Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes on Mind
The Philosophical Investigations (1953) develops the most sustained twentieth-century critique of the Cartesian picture of mind. The private language argument — sections 243 to 315 — challenges the supposition that there could be a language whose terms refer to inner private sensations accessible only to the speaker, since the criteria for using such terms correctly cannot be detached from the public practices that fix the meaning of any word. The discussion of pain, of seeing as, of the duck-rabbit, and of psychological concepts more generally undermines the assumption that the mind is an inner theater whose private contents are then expressed through external behavior, and replaces it with the analysis of psychological language as embedded in the public language-games of human forms of life.
Quotes
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“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Variant translations: | The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world. | The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for. | Original German: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. -
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
Pt II, p. 223 of the 1968 English edition -
Attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.”
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“Don't think, but look!”
§ 66 -
Attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact.”
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“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache. -
“It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England . The English — the best race in the world — cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German .”
Writing about the eventual outcome of World War I, in which he was a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army (25 October 1914), as quoted in The First World War (2004) by Martin Gilbert , p. 104 -
“If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.”
Philosophical Investigations(1953) | Pt II, p. 217 -
“If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.”
Culture and Value(1980) | p. 86e -
“If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud .”
Personal Recollections(1981) | Conversation of 1930 -
“Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking ; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.”
Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951(1993) | Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 183 -
“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”
Philosophical Investigations(1953) | § 112 -
“Does man think because he has found that thinking pays? Does he bring his children up because he has found it pays?”
Philosophical Investigations(1953) | § 467 -
“A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.”
Philosophical Investigations(1953) | Pt II, p. 189 -
“206. If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."”
On Certainty(1969)