the relation we are
concerned with is established, not just by painting these strokes
on the door, but by the particular rôle which they play in the
practice of our language as we have been sketching it. –
Again, the relation of the name of a person to the person in
   ) consists in the person having been trained to run up to
someone who calls out the name; or again, we might say that it
consists in this and the whole of the usage of the name in the
language-game.
     

      Look into this language-game and see if you can find the
mysterious relation of the object and its name. – The relation
of name and object we may say, consists in a scribble being
written on an object (or some other such very trivial relation),
and that's all there is to it. But we are not satisfied with
that, for we feel that a scribble written on an object in itself
is of no importance to us, and interests us in no way. And
this is true; the whole importance lies in the particular use
148.
we make of the scribble written on the object, and we, in a
sense, simplify matters by saying that the name has a peculiar
relation to its object, a relation other than that, say, of
being written on the object, or of being spoken by a person
pointing to an object with his finger. A primitive philoso-
phy condenses the whole usage of the name into the idea of a
relation, which thereby becomes a mysterious relation. (Com-
pare the ideas of mental activities, wishing, believing, thinking
etc., which for the same reason have something mysterious and
inexplicable about them.)
     

      Now we might use the expression, “The relation of name to and
object does not merely consist in this kind of trivial, ‘purely
external’, connection”, meaning that what we call the relation
of name and object is characterized by the entire usage of the
name, but then it is clear that there is no one relation of name
to object, but as many as there are uses of sounds or scribbles
which we call names.
     

      We can therefore say that if naming something is to be more
than just uttering a sound while pointing to something, there
must come to it, in some form or other, the knowledge of how in
the particular case the sound or scratch is to be used.
     

      Now when we proposed to give the aspects of a drawing names,
we made it appear that by seeing the drawing in two different
ways, and each time saying something, we had done more than per-
forming just this uninter[s|e]sting action; whereas we now see that
it is the usage of the “name” and in fact the detail of this
usage which gives the naming its peculiar significance.
149.
     

      It is therefore not an unimportant question, but a
question about the essence of the matter[;|:] “Are ‘A’ and ‘B’ to
remind me of these aspects; can I carry out such an order as
‘See this drawing in the aspect ‘A’; are there, in some way,
pictures of these aspects correlated with the names ‘A’ and ‘B’
(like and ); are ‘A’ and ‘B’ used in comm[i|u]nicating with
other people, and what exactly is the game played with them?”
     

      When I say, “I don't see mere dashes (a mere scibble) but
a face (or word) with this particular physiognomy”, I don't wish
to assert any general characteristic of what I see, but to
assert that I see that particular physiognomy which I do see.
And it is obvious that here my expression is moving in a <…>
circle. But this is so because really the particular phys-
iognomy which I saw ought to have entered my proposition. –
When I find that, “In reading a sentence, a peculiar experience
goes on all the while”, I have actually to read over a fairly
long stretch to get the peculiar impression uttered in this way
// which makes one say this //.
     

      I might then have said, “I find that the same experience
goes on all the time”, but I wished to say: “I don't just notice
that it's the same experience throughout, I notice a partic-
ular experience.” Looking at a uniformly coloured wall I might
say, “I don't just see that it has the same colour all over,
but I see the a particular colour.” But in saying this I am
mistaking the function of a sentence. – It seems that you
wish to specify the colour you see, but not by saying an[u|y]thing
about it, nor by comparing it with a sample, – but by pointing
to it; using it at the same time as the sample and that which
150.
the sample is compared with.
     

      Consider this example: You tell me to write a few lines,
and while I am doing so you ask, “Do you feel something in your
hand // notice a feeling in your hand // while you are writing?”
I say, “Yes, I have a peculiar feeling.” – Can't I say to myself
when I write, “I have this feeling”? Of course I can say it,
and while saying “this feeling”, I concentrate on the feeling.
– But what do I do with this sentence? What use is it to me?
It seems that I am pointing out to myself what I am feeling, –
as though my act of concentration was an “inward” act of point-
ing, one which no one else but me is aware of, this however is
unimportant. But I don't point to the feeling by attending to
it. Rather, attending to the feeling means producing or mod-
ifying it.
(On the other hand, observing a chair does not
mean producing or modifying the chair.)
     

      Our sentence, “I have this feeling while I'm writing”, is
of the kind of the sentence, “I see this.” I don't mean the
sentence when it is used to inform someone that I am looking
at the object which I am pointing to, nor when it is used, as
in   ), to convey to someone that I see a certain drawing in
the way A and not in the way B. I mean the sentence, “I see
this”, as it is sometimes contemplated by us when we are brood-
ing over ce[t|r]tain philosophical problems. We are then, say,
holding on to a particular visual impression by staring at some
object, and we feel it is most natural to say to ourselves, “I
see this”, though we know of no further use we can make of this
sentence.
     

      “Surely it makes sense to say what I see, and how better
151.
could I do this than by letting what I see speak for itself!”
     

      But the words, “I see” in our sentence are redundant.
I don't wish to tell myself that it is I who see this, nor that
I see it. Or, as I might put it, it is impossible that I
should not see this. This comes to the same as saying that I
can't point out to myself by a visual hand what I am seeing; as
this hand does not point to what I see but is part of what I
see.
     

      It is as though the sentence was singling out the partic-
ular colour I saw; as if it presented it to me.
     

      It seems as though the colour which I see was its own des-
cription.
     

      For the pointing with my finger was ineffectual. (And the
looking is no pointing, it does not, for me, indicate a direct-
ion, which could mean contrasting a direction with other direct-
ions.)
     

      What I see, or feel, enters my sentence as a sample does;
but no use is made of this sample; the words of my sentence don't
seem to matter, they only serve to present the sample to me.
     

      I don't really speak about what I see, but to it.
     

      I am in fact going through the acts of attending which
could accompany the use of a sample. And this is what makes
it seem as though I was making use of a sample. This<…> error
is akin to that of believing that an ostensive definition says
something about the object to which it directs our attention.
     

      When I said, “I am mistaking the function of a sentence”,
it was because by its help I seemed to be pointing out to myself
which colour it is I see, whereas I was just contemplating a
152.
sample of a colour. It seemed to me that the sample was the
description of its own colour.
     

      Suppose I said to someone: “Observe the particular lighting
of this room.” – Under certain circumstances the sense of this
order imperative will be quite clear, e.g., if the walls of the room were
red with the setting sun. But suppose at any other time when
there is nothing striking about the lighting I said, “Observe
the particular lighting of this room”: – Well, isn't there a
particular lighting? So what is the difficulty about observing
it? But the person who was told to observe the lighting when
there was nothing striking about it would probably look about
the room and say, “Well, what about it?” Now I might go on
and say, “It is exactly the same lighting as yesterday at this
hour”, or “It is just this slightly dim light which you see in
this picture of the room.”
     

      In the first case, when the room was lit a striking red,
you could have pointed out the peculiarity which you were meant,
though not explicitly told, to observe. You could, e.g.,
have used a sample of the particular colour in order to do so.
We shall in this case be inclined to say that a peculiarity was
added to the normal appearance of the room.
     

      In the second case, when the room was just ordinarily
lighted and there was nothing striking about its appearance,
you didn't know exactly what to do when you were told to observe
the lighting of the room. All you could do was to look about
you waiting for something further to be said which would give
the first order its full sense.
153.
     

      But wasn't the room, in both cases, lit in a particular
way? Well, this question, as it stands, is senseless, and so
is the answer, “It was …” The order, “Observe the particular
lighting of this room”, does not imply any statement about the
appearance of this room. It seemed to say: “This room has a
particular lighting, which I need not name; observe it!” The
lighting referred to, it seems, is given by a sample, and you
are to make use of the sample; as you would be doing in [s|c]opying
the precise shade of a colour sample on a palette. Whereas
the order is similar to this: “Get hold of this sample!”
     

      Imagine yourself saying, “There is a particular lighting
I must observe which I'm to observe.” You could imagine yourself in this case
staring about you in vain, that is, without seeing the lighting.
     

      You could have been given a sample, e.g., a piece of col-
our material, and been asked: “Observe the colour of this patch.”
– And we can draw a distinction between observing, attending
[y|t]o, the shape of the sample and attending to its colour. But,
attending to the colour can't be described as looking at a thing
which is connected with the sample, rather, as looking at the
sample in a peculiar way.
     

      When we obey the order, “Observe the colour …”, what is
we do is to open our eyes to colour. “Observe the colour …”
doesn't mean “See the colour you see.” The order, “Look at
so-and-so”, is of the kind, “Turn your head in this direction”;
what you will see when you do so does not enter this order.
By attending, looking, you produce the impression; you can't
look at the impression.
     

      Suppose someone answered
     
154.

      Suppose someone answered to our order: “Yes “All right, I am now
observing the particular lighting this room has”, – this would
sound as though he could point out to us the particular light-
ing // which lighting it was //; The order, that is to say, may
seem to tell have told you to do something with this particular lighting,
as opposed to another one (like “Paint this lighting, not that”).
Whereas you obey the order by taking in lighting, as opposed
to dimensions, shapes, etc.
     

      (Compare, “Get hold o[g|f] the colour of this sample” with
“Get hold of this pencil”, i.e., there it is, take hold of it.)
     

      I return to our sentence: “This face has a peculiar particular expres-
sion.” In this case too I did not compare or contrast my impr-
ession with anything, I did not make use of the sample before
me. The sentence was an utterance of a state of attention.
     

      What has to be explained is <…> // this //: Why do we
talk to our impression? – You read, put yourself into a <…> state
of attention particular state of attention and say: “Something peculiar happens undoubtedly.”
You are inclined to go on: “There is a certain smoothness about
it”; but you feel that this [o|i]s only an inadequate description
and that the experience can only stand for itself. “Something
peculiar happens undoubted[k|l]y” is like saying, “I have had an
experience.” But you don't wish to make a general statement
independent of the particular experience you have had but rather
a statement into which this experience enters.
     

      You are under an impression. This makes you say, “I am
under a particular impression”, and this sentence seems to say,
to yourself at least, under what impression you are.
As though
you were referring to a picture ready in readiness in your mind and said,
155.
“This is it” // and said, “This is what my impression is like”
//. Whereas you have only pointed to your impression. In
our case     ), saying “I notice the particular colour of this
wall” is like drawing, say, a black rectangle enclosing a small
patch of the wall and thereby designating that patch as a sample
for further use.
     

      When you read, <…> as it were attending closely to what
happened when you read in reading, you seemed to be observing reading as
under a magnifying glass and to see the reading process. (But
the case is more like that of observing something through a
coloured glass.)
You think you have noticed the process of
reading, the particular way in which signs are translated pass over into
spoken words.
     

      I have read a line with a peculiar attention; I am impress-
ed by the reading, and this makes me say that I have observed
something besides the mere seeing of the written signs and the
speaking of words. I have also expressed it by saying that I
have noticed a particular atmosphere round the seeing and speak-
ing. How such a metaphor as that embodied in the last sent-
ences can arise // can come to suggest present itself to me // may be
seen more clearly by looking at this example: If you heard
sentences spoken in a monotone, you might be tempted to say
that the words were all enshrouded in a particular atmosphere.
But wouldn't it be using a peculiar way of representation to say
that speaking the sentence in a monotone was adding something
to the mere saying of it? Couldn't we even conceive speaking
in a monotone as the result of taking away from the sentence its
inflexion. Different circumstances would make us adopt differ-
156.
ent ways of representation. If, e.g., certain words had to be
read out in a monotone, this being indicated by a staff and a
sustained note beneath the written words, this notation would
very strongly suggest the idea that something had been added to
the mere speaking of the sentence.
     

      I am impressed by the reading of a sentence, and I say the
sentence has shewn me something, that I have noticed something
in it. This made me think of the following example: A friend
and I once looked at beds of pansies. Each bed shewed a dif-
ferent kind. We were impressed by each in turn. Speaking
about them my friend said, “What a variety of colour patterns,
and each says something.” And this was just what I myself
wished to say.
     

      Compare such a statement with this: “Every one of these
men says something.” –
     

     
If one had asked what the colour pattern of the pansy said,
the right answer would have seemed to be that it said itself.
Hence we could have used an intransitive form of expression,
say, “Each of these colour patterns impresses one.”
     

      It has sometimes been said that what music conveys to us
are feelings of joyfulness, melancholy, triumph, etc. etc. and
what repels us in this account is that it seems to say that
music is a means to an instrument for producing in us sequences of feelings. And
from this one might gather that any other means of producing
such feelings would do for us instead of music. – To this such an
account we are tempted to reply “Music conveys to us itself!”
     

      It is similar with such expressions as, “Each of these
157.
colour patterns impresses one.” We feel we wish to guard ag-
ainst the idea that a colour pattern is a means to producing
in us a certain impression – the colour pattern being like a
drug and we interested merely in the effect this drug produces.
– We wish to avoid any form of expression which would seem to
refer to an effect produced <…> by an object on a subject.
(Here we are bordering on the problem of idealism ˇand realism and on the
problem whether statements of aesthetics are subjective or
objective.) Saying, “I see this and am impressed” is apt to
make it seem as though that the impression was some feeling accom-
panying the seeing, and that the sentence said something like,
“I see this and feel a pressure.”
     

      I could have used the expression, “Each of these colour
patterns has meaning”; – I didn't say “has meaning”, for this
would provoke the question, “What meaning?”, which in the case
we are considering is senseless. We are distinguishing between
meaningless patterns and patterns which have meaning; but there
is no such expression in our game as, “This pattern has the
meaning so-and-so.”
Nor even the expression, “These two pat-
terns have different meanings”, unless this is to say: “These
are two different patterns and both have meaning.”
     

      It is easy to understand though why we should be inclined
to use the transitive form of expression. For let us see what
use we make of such an expression as, “This face says something”,
that is, what the situations are in which we use this expression,
what sentence would precede or follow it, (what kind of con-
versation it is a part of). We should perhaps follow up such
158.
a remark by saying, “Look at the line of these eyebrows” or
“The dark eyes and the pale face!”; these expressions would
draw attention to certain features. We should in the same
connection use comparisons, as for instance, “The nose is like
a beak”, – but also such expressions as “The whole face expres-
ses bewilderment”, and here we have<…> used “expressing” trans-
itively.
     

      We can now consider sentences which, as one might say,
give an analysis of the impression we get, say, from a face.
Take such a statement as, “The particular impression of this
face is due to its small eyes and low forehead.” Here the
words, “the particular impression”, may stand for a certain
specification, e.g., “the stupid expression.” Or, on the other
hand, they may mean, “what makes this expression a striking one”
(i.e. an extraordinary one); or, “what strikes one about this
face” (i.e., “what draws one's attention”). Or again, our sent-
ence may mean, “If you change these features in the slightest
the expression will change entirely (whereas you might change
other features without changing the expression nearly so much)”.
The form of this statement, however, mustn't mislead us into
thinking that there is in every case a supplementing statement
of the form, “First the expression was this, after the change
it's that.” We can, of course, say, “Smith frowned, and his
expression changed from this to that”, pointing, say, at two
drawings of his face. – (Compare with this the two statements:
“He said these words”, and “His words said something”).
     

      When, trying to see what reading consisted in, I read a
written sentence, let it the reading of it impress itself upon me, and said that
159.
I had a particular impression, one could have asked me such a
question as whether my impression was not due to the particular
handwriting // whether it was n[i|o]t, say, the handwriting which
had given me the particular impression //. This would be ask-
ing me whether my impression would not be a different one if
the writing had been a different one, or say, if each word of
the sentence were written in a different handwriting. In this
sense we could also ask whether that impression wasn't due
after all to the sense of the particular sentence which I read.
One might suggest: Read a different sentence (or the same one in
a different handwriting) and see if you would still say that
you had the same impression. And the answer might be: “Yes,
the impression I had was really due to the handwriting.” –
But this would not imply that when I first said the sentence
gave me a particular impression I had contrasted one impression
with another, or that my statement had not been of the kind,
“This sentence has its own expression character.” This will get clearer
by considering the following example: Suppose we have three faces
drawn side by side: a) , b) , c) . They should be
absolutely iden[y|t]ical, but for an additional stroke in b) and
two dots in c). I contemplate the first one, saying to myself,
“This face has a peculiar expression.” Then I am shewn the
second one and asked whether it has the same expression. I
answer “Yes”. Then the third one is shewn to me and I say,
“It has a different expression.” In my two answers I might be
said to have distinguished the face and its expression: for b)
is different from a) and still I say they have the same expres-
sion, whereas the difference between c) and a) corresponds to a
160.
difference of expression; and this may make us think that also
in my first utterance I distinguished between the face and its
expression.
     

      Let us now go back to the idea of a feeling of familiarity
which arises when I see familiar objects. Pondering about the
question whether there is such a feeling or not, we are likely
to gaze at some object and say, “Don't I have a particular feel-
ing when I look at my old coat and hat?” But to this we no
answer: What feeling do you compare this it with<…>, or oppose it to?
Should you say that your old coat gives you the same feeling
as your old friend A with whose appearance too you are well
acquainted, or that whenever you happened to look at your coat
you get that feeling, say of intimacy and warmth?
     

      “But is there no such thing as a feeling of familiarity?”
– I should say that there are a great many different experience,
some of them feelings, which we might call “experiences (feel-
ings) of familiarity.”
     

      Different experiences of familiarity: a) Someone enters my
room, I haven't seen him for a long time, and didn't expect him.
I look at him, say or feel, “Oh, it's you.” – (Why did I in
giving this example say that I hadn't seen the man for a long
time? Wasn't I setting out to describe experiences of famil-
iarity? And whatever the experience was I alluded to, couldn't
I have had it even if I had seen the man half an hour ago?
I mean, I gave the circumstances of recognizing the man as a
means to the end of describing the precise situation of the
recognition. One might object to this way of describing the
experience, saying that it brought in irrelevant things, and in
161.
fact wasn't a description of the feeling at all. In saying
this one takes as the prototype of a description, say, the des-
cription of a table, which tells you the exact shape, dimensions,
the material which it is made of, and its colour. Such a des-
cription one might say pieces the ta[t|b]le together. There is
on the other hand a different kind of description of a table,
such as you might find in a novel, e.g., “It was a small,
rickety <…> table decorated in Moorish style, the sort
that is used for smoker's requisites.” Such a description
might be called an indirect one; but if the purpose of it is to
bring a vivid image of the table before your mind in a flash,
it might serve this purpose incomparably better than a detailed
“direct” description. – Now if I am to give the description of
a feeling of familiarity or recognition, – what do you expect
me to do? Can I piece the feeling together? In a sense of
course I could, giving you many different stages and the way my
feelings changed. Such detailed descriptions you can find in
some of the great novels. Now if you think of descriptions of
pieces of furniture as you might find them in a novel, you see
that to this kind of description you can oppose another making
use of drawings, measures such as one should give to a cabinet
maker. This latter kind one is inclined to call the only direct
and complete description (though this way of expressing ourselves
shews that we forget that there are certain purposes which the
“real” description does not fulfill. These considerations
should warn you not to think that there is one real and direct
description of, say, the feeling of recognition as opposed to
162.
the “indirect” one which I have given.)
     

      b) the same as a), but the face is not familiar to me
immediately. After a little, recognition “dawns upon me.”
I say, “Oh, it's you”, but with totally different inflexion
than in a). (Consider tone of voice, inflexion, gestures,
as essential parts of our experience, not as inessential accom-
paniments or mere means of communication. (Compare p. 104–5)).
c) There is an experience directed towards people or things
which we see every day when suddenly we feel them to be “old
acquaintances” or “good old friends”; one might also describe
the feeling as one of warmth or of being at home with them.
d) My room with all the objects in it is thoroughly familiar to
me. When I enter it in the morning do I greet the familiar
chairs, tables, etc., with a feeling of “Oh, hello!”? or have
such a feeling as described in c)? But isn't the way I walk
about in it, take something out of a drawer, sit down, etc.
different from my behaviour in a room I don't know? And why
shouldn't I say therefore, that I had experiences of familiarity
whenever I lived amongst these familiar objects? e) Isn't it
an experience of familiarity when on being asked, “Who is this
man?” I answer straight away (or after some reflection), “It is
so-and-so”? Compare with this experience, f), that of looking
at the written word “feeling” and saying, “This is A's hand-
writing” and on the other hand g) the experience of reading the
word, which also is an experience of familiarity.
     

      To e) one might object saying that the experience of saying
the man's name was not the experience of familiarity, that he
had to be familiar to us in order that we might know his name,
163.
and that we had to know his name in order that we might say it.
Or, we might say, “Saying his name is not enough, for surely
we might say the name without knowing that it was his name.”
And this remark is certainly true if only we realise that it
does not imply that knowing the name is a process accompanying
or preceding saying the name.
     

      Consider this example: What is the difference between a
memory image, an image that comes with expectation, and say,
an image of a day dream. You may be inclined to answer, “There
is an intrinsic difference between the images”. – Did you not-
ice that difference, or did you only say there was one because
you thought there had to be one? think there must be one?
     

      “But surely I recognize a memory image as a memory image,
an image of a day dream as an image of a day dream, etc.” –
Remember that you are sometimes doubtful whether you actually
saw a certain event happening or whether you dreamt it, or just
had heard of it and imagined it vividly. But apart from that,
what do you mean by “recognizing an image as a memory image”?
I agree that (at least in most cases) while an image is before
your mind's eye you are not in a state of doubt as to whether
it is a memory image, etc. Also, if asked whether your image
was a memory image, you would (in most cases) answer the quest-
ion without hesitation. Now what if I asked you, “When do you
know what sort of an image it is?”? Do you call knowing what
sort of image it is not being in a state of doubt, not wondering
about it? Does introspection make you see a state or activ-
ity of mind which you would call knowing that the image was a
memory image, and which takes place while the image is before
164.
your mind? – Further, if you answer the question, what sort of
image it was you had, do you do so by, as it were, looking
at the image and discovering a certain characteristic in it?
(as though you had been asked <…> by whom a picture was painted,
looked at it, recognized the style, and said it was a Rembrandt.)
     

      It is easy, on the other hand, to point out experiences
characteristic of remembering, expecting, etc. accompanying the
images, and further differences in the immediate or more remote
surrounding of them. Thus we certainly say different things
in the different cases, e.g., “I remember his coming into my
room”, “I expect his coming into my room”, “I imagine his coming
into my room.” – “But surely this can't be all the difference
there is!” It isn't all: There are the three different games
played with these three words surrounding these statements.
     

      When challenged, do we understand the word “remember”, etc.,
is there really a difference between the cases besides the mere
verbal one, our thoughts moving in the immediate surroundings
of the image we had or the expression we used. I have an image
of dining in Hall with T. If asked whether this is a memory
image, I say, “Of course”, and my thoughts begin to move on
paths starting from this image. I remember who sat next to us,
what the conversation was about, what I thought about it, what
happened to T later on, etc. etc.
     

      Imagine two different games both played with chess men on
a chess board. The initial positions of both are alike. One
of the games is always played with red and green pieces, the
other with black and white. Two people are beginning to play,
they have the chess board between them with the red and green
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pieces in position. Someone asks them, “Do you know what game
you're intending to play?” A player answers, “Of course; we
are playing No.2.” “What is the difference now between playing
no.2 and no.1?” – “Well, there are red and green pieces on the
board and not black and white ones, also we say that we are
playing no.2.” – “But this couldn't be the only difference;
don't you understand what ‘no.2’ means and what game the red
and green pieces stand for?” Here we are inclined to say,
“Certainly I do” and to prove this to ourselves we actually
begin to move the pieces according to the rules of game no.2.
This is what I should call moving in the immediate surrounding
of our initial position.
     

      But isn't there also a peculiar feeling of pastness charac-
teristic of images as memory images? There certainly are
experiences which I should be inclined to call feelings of past-
ness, although not always when I remember something is one of
these feelings present. – To get clear about the nature of
these feelings it is again very most useful to remember that there
are gestures of pastness and inflexions of pastness which we
can regard as representing the experiences of pastness.

(Aristotle).
     

      I will examine one particular case, that of a feeling which
I shall roughly describe by saying it is the feeling of “long,
long ago.” These words and the tone in which they are said
are a gesture of pastness.
But I will specify the experiences
which I mean still further by saying that it is that corres-
ponding to a certain tune (Davids Bündler Tänze – “Wie aus
wie⇄eieiter Ferne”). I'm imagining this tune played with the right
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expression and thus recorded, say, for a gramophone. Then
this is the most elaborate and exac[c|t] expression of a feeling of
pastness // exact gesture of pastness // which I can imagine.
     

      Now should I say that hearing this tune played with this
expression is in itself that particular experience of pastness,
or should I say that hearing the tune causes the feeling of
pastness to arise and that this feeling accompanies the tune?
I.e., can I separate what I call this experience of pastness
from the experience of hearing the tune? Or, can I separate
an experience of pastness expressed by a gesture from the exper-
ience of making this gesture? Can I discover something, the
essential feeling of pastness, which remains after abstracting
all those experiences which we might call the experiences of
expressing the feeling?
     

      I am inclined to suggest to you to put the expression of
our experience instead of the experience. “But these two aren't
the same.” This is certainly true, at least in the sense in
which it is true to say that a railway train and a railway
accident aren't the same thing. And yet there is a justific-
ation for talking as though the expression, “the gesture ‘long,
long ago’” and the expression, “the feeling ‘long, long ago’”
had the same meaning. Thus I could give the rules of chess in
the following way: I have a chess board before me with a set of
chess men on it. I give rules for moving these particular
chess men (these particular pieces of wood) on this particular
board. Can these rules be the rules of the game of chess?
They can be converted into them by the usage of a single operat
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operator, such as the word “any”. Or, the rules for my part-
icular set may stand as they are and be made into rules of the
game of chess by changing our standpoint towards them.
     

      There is the idea that the feeling, say, of pastness, is
an amorphous something in a place, the mind, and that this some-
thing is the cause or effect of what we call the expression of
feeling. The expression of feeling then is an indirect way of
transmitting the feeling. And people have often talked of a
direct transmission of feeling which would obviate the external
medium of communication.
     

      Imagine that I tell you to mix a certain colour and I
describe the colour by saying that it is that which you get if
you let sulphuric acid react on copper. This might be called
an indirect way of communicating the colour I meant. It is
conceivable that the reaction of sulpuric acid on copper under
certain circumstances does not produce the colour I wished you
to mix, and that ons seeing the colour you had got I should
have to say, “No, it's not this”, and to give you a sample.
     

      Now can we say that the communication of feelings by ges-
tures is in this sense indirect? Does it make sense to talk
of a direct communication as opposed to that i[j|n]direct one?
Does it make sense to say, “I can't feel his toothache, but if
I could I'd know what he feels like”?
     

      If I speak of communicating a feeling to someone else,
mustn't I in order to understand what I say know what I shall
call the criterion of having succeeded in communicating?
     

      We are inclined to say that when we communicate a feeling
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to someone, something which we can never know happens at the
other end. All that we can receive from him is again an ex-
pression. This is closely analogous to saying that we can
never know when in Fitzeau's experiment the ray of light
reaches the mirror.