What Wittgenstein s Grammar is Not on Ga - Mauro Engelmann

What Wittgenstein’s ‘Grammar’ is not

(Wittgenstein-Studien 2011/2, De Gruyter; pp. 71-102 )

final draft

What Wittgenstein’s ‘Grammar’ Is Not (On Garver, Baker and Hacker, and

Hacker on Wittgenstein on ‘Grammar’)1

Abstract

‘Grammar’, for Garver, delivers what he calls a “critical criterion” of sense, i.e. a

criterion that determines what makes sense to say that should not be senseless by its own

lights. For Baker and Hacker the “critical criterion” is “rules of grammar”. I argue that

‘grammar’ in the form of a critical criterion is not compatible with the way that the later

Wittgenstein describes his own goals. This because such a criterion expresses a

(disputable) philosophical conception and asks for a philosophical doctrine or

justification; moreover, it may not be meaningful by its own lights. There is, however,

important textual evidence that supports the idea that Wittgenstein has or wants a critical

criterion in his works from 1929-33. At the end of this paper, I indicate why that material

should not be used in the interpretation of his later works. Finally, I point out that as long

as we do not show in details why writings from 1929-33 cannot be used in the

interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, we don’t have a real alternative to the

current understanding of ‘grammar’ – even though we may be convinced that it is

incorrect.

1. Introduction

The word ‘grammar’ is used quite often in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts,

typescripts, dictations, classes and published works. It appears already in the Tractatus

Logico-philosophicus (henceforth Tractatus) in the form of “logical grammar” or “logical

syntax”, i.e., the correct syntax of a formal language (TLP 2004: 3.325). However, the

role of ‘grammar’ in the Tractatus is not the subject of this paper.2 As important as it may

1 Thanks to Peter Hylton, Bill Hart, Wolfgang Kienzler, and Mike Beney for comments on an early draft of

this paper. Thanks to Peter for encouragement and advice. This paper is a revised and reworked version of

the introductory chapter of my PhD dissertation (of which he was the adviser). Thanks to Andrew Lugg and

David Stern for comments on the last draft of this paper. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer of

Wittgenstein-Studien for suggestions made. 2 Concerning the notion of ‘grammar’ in the Tractatus, the two major current interpretations are from Hacker and Conant and Diamond (one can think that the readings derive, respectively, from Norman

Malcolm, and Rush Rhees and Peter Winch – see Diamond (2006) and Hacker (1999) about the ‘lines of

interpretation’). Baker and Hacker (but not the later Baker) think that logical syntax (or logical grammar) in

the Tractatus has the function of determining “the combinatorial possibilities of symbols” (Baker and

Hacker 1994: 34). Logical syntax, or “deep grammar”, can do it in two different levels: by determining

What Wittgenstein’s ‘Grammar’ is not 2

be in the Tractatus, ‘grammar’ seems to be central only after Wittgenstein’s return to

Cambridge in 1929.3 His philosophy in the Middle (1929-36) and Late (1937-51) Periods

seems to be of a grammatical nature. In the Big Typescript, for instance, Wittgenstein

says that “the rules of grammar determine the sense of a sentence; and whether a

combination of words has sense or not” (BT 2005: 79).4 In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein

points out that philosophical problems arise by “grammatical misunderstandings” (BBB

1960: 9), suggesting that a grammatical investigation is the proper activity of a

philosopher in the “fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us”

(BBB 1960: 27). In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein says that his

“investigation is … a grammatical one” (PI 2001: 90).

Given those statements, it seems natural to conclude that ‘grammar’ is what

properly characterizes Wittgenstein’s later philosophical activity and is, therefore, the key

to the understanding of his later philosophy. But what does Wittgenstein mean by

‘grammar’? What is the relation between ‘grammar’ and Wittgenstein’s methodology in

the Philosophical Investigations? Is it the traditional use of the word ‘grammar’ that he

has in mind? According to Moore’s notes on Wittgenstein’s lectures from 1930-33,

Wittgenstein claimed that he was using the same notion of grammar as we ordinarily use

rules for combining atomic propositions into molecular propositions and finding out correlations of names

and objects established by “mental acts” that “project names on to objects” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 35).

For Conant, logical syntax (or logical grammar) in the Tractatus “treats of the categorically distinct kinds

of logically significant components into which sinnvolle Saetze can be segmented…” (Conant 2001: 42).

This segmentation depends on the use of symbols in meaningful propositions. In both readings

Wittgenstein’s concern in logical syntax is with the meaning of words. The difference is that Conant

emphasizes the context principle (TLP 2004: 3.3), while Baker and Hacker emphasize the “mental” act of

naming (projection is seen as a mental act that combine names and simple objects) as the source of

meaning. For a very illuminating discussion of the notion of projection in the Tractatus see Mounce (1997), Hacker (1999), and Diamond (2006). 3 Quotation marks are always used to refer to talk about grammar because the notion is under scrutiny here. 4 Something similar is said in Wittgenstein’s lectures: “Grammar circumscribes language. A combination

of words which does not make sense does not belong to language” (LWL 1989: 48); see also (LWL 1989:

46-7 and 87) (all from 1931-2); also from the same period (MS 112: 53).


– “in its ordinary sense”, as writes Moore (MWL 1965: 276). Nevertheless, in his lectures

from 1932-33, Wittgenstein says that he “left the realm of what is generally called

grammar” (AWL 1979: 31). Thus, the very status of ‘grammar’ as a term of ordinary

language is not clear.5 An obvious problem is whether Wittgenstein is using it in a

metaphysical way (therefore nonsensical in his own terms?), given that his use of the

word is not equivalent to its ordinary use. Is ‘grammar’ the tabulation of rules that

determine whether each sequence of words makes sense or not, as is suggested by the

passage from the Big Typescript quoted above? How does this view, if true, fit

Wittgenstein’s struggle to present a method of philosophy that is free from substantial

philosophical views (or theories)?

Commentators have discussed these questions, but, as I will show, no satisfactory

answer has been found. In fact, a more careful analysis of the present understanding of

Wittgenstein on ‘grammar’ indicates that at best one can be sure that there is something

puzzling about it. If Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice is consistent with what he says,

I argue, these views can only show what ‘grammar’ is not for Wittgenstein. I concentrate

on two major interpretations of the role of ‘grammar’ in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy

(those of Garver, and Baker and Hacker). These authors are the best examples of a

widespread tendency of attributing a substantial view of ‘grammar’ to Wittgenstein.6

5 This question is relevant because of what Wittgenstein says: “What we do is to bring words back from

their metaphysical to their everyday use”(PI 2001: 116). 6 A third author who discusses Wittgenstein’s views on grammar at length is Forster. Forster’s major

concern is to present and defend Wittgenstein’s “thesis to the effect that for all grammatical principles in all

areas alternatives are either actual or at least possible and conceivable” (Forster 2004: 3). Forster clearly

attributes theses to Wittgenstein and recognizes a “collision” between them and “Wittgenstein’s quietism” (Forster 2004: 86-7), but thinks that the latter “ought to be sacrificed anyway” (Forster 2004: 87). Similar to

Garver (and at some extent to Baker and Hacker) Forster also sees Wittgenstein’s as a more radical Kantian

project (almost Hegelian, perhaps). In Forster’s view, Wittgenstein extended “Kant’s explanation of the

necessity of so-called synthetic a priori principles in terms of mind-imposition and our constraint to cover

it” to include also all analytic principles (Forster 2004: 128). It is significant that he shares with Garver and


Most current views either explicitly attribute philosophical doctrines to Wittgenstein or

do so in disguise.7 Wittgenstein’s philosophy is seen with Strawsonian glasses: notions

such as ‘descriptive metaphysics’ and ‘bounds of sense’ play a central role in current

interpretations.8

In part 2 of this paper, I argue that Garver attributes to Wittgenstein doctrines that

are plainly incompatible with the way that Wittgenstein describes his goals. In part 3 I

analyse Baker and Hacker’s interpretation, which is certainly the most through and

systematic overall interpretation of Wittgenstein at present. Baker and Hacker are not

guilty of Garver’s mistakes. However, even for them ‘grammar’ seems to open the door

to attributing substantial philosophical theses, opinions or conceptions to Wittgenstein by

means of notions such as “the bounds of sense” and “arbitrariness” of grammar.9 In part 4

I show that Baker and Hacker’s interpretation is supported by the assumption that

Wittgenstein’s writings after 1930 are all variations of the same philosophy. This

suggests that only the revaluation of Wittgenstein’s Middle Period writings can show to

Baker and Hacker the assumption that Wittgenstein has the same philosophy and understanding of

‘grammar’ after 1930 (he quotes Wittgenstein’s writings from different periods without paying attention to

possible changes in Wittgenstein’s ideas). In what follows I criticize the attitude of not taking seriously

Wittgenstein’s non theoretical approach to philosophy, the use of different philosophers to supposedly

understand Wittgenstein and the attribution to him of substantial vies on grammar based on writings from the early 30’s when I discuss Garver’s and Baker and Hacker’s interpretations. I think that the most

important criticisms presented against them directly apply to Forster as well. 7 See, for instance, the debate between Glock (2008) and Kalhat (2008) concerning the supposedly

“conventionalist account” of necessity and sense given by Wittgenstein (see also Schwyzer (2001), O’Neil

(2001) and Forster (2004)). Kuusela (2006) and (2008) is an important exception among interpreters who

discuss Wittgenstein’s ‘grammar.’ He clearly sees that Wittgenstein does not intend to explain the “nature

of necessity” by means of “rules of grammar” and that the idea of a “criterion of sense” (or “standard of

sense,” as he says) is incompatible with Wittgenstein’s later work. In general, I think, his approach is the

right one and, in my view, he describes what Wittgenstein ‘grammar’ is or, at least, might be. I express

some worries about his views in footnote 46. 8 See Strawson (1975) and (1996). My goal here is not to reveal and explain the historical background of

the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘grammar’; however, Strawson’s influence on several interpretations seems to me undeniable (see footnotes 7, 15, 41, and 42 of this paper). 9 The late Baker substantially disagreed with Baker and Hacker. It is difficult, nonetheless, to draw a line

between them (especially concerning Wittgenstein’s changes in the 30’s) because the former’s late work is

comparatively rather fragmentary. But I will take into consideration some aspects of Baker’s late

disagreement with his early views in this paper.


what extent Wittgenstein changes his views on ‘grammar’ and is methodologically

consistent in his late work.

2. Garver on Grammar: A Philosophical Doctrine and A “Critical Criterion”

In his essay Philosophy as Grammar, Garver defends the view that ‘grammar’

takes the place of logic in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In the Tractatus, he argues,

Wittgenstein regards logic as a model of reality that provides “the basis for the meaning

of sentences…” (Garver 1996: 142). In his view, logic in the Tractatus gives us “the key

to reality” and takes the place of traditional metaphysics because logic, presumably, tells

us what the correct metaphysical view is. In his later philosophy, according to Garver,

Wittgenstein “retains virtually the same view about the relation of the forms of language

(whether they be grammatical or logical) to metaphysics” (Garver 1996: 142).10

Concerning the change from the Tractatus to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy,

Garver believes that Wittgenstein noticed that incompatibilities of color, for instance, are

present in all languages and because of this the views of the Tractatus needed to be

expanded. Garver is aware of the fact that Wittgenstein doesn’t engage in a grammatical

investigation immediately after his return to philosophy. He thinks that Wittgenstein

“sometimes” spoke about phenomenology in the Middle Period as the alternative for the

talk about logic in the Tractatus, but he doesn’t see any particular reason for this

vocabulary. The change from ‘phenomenology’ to ‘grammar’ is, for Garver, not much

more than terminological. In Garver’s view, Wittgenstein changed the terminology

10 To justify his view, Garver cites PI 2001: 371-3 in the following way: “Essence is expressed by grammar… Grammar tells what kind of object anything is”. He leaves out the enigmatic 372: “Consider:

“The only correlate in language to an intrinsic necessity is an arbitrary rule. It is the only thing which one

can milk out of this intrinsic necessity into a proposition””. Note that Wittgenstein quotes the passage. It is

not clear who is saying it. Is it Wittgenstein, the interlocutor or one of the interlocutors? What could be the

purpose of the quotation?


because other philosophers had used the word ‘phenomenology’ before him and it had a

Cartesian flavor. This, however, Wittgenstein certainly knew before beginning his

phenomenological project.

Garver skips over the problems concerning the origins of Wittgenstein’s use of

‘grammar’ too quickly. It cannot be a mere terminological change that occurred, for

Wittgenstein characterizes phenomenology in his notebooks as what “isolates/separates/

the visual field and what goes on in it from everything else” (MS 107: 4). It seems that

phenomenology is concerned with “the first system” (MS 105: 85), “the primary” (see

MS 106: 177), “the immediately given” or “primary language” (MS 107: 295), while the

notion of grammar to which Garver refers is related to ordinary language. Garver would

need an argument to show that, in spite of appearances, there is a strong continuity

between phenomenology and grammar.

Garver maintains that Wittgenstein has a central motto for his later philosophy:

“Philosophy consists of grammar and metaphysics: grammar is its basis” (Garver 1996:

142).11

One should be suspicious of Garver’s attribution of the view that grammar is the

basis of metaphysics to Wittgenstein, for Wittgenstein’s goal is (so it seems) to show how

metaphysical claims are confused; he also takes himself as not offering any theoretical

views.12

Garver’s answer to such worries is that Wittgenstein is hostile to speculative or

scientific metaphysics, but also made “continuing contributions to descriptive

11 Garver is paraphrasing a remark that Wittgenstein made in 1913: “Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis” (TS 201a). 12 On December 1931, for instance, Wittgenstein says (making a clear reference to TLP: 6.53): “Once I

wrote: The only correct method of philosophizing would consist in not saying anything and leaving it to

another person to make a claim. This is what I now hold [modified translation; my emphasis]” (WWK

1979: 183).


metaphysics” (Garver 1996: 157).13

What characterizes speculative or scientific

metaphysics for Garver is the “enquiry into transcendent facts” (Garver 1996: 157). This

kind of inquiry is, for Garver’s Wittgenstein, nonsense because it confuses two language-

games, namely, the discussion of problems related to facts and the discussion of problems

related to concepts. This conception that Garver attributes to Wittgenstein, however,

already presupposes a very strong philosophical thesis: that there is an essential

distinction between questions of facts and questions of concepts. Descriptive metaphysics

is sound according to Garver (probably because he thinks that it doesn’t conflate different

language-games) and Wittgenstein is, in his opinion, one of its major contributors with

his descriptions “in the form of human natural history” (Garver 1996: 158). What Garver

has in mind are, as he says, “very general matters of fact” such as the fact that “in all

human groups there are distinctions between ordering, asking, urging and praying” and

that the rules for those activities, according to Garver, are “valid with respect to any

particular language” (Garver 1996: 228).

Here, one has the impression that Garver himself is conflating the two kinds of

questions that he strives to distinguish. He ends up attributing to Wittgenstein

assumptions concerning how the world is. Since Wittgenstein relies on descriptions of the

uses of words and other activities, Garver thinks that the contingency of the facts that

comprises the world is “the most prominent feature of Wittgenstein’s metaphysical

commitments” (Garver 1996: 159). For Garver, in his later philosophy “Wittgenstein

clearly also remained interested in what kinds of things there are, and he took pains to

13 It seems that Garver is referring to Strawson’s Individuals when he talks about “descriptive

metaphysics”. The mixture of Strawson and Wittgenstein is also present in Baker and Hacker, for they

constantly use the Strawsonian expression “the bounds of sense” as if it originated in Wittgenstein’s late

philosophy. Similarly both, Garver and Baker and Hacker, give more or less Kantian readings of

Wittgenstein’s late philosophy.


describe or determine the form or essence – though he did not call it that – of such things

as pain, memory, intention, seeing, colours, numbers, and so forth.” (Garver 1996: 142).

Is Wittgenstein, then, simply wrongly using his own words and is really determining the

form or essence of memory, intention, etc?

I think that the point of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is distorted by Garver. The

only results of Wittgenstein’s philosophy are “the uncovering of one or another piece of

plain nonsense” (PI 2001: 119). Philosophy, as it is practiced by the later Wittgenstein

“leaves everything as it is” (PI 2001: 124). The aim of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is to

make philosophical problems “completely disappear” (PI 2001: 133). What is really

distinctive in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is that the attack on philosophical claims is

not founded in any philosophical assumptions. This is at least what he claims. Therefore,

if one attributes philosophical views about the nature of language or grammar to

Wittgenstein, one has to suppose that he is inconsistent.14

He may be inconsistent, but

then the inconsistency has to be presented as such.

Once Wittgenstein’s point is distorted by Garver’s interpretation, what takes its

place is a series of comparisons with philosophers who, supposedly, have views in

common with Wittgenstein.15

This comparison is threefold: Saussure, Aristotle and Kant.

14 See for instance Fogelin (1996), who thinks that Wittgenstein “has transgressed his self-imposed

restrictions against substantive philosophical theorizing” (Fogelin 1996: 45). Another interpreter who sees

Wittgenstein’s position of non advancing philosophical theses (“Wittgenstein’s quietism”) as incompatible

with his other views is Forster. For Forster, the “doctrine of meaning as use” (Forster 2004: 83) and

Wittgenstein’s views on grammatical principles are incompatible with his “quietism”: “…It is surely hard

to believe that our ordinary language concept of meaning includes requirements of the sort of usefulness,

and, as an essential part of this in the case of grammatical principles, the sort of threefold empirical

application, in question” (Forster 2004: 84) (According to Forster, “the threefold empirical application” is

the following: that grammatical principles are used in factual judgments, that they have a regulative role in factual judgments and that the factual judgments that they regulate prove not to be recalcitrant). 15 The view that Wittgenstein is better understood by means of the understanding of other philosophers,

especially Kant, is quite popular. See, for instance, Finch and his claim that Wittgenstein is “the ultimate

Kantian”(Finch 1977: 248). Another interpreter who claims that Wittgenstein is Kantian is Pears (see

Pears’ introduction for his 1970). A recent version of Wittgenstein’s Kantianism is given by Forster (2004).


In Garver’s view, both Saussure and Wittgenstein use ‘grammar’ descriptively

and think that ‘grammar’ is arbitrary in the sense of not being made true or false by the

facts in the world. But, for Garver, Wittgenstein “doesn’t aim at a systematic description

of language use”, because of his supposed “disdain for the systematic” (Garver 1996:

150-1). Another difference, according to Garver, is Wittgenstein’s “integration of

language with activity and the consequent necessity for agreement in practical judgment”

(Garver 1996: 151). For Saussure, according to Garver, language is isolated (linguistic

phenomena are supposedly segregated from other activities). It is not clear what the

“isolated language” attributed to Saussure may be, but it is interesting to notice that, in

Garver’s view, the “agreement in judgments” is a “discourse condition” found by

Wittgenstein (Garver 1996: 150). Thus, according to Garver, Wittgenstein thinks that

there is at least one necessary condition for language to exist, namely, agreement in

judgments.16

The problem with this comparison is that it doesn’t tell us what Wittgenstein is

doing or how he is doing it. And this is a risk for interpretations that appeal to different

He says: “…Wittgenstein’s position can quite properly be described as idealist, in a sense closely

analogous to that in which Kant was” (Forster 2004: 17). Thus, Garver is exemplar in this aspect of his

interpretation. For a good discussion of the risks involved in seeing other philosophers’ views in

Wittgenstein’s works see Hilmy (1986). 16 What Garver has in mind is this passage: “If language is to be a means of communication there must be

agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments.” (PI 2001: 242). Of

course, “the must” in the sentence strongly suggests a transcendentalist interpretation of the passage. But

neither the German word ‚muessen’ nor any other similar that could be directly translated as ‚must’ occurs

in the German text: “Zur Verstaendigung durch die Sprache gehoert nicht nur eine Uebereinstimmung in

den Definitionen, sondern (so seltsam dies klingen mag) eine Uebereinstimmung in den Urteilen.” An

alternative, more literal, translation could be: „To the understanding [communicaton] by means of language belongs not only an agreement in the definitions, but [also] (weird as this may sound) an agreement in

judgments.“ In this more literal translation, it is clear that the ‘must’ is the product of an interpretation and

doesn’t belong to the original text. Here I am indebted with Goldfarb, who made that point in a talk. The

new translation by Hacker and Schulte reads: “It is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it

may sound) agreement in judgments that is required for communication by means of language.” (PI 2009).


philosophers in order to understand Wittgenstein’s work. Why is Wittgenstein’s

‘grammar’ descriptive? In what sense is Wittgenstein (if he is) unsystematic?

There is a similar problem with Garver’s comparison between Wittgenstein and

Aristotle the author of Categories. According to Garver, the Categories are “an early and

fragmentary version of what today we may call Wittgensteinian grammar” (Garver 1996:

154). Unfortunately, Garver doesn’t say precisely what Wittgensteinian ‘grammar’ is (so

we cannot know what the Categories are supposed to be a fragmentary version of).

Instead he only hints at the nature of ‘grammar’ by means of the differences between

Wittgenstein and Aristotle’s Categories. For Garver, both the later Wittgenstein and

Aristotle describe “actual uses of language”, but Wittgenstein doesn’t focus on truth-

claims as Aristotle and the earlier Wittgenstein did. He also contrasts Aristotle’s

scientific approach and Wittgenstein’s non-scientific approach. There is still a third

difference according to Garver: while “Wittgenstein’s language-games early in

Philosophical Investigations are preliminary to diagnosis and treatment of philosophical

problems”, Aristotle’s Categories are “preliminary to just the sort of scientific

metaphysics that Wittgenstein found especially in need of his therapy” (Garver 1996:

154). Note that Garver could have concluded from this last claim that the projects of

Aristotle and Wittgenstein are completely different and that the comparison is unhelpful.

For if Wittgenstein wants to stop exactly what Aristotle wants to start, they must be

looking at language in very different ways. Moreover, if what Wittgenstein and Aristotle

share is the description of “actual uses of language”, then both have it in common with

practically all the philosophers of language of the 20th century.


Garver’s comparison between Wittgenstein and Kant is more promising, for it can

point to a valuable insight into Wittgenstein’s late philosophical activity. For Garver,

what characterizes a critical philosophy in a Kantian style is the aim to overcome “the

usual philosophical controversies” by means of an assumption that is uncontroversial and

the derivation of a “framework” (a “critical criterion”) to criticize philosophical views

(Garver 1994: 272). But the controversies, for Garver, can be overcome in this way only

if the “critical framework” is itself justified. In order to avoid an infinite regress, argues

Garver, the “critical criterion” has to provide its own justification without being, so to

speak, its own victim (the criterion cannot turn against itself).17

This is, in Garver’s view,

exactly what characterizes the “critical project” of the Philosophical Investigations.

Wittgenstein’s strategy, according to Garver, is to take for granted the human form of life

and its language-games. From this, Wittgenstein derives his “critical framework”:

“grammar and grammatical knowledge – specially that part of grammar which is

invariant for different languages…” (Garver 1994: 273). Thus, ‘grammar’ as the “critical

criterion”, for Garver, is important especially because it is universal, and it makes

Wittgenstein’s philosophy free of problems of a self-defeating framework. 18

To justify this last point, Garver says: “it is obvious and unproblematic that we

teach and learn how to teach and learn language; that is, that grammar is self-referential is

as unproblematic as that there is a spelling for the word ‘spelling’” (Garver 1996: 165).

This argument is certainly problematic. It is true that it is “unproblematic that we teach

17 One could think, for instance, that the principle of verification is an example of a problematic “critical

criterion”, for one can ask: is the principle itself verifiable? Garver’s example of a problematic criterion is the Tractatus: since it is itself a collection of nonsense, how can it possibly show that metaphysical

propositions are nonsense? Garver claims: “It [the Tractatus] was a failed attempt because it was, by its

own lights, nonsense” (Garver 1996: 273). 18 Garver says: “Grammar is a universal language-game, in that there is no natural language in which it is

not possible to instruct people in the use of language” (Garver 1996: 165).


and learn how to teach and learn language”, but this has little to do with what could be a

test of self-referentiality or self-defeat concerning Wittgenstein’s ‘grammar’. An

important question would be, for instance, whether Wittgenstein’s use of ‘grammar’ is

itself grammatical in the sense that Garver takes Wittgenstein to use the term: i.e. Garver

should have asked whether there is a language-game in our ordinary language in which

there are rules that agree with Wittgenstein’s use of the word ‘grammar’. So, it is

irrelevant whether ordinary grammar is self-referential and not self-defeating, since it is

not clear whether Wittgenstein’s use of ‘grammar’ coincides with it. How can Garver

show that the ordinary use and Wittgenstein’s use of ‘grammar’ coincide? In fact, he

cannot. It is clear that Garver (if he wants to be consistent) has to defend the claim that

Wittgenstein’s ‘grammar’ is completely different from the ordinary one. If we strictly

observe what Garver says about ‘grammar’, we have to conclude that Wittgenstein’s use

of the term is not only broader than the ordinary use, but also peculiar. It is peculiar

because in Garver’s interpretation it remains inside a metaphysical tradition. For him,

Wittgenstein’s ‘grammar’ “expresses certain essential qualities of the persons and

actions” (Garver 1996: 160). This, obviously, has no relation at all with the ordinary

understanding of ‘grammar’.

Garver’s comparison between Wittgenstein and Kant shows, however, that it is

difficult to see how radical Wittgenstein’s philosophy is. It is very tempting to attribute to

it some kind of foundation, some kind of criterion from which to judge the sense of

philosophical claims. It seems that if Wittgenstein claims that philosophers talk nonsense,

then he must have a criterion to decide whether a given philosophical statement is

nonsensical. But, in this case, the criterion would be obviously suspicious, for we could


ask what its status is. Here we see how particular a correct interpretation of

Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘grammar’ has to be (under the assumption that Wittgenstein is

consistent). If we accept that Wittgenstein presents a criterion of sense (or defends that

there are “bounds of sense”), then we seem to get into the predicament of Baron von

Muenchhausen, who has to pull himself out of the quicksand without somebody else’s

help. For if a critical criterion (‘grammar’, or ‘ordinary language’, or ‘being part of a

language-game’, or ‘rules of grammar that constitute meaning’, or any other related

“criterion”) is the criterion to be used to determine what it makes sense to say, then this

criterion has to make sense according to what it prescribes. Of course, there is always the

possibility of biting the bullet and assuming that Wittgenstein is the victim of his own

criticism. But in this case we could ask what the relevance of Wittgenstein’s criticism is.

In Garver’s understanding of ‘grammar’, the notion of a critical criterion is its own first

victim, for Wittgenstein’s ‘grammar’, as understood by Garver, is not part of a language-

game of ordinary language. However, the very idea of a “critical criterion” of sense is

problematic. For even if the criterion is not self-defeating, as Garver correctly urges, it

asks for a theoretical justification. Why would one accept that there is a “critical

criterion” of sense? The problem is that a justification of a critical criterion would be, of

course, philosophical. Therefore, it seems that a philosopher who does not want to

present a theory, doctrine, or a conception should not claim that there is such a criterion.

3. Baker and Hacker, and Baker, and Hacker

Baker and Hacker are aware of the mistake of taking the later Wittgenstein as a

new Aristotelian or as a new Kantian. So they avoid attributing a philosophical


explanatory role to ‘grammar’ in line with traditional philosophy.19

It is certainly

‘grammar’ that characterizes Wittgenstein’s philosophy in their view, but the “grasp of

grammar”, as they say, is envisioned by Wittgenstein in order to dissolve philosophical

problems and not to explain, for instance, how propositions a priori are possible.20

The

following passage shows this point clearly:

There are no philosophical propositions; philosophy can only produce a

distinctive kind of understanding of non-philosophical propositions, as well as a

grasp of the illegitimacy of putative philosophical propositions. The distinctive

understanding is a grasp of the grammar, the logical articulation of ordinary

propositions, which will dissolve philosophical questions and put at rest

philosophical worry (Baker and Hacker 1985: 275).

So what is distinctive in philosophy is the grasp of ‘grammar’, which Baker and

Hacker take to be the grasp of “the logical articulation of ordinary propositions”

(‘ordinary’, I take it, in contrast to philosophical propositions). In their view, the grasp of

‘grammar’ expresses the positive task of philosophy as practiced by Wittgenstein.

Negatively, ‘grammar’ is designed to fulfill the task of showing that traditional

philosophical problems are the product of confusions related to misunderstandings of the

functioning of language. Those problems, according to them, arise not because the

‘grammar’ of our language is somehow hidden underneath the sentences of language as,

say, the elementary propositions in the Tractatus; rather, the ‘grammar’ of ordinary

language is not easily surveyable and the lack of surveyability led traditional

philosophers to develop confused philosophical theories based on grammatical mistakes.

19 At least explicitly. Hacker understands the project of the Tractatus as similar to Kant’s project (Hacker:

1997) and Baker and Hacker’s interpretation of the later Wittgenstein brings Wittgenstein very close to

Strawsonian-Kantianism. 20 For a view on ‘grammar’ similar to Baker and Hacker see O’Neil (2001).


‘Grammar’, for Baker and Hacker, only needs to show a “perspicuous representation“ or

“survey” of what is already open to view in language.21

The task of the Wittgensteinian philosopher is, then, “to give us a perspicuous

representation of that segment of language which generated our confusion” (Baker and

Hacker 1985: 276). According to Baker and Hacker, the Wittgensteinian philosopher

aims at an “overview of the conceptual field”, at an arrangement of “grammatical data”,

which should bring us to the dissolution of philosophical puzzles (Baker and Hacker

2005: 284). Thus, the positive task of philosophy characterized by a ‘grammatical

investigation’ is determined by and dependent on its negative task of dissolving

philosophical problems. Thus, they certainly take seriously Wittgenstein’s goal of not

defending philosophical conceptions.

But what counts, for Baker and Hacker, as a perspicuous representation? A

“perspicuous representation”, according to them, is a kind of conceptual map of the use

of expressions in language. It is “a grasp of the logical network of concepts within a

given domain” (Baker and Hacker 1985: 286). It is not a complete map, but a partial one,

a map of part of the grammar that has some stability over time: “…at least some

segments of our grammar can be definitely mapped for a given generation.” (Baker and

Hacker 1985: 286). Even if the conceptual map or the “conceptual geography” that is

supposedly the task of ‘grammar’ is not complete, it is at least, according to them,

systematic: “For a survey does not consist of a haphazard collection of apercus. If it is not

comprehensive, at any rate it is systematic” (Baker and Hacker 1985: 291).

21 See PI 2001: 122, where “uebersichtliche Darstellung” is translated by Anscombe as “perspicuous

representation”.


What troubles one with Baker and Hacker’s interpretation, at this point, is that

Wittgenstein doesn’t seem to give “perspicuous representations” or “conceptual maps” of

grammar very often, if he does it at all.22

This depends, of course, on what should count

as an example of a perspicuous representation in Wittgenstein’s work, but it is clear that

more has to be explained here if the concept has really the central role attributed to it by

them.23

The only example given by Wittgenstein that is labeled as ‘perspicuous

representation’ is the color octahedron (WWK 1993: 42 and PR 1975: §§51-2). One can

see in the octahedron that some combinations of color are not possible (for instance

‘greenish red’) while others are allowed (for instance ‘yellowish red’). In the octahedron

the opposition of red and green shows this. The octahedron seems to be an interesting

example of ‘perspicuous representation’ because it shows in a glance (it is surveyable)

the different possibilities of color combination. But, of course, a set of rules prescribing

the combinations that are allowed would also suffice. According to Baker and Hacker,

this is actually the clue to understanding the difficulty involved in Wittgenstein’s account

of the notion of ‘survey’ (Baker and Hacker 2005: 307-334)24

. A surveyable

representation, according to them (or at least according to Hacker), can be understood

broadly or narrowly.25

Narrowly, it means “a grammatical proposition or a few

22 The role of a “surveyable representation” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy is one of the major disagreements

between Hacker and Baker. In the discussion that follows I am indebted to Baker (2004). 23 Baker and Hacker have a good reason to think that the concept is central to Wittgenstein, for he says “the

concept of perspicuous representation is central to us” (PI 2001: 122). The question is, of course, whether

its centrality is connected with their claim that a perspicuous representation is the positive part of

Wittgenstein’s philosophy (a grammatical map) used to show how philosophical problems are nonsensical

(negative task of philosophy). 24 Hacker wrote the second edition of the first two volumes of the commentary alone (Baker and Hacker

(2005) and (2009)). Baker’s views are expressed in Baker (2004). There are several disagreements pointed out by Baker, but the common source of practically all of them is the dogmatism that is implicitly attributed

to Wittgenstein in Baker and Hacker’s reading. 25 Since Hacker is responsible for the new edition of Baker and Hacker’s commentary, one could ascribe

most of the views expressed in the new edition to him alone. However, it is difficult to clearly separate their

views.


propositions that shed enough light on the matter at hand to dispel illusion and to

highlight the grammatical category or role of the expression in question” (Baker and

Hacker 2005: 332). Broadly, it means a “synopsis of grammatical rules”. It is clear, for

Baker and Hacker (or Hacker), that there are no examples in Wittgenstein’s later work of

tabulating rules of grammar in the synoptic sense. The exception is “his plan for

treatment of psychological concepts” in Zettel §472 (Baker and Hacker 2005: 333). For

them, Wittgenstein was too worried with the details and ramifications of concepts

involved in philosophical confusion and therefore didn’t expend time trying to tabulate

“the grammar of expressions in a surveyable manner” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 333). But

according to Baker and Hacker an attentive reader could do the job for “scattered

throughout his voluminous notes we often find numerous grammatical observations that

can be used by the judicious cartographer who has the inclination to master the

geography of concepts” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 334).

But is this cartographer sure that he can find an overview of the concepts that he

needs to investigate? For Baker and Hacker (or Hacker), our grammar is “deficient in

surveyability”, but it must be surveyable: “that which one has in view must be something

that is, in principle, surveyable (uebersehbar)” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 310). The

justification for this in principle necessity is the following:

The surveyability that Wittgenstein exhorts us to pursue is no will o’ the wisp. It

is not a contingent feature of language that its grammar is surveyable. That it must

be possible in one way or another to describe our use of language and to remind

ourselves of the grammatical explanations we normally accept as criteria of

understanding is a reflection of the contention that a person’s conduct cannot be

described as rule-governed unless he himself sees it as rule-governed (Baker and

Hacker 1985: 308). 26

26 It is not clear why Hacker didn’t include that justification for his claim in the second edition of Vol. 1 of

the commentary. Baker was unsatisfied with this passage, for he quotes it and criticizes its dogmatism in


The first thing to notice about this claim and its justification is that it is far too

dogmatic to be Wittgensteinian. One of Wittgenstein’s major concerns in his later

writings is the tendency that philosophers have to express conditions that must be

satisfied in order for this or that be the case. Wittgenstein, therefore, doesn’t fit the

“transcendentalist” who is looking for “conditions of possibility” of rule following or

language. This seems to be well expressed in Wittgenstein’s criticism of the Tractatus’

conception of logic in the Philosophical Investigations:27

We want to say that there can’t be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs

us that the ideal ‘must’ be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it

occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this “must”. We think it must be

in reality; for we think we already see it there (PI 2001: 101).

One could paraphrase §101 and say that for Baker and Hacker (or Hacker) “there

can’t be a non-surveyable grammar…the ideal ‘must’ be found in language”. But, we

could go on, what is the nature of this ‘must’? The short answer is: it has a dogmatic

nature. It shows only the requirements that one wants to impose on language.

Wittgenstein is, in fact, explicit about the dogmatism behind the philosophical must: “ “It

has to be this way” is not a sentence of philosophy. Dogmatism” (MS 130: 53).28

So

Baker (2004: 71, footnote). It may be that Hacker decided to leave out the justification of their early claim

because of Baker’s disagreement, but a very similar claim remained in the second edition notwithstanding. 27 See PI 2001: 89-109, and 131. Important (Early) Middle Period passages on dogmatism are: (WWK

1993: 182-4), (BT 2005: 260), (MS 110: 222), (MS 111: 87); later period passages are: (MS 115: 57), (MS 122: 84r), (MS 130: 53), (MS 142: 111-2). It seems very plausible that Wittgenstein fought against his own

tendencies of dogmatism until late in his life, for even in his later writings he points to his own dogmatic

positions (see, for instance, from 1939-40: “Here I always tend to dogmatism!” (MS 122: 71v)). 28 According to von Wright’s catalog, most of the manuscript is from 1946 (Von Wright 1980: 44 and 53),

but the quoted passage is probably from 1944-45. (Thanks to a reviewer, who pointed this out to me).


Baker and Hacker’s grammatical or linguistic necessities don’t seem to quite fit

Wittgenstein’s Late Period Philosophy. 29

How could Wittgenstein defend claims about language and its conditions of

possibility and at the same time claim that he “won’t say anything which anyone can

dispute” in his Cambridge Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics from 1939? To

see how strong Wittgenstein’s point is, it is useful to look at the whole passage:

The investigation is to draw your attention to facts you know quite as well as I,

but which you have forgotten, or at least which are not immediately in your field

of vision. They will all be quite trivial facts. I won’t say anything which anyone

can dispute. Or if anyone does dispute it, I will let that point drop and pass on to

say something else [my emphasis] (LFM 1976: 22).

If Wittgenstein is willing even to let the “point drop”, it seems very unlikely that

he would defend a view of the nature of language suggested by Baker and Hacker –

unless his goals and practice were inconsistent, which is, of course, also possible.

Moreover, we should not expect that Wittgenstein was not aware that to give necessary

29 I am skipping here a detailed discussion of an important part of the role of ‘grammar’ according to Baker

and Hacker. For them, one of Wittgenstein’s most important insights is that mathematical and geometrical

propositions are ‘rules of grammar’, while some metaphysical propositions are disguised ‘rules of

grammar’. Necessary propositions are “expressions of internal relations between concepts that are themselves used in stating truths about the world”; and their role, according Baker and Hacker, is “to

license (or prohibit) transitions between concepts, i.e. transitions from one expression of an empirical

proposition to another” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 269). They don’t see Wittgenstein as merely suggesting

an analogy between mathematical, geometrical and metaphysical propositions with rules of ‘grammar’.

They claim that Wittgenstein’s contention was “that they were rules” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 57):

“Notoriously he [Wittgenstein] claimed that mathematical propositions are rules of grammar” (Baker and

Hacker 1994: 61). (See also Baker and Hacker 2009: 62). This again, in my view, sounds more like a

philosophical doctrine concerning the nature of necessity than any description of our practices. That is, it

seems that Baker and Hacker are attributing a dogmatic position to Wittgenstein. In this case, they may be

right. It may be that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics is still dogmatic even in the 40’s, but I

cannot evaluate the details of this possibility in this paper (see also Putnam (2007)). In part 4 of this paper I

briefly discuss passages from Wittgenstein’s lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in order to suggest that even in the philosophy of mathematics ‘grammar’ is not to be seen as an explanation of necessity. It is

important to notice, however, that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics was never ready for

publication – except maybe for TS 222, published as the first part of Bemerkungen ueber die Grundlagen

der Mathematik, which must be read as the second part of TS 221 (see Schulte’s introduction to the

Kritisch-genetisch Edition and Schulte (2006)).


conditions of possibility of language would not be disputed by philosophers. It cannot be

taken as a “trivial fact” that surveyability is a necessary condition of language.

Baker and Hacker’s view certainly has the appearance of a philosophical theory,

which contradicts what Wittgenstein prescribes.30

As he says: “And we may not advance

any kind of theory” (PI 2001: 109). Wittgenstein does not say that he does not want to

advance a scientific or philosophical theory in §109; rather, he says “any kind of theory”.

The claim that grammar must be surveyable doesn’t look like a claim that “everybody

would agree to” (PI 2001: 128), but more like an aspect of a philosophical doctrine that

will be endlessly discussed. It looks simply like a “kind of theory”.

Another important aspect of a ‘grammatical investigation’ for Baker and Hacker

is its opposition to what would count as an empirical investigation: philosophy as a

grammatical investigation doesn’t have empirical concerns; it is only interested in the

relation of concepts, in sense and not truth (Baker and Hacker 2009: 57). For them, the

reason why philosophy is not concerned with empirical questions is its “special concern

with the limits of sense”, which it “describes from within” (Baker and Hacker 1985: 281).

This concern with the limits of sense (or “bounds of sense”) is what is proper to a

‘grammatical investigation’: “Grammar determines what is logically possible, i.e. what it

makes sense to say” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 324).

Baker and Hacker see the rules of grammar as descendents of the rules of logical

syntax of the Tractatus and think that “like rules of logical syntax, rules of grammar

determine the bounds of sense” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 40). Given this point of

30 It is a common move among interpreters to attribute to Wittgenstein a philosophical theory or opinion

and, then, of course, say that what he means by ‘theory’ is only scientific theory (see, for instance, Hanfling

(2004)). In my view, such moves distort Wittgenstein’s philosophy and miss one of the most important

characteristics of it: it is a critique of philosophy that is not based on a critical theory.


proximity between the later and the earlier Wittgenstein, Baker and Hacker offer us what

they take to be a clue for the difference between the philosophical activity of both

periods: while the structure of language was taken to be hidden in ordinary language in

the Tractatus (simple names as constituting elementary propositions), it is open to view

for the later Wittgenstein. According to them (or Hacker), Wittgenstein’s first change was

to abandon the Tractarian view that there is a hidden isomorphism between reality and

language.31

In their view, the idea of the connection between world and language by

means of proper names and simple objects discovered by analysis is abandoned in favor

of a view that ostensive definitions are rules within language. The meaning of a word is

the set of rules which constitute meaning (Baker and Hacker 2009: 364). Because

ostensive definitions are rules of language, they are part of language and its ‘grammar’.

This shows, for Baker and Hacker, that language is “self-contained and autonomous”

(Hacker 2000: 91; Baker and Hacker 2009: 46). The “transgression” of those autonomous

rules “yields nonsense” (Baker and Hacker 2009: 19). For them, the real turn in

Wittgenstein’s philosophy is, then, the abandonment of “the metaphysical aspirations of

investigating an objective essence of the world” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 252) in favor

of “the de dicto conception of essence endorsed in the Investigations §§92, 371, 373”

(Baker and Hacker 2005: 252, footnote 3). Thus, for them (or for Hacker), Wittgenstein

in the Tractatus has a de re conception of essence or necessity, while in the Philosophical

31 It is not clear to me that Wittgenstein really defended such a view in the Tractatus. – see, for instance,

Diamond (1996) and (2004), Conant (1990) and (2006), and (2001), Kremer (2001) and (2007) and

Ricketts (1996). It is, nonetheless, true that some passages in the Middle Period suggest that Wittgenstein held that there is an isomorphism between language and reality, but that it cannot be described (see, for

instance, the first pages of MS 108, from 1930). But if it is really true that this was Wittgenstein’s view,

then he must have defended the idea that one can quantify over the inexpressible (there is a x such that x is

inexpressible), which is also nonsense. In this case, Wittgenstein believed inexpressible nonsense, even

though the point (or an important point) of the Tractatus was to stop nonsense.


Investigations he has a de dicto conception. Here, they (or Hacker) are attributing, again,

a philosophical doctrine to the later Wittgenstein.

It is interesting to observe that Hacker does not include §372 of the Philosophical

Investigations in the list of Wittgenstein’s remarks that supposedly express a de dicto

conception of necessity (Baker and Hacker 2005: 252; quoted in the last paragraph).32

However, in the first edition of their commentary Baker and Hacker clearly assumed that

§372 expresses a defense of the “arbitrariness of grammar” which they, then, attribute to

Wittgenstein himself (Baker and Hacker 1994: 329). Later, in the third volume of the

commentary, Hacker recognizes that §372 is a quote, but simply tries to make it fit his

old interpretation by assuming that in the quote Wittgenstein is opposing the Tractatus to

the Philosophical Investigations (Hacker 1998). He interprets the first claim of the quote

as an allusion “in a generalized way to the position delineated in the Tractatus” (Hacker

1998: 237). Hacker says that “at that stage [Tractatus] Wittgenstein firmly believed that

there are intrinsic necessities” (Hacker 1998: 237). He opposes this view to a view that he

attributes to the Philosophical Investigations: “…we are being invited to consider the

quoted remark by way of contrast with the conception of necessity or essence that

characterizes Wittgenstein’s later philosophy [my emphasis]” (Hacker 1998: 238).

Hacker’s interpretation of §372 (and, therefore, passages surrounding it) characterizes his

general views concerning the Philosophical Investigations: on the one hand, he claims

that, for instance, the ‘arbitrariness of grammar’ is “not a philosophical thesis at all”

32 Here is the remark: “Consider: “The only correlate in language to an intrinsic necessity (Naturnotwendigkeit) is an arbitrary rule. It is the only thing which one can milk out of this intrinsic

necessity into a proposition.”” (PI 2001:372). One should not forget that the remark is quoted and, as such,

may not be the expression of Wittgenstein’s view. It is not quoted, however, in the original version of the

Big Typescript, which suggests that Wittgenstein held the view at the time. Later Wittgenstein added

quotation marks and the word “consider’’ to the remark.


(Hacker 2000: 89); on the other hand, he claims that Wittgenstein has a “conception of

necessity or essence” and talks about “Wittgenstein’s later account of necessity” (1998,

238) in terms of the “arbitrariness” or “autonomy” of grammar. In volume 4 of the

commentary (Hacker 2000), Hacker does not mention §372 to support his views on the

“arbitrariness of grammar” anymore. He justifies his views making reference, not

accidentally as we will see, to the Philosophical Grammar and to lectures from the period

1930-33.

Baker and Hacker try to deny that Wittgenstein’s ‘grammatical remarks’ have

doctrinal or dogmatic characteristics (Baker and Hacker 2009: 20). For them, there are

two categories of ‘grammatical remarks’. The first is “evident truisms concerning our use

of expressions and undisputed rules for their use” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 23) (Ex: it

makes sense to say ‘I know you have a toothache’, that ‘to understand’ doesn’t have a

continuous present tense, or that ‘two’ may be correctly explained by ostension). The

second category of remarks are the “overviews” and synoptic descriptions. Baker and

Hacker give the following examples of ‘overviews’: “that the sense of a sentence is its

method of verification, that the proper answer to ‘What are numbers?’ is a description of

the grammar of number and of numerals, or that inner states stand in need of outward

criteria [my emphasis]” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 23).33

According to Baker and Hacker, however, those propositions are not the

“axiomatic basis for the grammar of our language” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 23) and so

33 It is strange that Baker and Hacker include “the sense of a sentence is its method of verification” among the ‘grammatical remarks’. This is obviously a very disputed view in philosophy and it is very doubtful that

Wittgenstein defended such a view in his later philosophy even if he defended something similar between

1929-1931. For Wittgenstein’s verificationist claims see, for instance, MS 105: 10 and 16, from 1929

(“Each proposition is the instruction of a verification”). After 1931, the use of the expression rarefies and

never appears in the form of “the sense of a sentence is its method of verification.”


they are not theses or dogmatic remarks. This because, in their view, Wittgenstein never

uses his grammatical remarks as premises of arguments. Such propositions appear as “the

coda of reasoning”: “there are no grammatical arguments from grammatical propositions

in his work” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 23). If these ‘grammatical remarks’ are not used as

parts of arguments, then it seems plausible to think that they don’t have the weight of

philosophical theses.

Even though the explanation above is helpful, it is incompatible with what they

say later. Later, the interesting clue that grammatical remarks are not part of arguments

seems to be forgotten (Baker and Hacker 2005). They (or Hacker) seem to give a lot of

weight to ‘grammatical observations’ in Wittgensteinian philosophical arguments when

discussing the nature of Wittgenstein’s arguments: “...it is not evident that there cannot be

deductively valid arguments in philosophy, the premises of which spell out conditions of

sense and the conclusion of which is that a given form of words lacks sense (since it fails

to accord with the conditions of sense)[my emphasis]” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 294). An

argument of this kind, writes Hacker, “proves that a form of words is excluded from

language [my emphasis]” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 294). It seems that after all, according

to Baker and Hacker (or Hacker), the use of ‘grammatical rules’ as premises is not a bad

idea; as such they have the role of axioms of sense.34

34 It is important to notice that Hacker (Baker and Hacker (2005) and (2009)) doesn’t seem to believe that

there is any fundamental change in the way he understands Wittgenstein’s philosophy between Baker and

Hacker’s early books and the second edition of the first two volumes of the commentary. It is true that

Hacker says he saw “numerous errors” in their interpretation (Baker and Hacker 2005: xv) and talks about

errors “made twenty-five years earlier” (Baker and Hacker 2009: xiii), but those errors are not indicated to

the reader. The exception is the supposedly wrong “emphasis on the Augustinian picture” (Baker and Hacker 2005: xv). Not much is said about specific changes made and the reasons underlying them. One

could, of course, think that Hacker changed his mind in his later work and this would then explain tensions

and inconsistencies in their interpretation. But as a matter of fact, they are inherent to Baker and Hacker’s

early and to Hacker’s later interpretations. On the one hand, according to Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein’s

‘grammatical investigation’ dissolves philosophical problems (negative task of philosophy); on the other


This role aggravates another problem. Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘grammar’

understood as the guardian of the limits of sense is very different from the ordinary use of

the word ‘grammar’. No grammar book has in it a description of the “bounds of sense”.

No grammar book contains ‘grammatical remarks’ similar to the following made by

Baker and Hacker: “necessary truths are a product of grammar, not descriptions of the

structure of reality” (Baker and Hacker 1985: 279). Thus, one of Moore’s famous

objections to Wittgenstein’s use of the word ‘grammar’ seems to be justified:

Wittgenstein doesn’t use ‘rules of grammar’ as it is ordinarily used (Moore 2007). Here,

again, we have the problem of the criterion that does not pass its own test.

According to Baker and Hacker, both the grammarian and Wittgenstein are

“concerned with the rules for the use of words” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 56; Baker and

Hacker 2009: 60), but those rules can be seen in different ways. Wittgenstein and

grammarians occupy themselves with the same general subject, namely, the rules of

language, but have different purposes with their occupation (Baker and Hacker 1994: 54;

Baker and Hacker 2009: 58). In their view, the philosopher “tabulates the use of the

words” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 330; Baker and Hacker 1985: 292); in this way she

shows that traditional philosophical propositions are nonsense because they transgress the

“bounds of sense”. They think, however, that the ordinary grammarian wishes not exactly

the same, for instance, to teach children how to speak correctly (Baker and Hacker 2009:

57). Wittgenstein, for Baker and Hacker, broadened the notion of ‘rules of grammar’

based on similarities between rules of language in ordinary grammar and in philosophical

hand, to dissolve philosophical problems, according to them a ‘grammatical investigation’, must determine

the “bounds of sense” (positive task of philosophy). The very claim (which appears in several volumes of

their commentary) that bounds of sense are to be made clear supposes philosophical criteria to determine

them and, thus, a philosophical justification. Such a justification is, however, absent in Wittgenstein’s

writings and is in tension with Wittgenstein’s goal of not presenting theories or opinions.


grammar. A similarity of both concerning the bounds of sense is, for instance, that a

grammarian also considers some combination of words nonsensical (for instance, “they

was wall tiger ball”). In their view, the ordinary grammarian is only worried with

syntactical aspects of nonsense, while Wittgenstein’s quest is for semantic nonsense

(Baker and Hacker 2009: 60). Here, I think, Baker and Hacker assume that for

Wittgenstein meaning is circumstance dependent (for the meaning of a word can vary

according to the context of use) in order to deny the sharp demarcation of semantics,

syntax and pragmatics and, thus, defend that the ordinary and the philosophical

grammarians are not that far apart. (They assume it explicitly in (Baker and Hacker 1994:

58)).35

If this is correct, however, the demarcation of syntax, semantics and pragmatics

doesn’t have force as a consequence of a philosophical conception defended by

Wittgenstein. It is only if the philosophical claim that meaning is context dependent is a

true statement that Wittgenstein’s ‘grammar’ can be seen as about the same things as

ordinary grammar. Here a philosophical justification seems to be needed for the general

view about context dependency that justifies the similarity between grammar and

‘grammar’.

However, whatever we do with this philosophical claim about meaning, it is still

obvious that nobody but Wittgenstein, as read by Baker and Hacker, uses the word

‘grammar’ as the activity of laying down the bounds of sense and judges that some

propositions are disguised nonsense because they don’t fit these limits. The major

problem concerning Wittgenstein’s use of ‘grammar’, then, remains: Is Wittgenstein

violating the ordinary use of the word ‘grammar’? Does Wittgenstein’s notion of

35 However, as we will see soon, in a different context Baker and Hacker presuppose a sharp distinction

between semantics and pragmatics.


‘grammar’ serve a dogmatic purpose? If there is a solution for this problem (or a way to

avoid it), it seems that one of its aspects will need to be a reduction of the significance of

‘grammar’. ‘Grammar’ should not be a discipline that manages the “bounds of sense” if

Wittgenstein is consistently non dogmatic. It should not be a critical criterion.

I think that Baker and Hacker have to ascribe to Wittgenstein still another

philosophical presupposition that looks like a conception or a theory. According to them,

for Wittgenstein, ‘grammar’ is arbitrary, i.e. ‘rules of grammar’ are neither true nor false

and there is no reality corresponding to grammatical facts (Baker and Hacker 2009: 57).

This means that we could have a different ‘grammar’, of course. But in this case, the

question “Why this grammar and not a different one?” seems pressing.36

They actually

have an answer for this question: “grammar is autonomous, but many reasons guide our

concept-formation, e.g. in mathematics, and many reasons can be given why certain

concepts are useful.” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 336).37

The pragmatic reasons pointed out

by them are four: experience prompts us, practical needs, theoretical needs and aesthetic

considerations (Baker and Hacker 1994: 336; Baker and Hacker 2009: 343).38

Thus, for Baker and Hacker, “grammar is antecedent to truth” (Baker and Hacker

2009: 57) and Wittgenstein presupposes a clear distinction between questions of fact and

questions of meaning (or sense): “It [Grammar] incorporates any rules for using

expressions that have to be determined antecedently to questions of truth and falsehood”

(Baker and Hacker 2009: 61). That is a philosophical thesis. One has the impression,

36 Wittgenstein says explicitly that grammar is arbitrary in the Big Typescript. The question that should guide one’s investigation is: to what extent such views correspond to his views in the Philosophical

Investigations? 37 On this topic see also (Hacker 2000, 78): “To be sure, a system of rules which is simple, convenient, and

easily taken in is pragmatically justified.” See also O’Neil (2001) for the same view. 38 In this point this interpretation certainly finds support in, for instance, BT 2005: 236.


here, that Wittgenstein, a philosopher who does not have philosophical opinions, is

engaged in a defense of Carnap against Quine. Moreover, as we have just seen, for them

Wittgenstein also needs a distinction between questions of truth and pragmatic questions

(Baker and Hacker 2009: 57).39

This sounds like ‘tolerance’ concerning different

grammars. Most serious, however, is that Baker and Hacker cannot hold such a

distinction in light of their claim that the distinction between syntax, semantics and

pragmatics doesn’t have force in Wittgenstein’s philosophy (Baker and Hacker 1994: 22;

see Baker and Hacker 2009: 60). As we have seen, they presuppose the lack of force of

this distinction in order to justify Wittgenstein’s non-ordinary use of ‘rules of grammar’.

Their interpretation goes, once more, to two directions: the distinction between

pragmatics and semantics must have force for them to distinguish between questions of

truth and questions of ‘grammar’, but it cannot have force in the justification of

Wittgenstein’s use of ‘grammar’.

4. The Middle Period

If one wants to avoid the uncomfortable position of attributing disguised or

explicit philosophical doctrines to the later Wittgenstein, it is best to take his remarks on

the nature of his own activity more seriously than Baker and Hacker, Hacker and Garver

do. Wittgenstein certainly thinks that philosophers are confused and that they talk

nonsense. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that Wittgenstein needs a non self-defeating

39 I have no doubt that Wittgenstein himself, in the Middle Period, defended the view that grammar is

autonomous and that grammar can only be pragmatically justified. However, this does not mean that he

defended the same view later (see part 4 of this paper).


“critical criterion” to determine the “bounds of sense” in order to show that. He may not

need a “critical criterion” at all.40

Fortunately, Wittgenstein doesn’t use the expressions “critical criterion” or

“bounds of sense”.41

However, Wittgenstein does say that “all conditions of the

comparison of the proposition with reality/with the facts” belong to ‘grammar’ (BT 2005:

43); he also says that “grammar determines what should count as a proposition” (BT

2005: 77); also, he says that “the rules of grammar determine the sense of the proposition

and whether a combination of words has sense or hasn’t [my emphasis]” (BT 2005: 79).

Arguably, what Baker and Hacker (or Hacker) say about the Philosophical Investigations

fits well the Big Typescript.42

This because in the Middle Period Wittgenstein is still

concerned with the tabulation of rules of sense in the “book of grammar” (BT 2005: 58).

The tabulation of rules counts as a description of the calculus of language (BT 2005:

155). In the Big Typescript Wittgenstein still thinks that to “understand a language” is “to

have command of a calculus” (BT 2005: 35). The rules of ‘grammar’ are the rules of the

calculus. They prescribe what counts as a move in language, i.e. what makes sense to say,

because according to the Big Typescript ‘grammar’ is a transcendental condition of

language: “without grammar it isn’t a bad language, but no language” (BT 2005: 194).

40 See Goldfarb (1983) and (1997), and Minar (1995). 41 The expression comes probably from Strawson’s book The Bounds of Sense. Baker and Hacker also say

that “Kant too argued that his antagonists transgressed the bounds of sense” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 294).

This is a dubious thesis defended in Strawson’s book. Dubious because Kant tries to establish a limit to

what can be known, and not to what can be meaningfully said. The talk about the totality of nature, god, the

soul and other ideas that transgress our theoretical knowledge is not nonsense for Kant (proof of this is that

Kant himself in the Critique of Practical Reason gives “practical proofs” for the existence of god and the

eternity of the soul). 42 This does not mean that Baker and Hacker have invented their interpretation after reading the Big

Typescript. My point is simply that what they write fits the conception of ‘grammar’ of that TS. It is quite

possible, however, that the source of their interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations was the Blue

Book (here I am indebted to conversations with David Stern). Perhaps it was a Strawsonian reading of the

Blue Book that influenced them. For an early dissenting voice concerning the Blue Book and how to read

Wittgenstein’s works see Bouwsma (1961).


Moreover, there, ‘grammar’ is arbitrary because the rules of ‘grammar’ constitute

meaning: “The rules of grammar determine meaning (constitute it), and therefore they are

not answerable to any meaning and it this respect are arbitrary” (BT 2005: 233). This is

why in the Big Typescript Wittgenstein does not quote the passage concerning the

arbitrariness of ‘grammar’ from Philosophical Investigations §372; he explicitly defends

it there:

In language the only correlate to natural necessity (Naturnotwendigkeit) is an

arbitrary rule. It is the only thing one can remove from this necessity and put into

a proposition. (BT 2005: 235)

All those passages from the Big Typescript (from 1932-33) seem to show that

Baker and Hacker have good textual evidence for the claim that Wittgenstein uses

‘grammar’ as a “critical criterion” and wants to determine the “bounds of sense.” 43

And

there are several passages in the Middle Period writings that can certainly be used to

justify their view.44

It is not mere coincidence, thus, that Baker and Hacker’s (or Hacker’s)

interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on ‘grammar’ lean heavily on quotations from

the Big Typescript, manuscripts, and lectures from 1929-1933. They (or Hacker) quote

passages from Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts after 1929 as though it was not

relevant to consider the date of the remarks (a similar claim can be made about Garver).

The consequence of this practice is that Wittgenstein’s views on ‘grammar’ from 1930-33

are considered to be the same in the Philosophical Investigations. In Hacker (2000), for

instance, in the chapter called The Arbitrariness of Grammar and the Bounds of Sense,

43 Wittgenstein, however, makes important changes when he revises BT 2005: 235. He adds quotation

marks and ‘consider’ in handwritten remarks added to the passage (see footnote 32). 44 For instance LWL 1989: 46-7, 48, 61 and 87.


the vast majority of the relevant passages quoted or indicated to support his reading are

from the period 1929-1933.45

The passages from the Middle Period guide the

interpretation of passages from the Philosophical Investigations. It is taken for granted

that from 1930 on the changes in Wittgenstein’s philosophy are variations of one basic

idea, namely, ‘grammar’ as the discipline that determine the bounds of sense and

accounts for the nature of necessity in a de dicto fashion.

Sometimes Baker and Hacker (or Hacker) explicitly assume the continuity in

Wittgenstein’s middle and later work: “…the rotation of our examination or way of

thinking that Wittgenstein wrote of in 1937 is a further aspect of this same transformation

in his conception of the nature, goals and methods of philosophy that dawned on him in

1929/30[my emphasis]” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 275). The ‘new method’ discovered “in

late 1929”, according to them, is “essentially the transition from the quest for truth to the

quest for sense” (Baker and Hacker 2005: 279). This is utterly misleading, for already the

phenomenological investigations from early 1929, i.e. the quest for a phenomenological

language, is characterized by Wittgenstein as the investigation of “sense and not truth”.

This can be clearly seen in MS 105, in a passage from 02.04.1929, where Wittgenstein

distinguishes phenomenology from physics: “Physics strives for truth, i.e., correct

prediction of events, while phenomenology does not do that, it strives for sense and not

truth”. Thus, if they (or Hacker) were right, Wittgenstein’s phenomenology from 1929

would have to be considered part of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy, which is certainly

false. What “dawned on” Wittgenstein in 1929 was the fact that a phenomenological

45 The following is the complete list: lectures between 1930 and 1932 in LWL 1989: 8, 20, 21, 27, 31, 44,

49, 64, 86, 94, 95; lectures from 1932-33 in AWL 1979: 4, 48; PR (from 1929-30): 53, 55; from the PG

(remarks originated in the BT 2005): 53, 88, 126, 129, 185, 304, 311, 313.


language was unnecessary, which has not so much to do with what happened with

Wittgenstein’s philosophy in 1937, I think.

There is another oddity in Baker and Hacker’s (or Hacker’s) characterization of

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as striving for “sense and not for truth”. In their

interpretation of the Tractatus one finds that also there Wittgenstein is establishing the

“conditions of sense” which demarcate the “bounds of sense”. In fact, they claim: “An

important point of continuity was the insight that philosophy is not concerned with what

is true and false, but rather with what makes sense and what traverses the bounds of

sense” (Baker and Hacker 1994: 39). In one sense, then, they subscribe to the view that

there is only one Wittgenstein, while at the same time attribute to Wittgenstein a change

(“striving for sense and not truth”); however, in light of their own interpretation, this

should not be a change at all, since this is already the view of the Tractatus.

Even though those discrepancies in Baker and Hacker’s (or Hacker’s) account of

Wittgenstein’s development are serious, it is far from clear that one can show in details

that they are wrong in their use of Wittgenstein’s Middle Period writings to support the

attribution of a de dicto conception of necessity to the Philosophical Investigations. If

Hacker is right in using, for instance, the Big Typescript in his interpretation of the

Philosophical Investigations, he is right in his understanding of ‘grammar’ there as

well.46

46 In his critique of Baker and Hacker’s interpretation, Kuusela (2006) and (2008) emphasises

Wittgenstein’s works after 1933, but does not explain why. This is problematic because Kuusela’s major

concern is Wittgenstein’s struggle against dogmatism (Kuusela 2008). Wittgenstein wants to give up

dogmatism already in 1931 (see WWK 1993: 182). Thus, the Big Typescript should count as non-dogmatic (see, however, the quotations from the Big Typescript above). It seems, therefore, that Wittgenstein’s

struggle against dogmatism took place between 1931 and 1933, a period that Kuusela does not discuss.

This means that he does not seriously discuss very important textual evidence that gives Baker and

Hacker’s reading support. One would expect him to do so, since Baker and Hacker’s interpretation is

discussed throughout his book (Kuusela 2008).


I can only suggest here that Wittgenstein’s use of the word ‘grammar’ changed

after 1934. In the Brown Book, for instance, the word appears only four times and there

‘use’ and ‘grammar’ are synonyms (BBB 1960: 109, 130, 135 and 171). They are

synonyms, I take it, because there is no space for ‘grammar’ as the discipline that

demarcates the bounds of sense and explains the nature of necessity in Wittgenstein’s

philosophy after 1934 in an anti-realistic fashion. In his 1939 lectures, Wittgenstein goes

as far as denying not only the idea that he defends philosophical theses, but any opinion

whatsoever:

One of the greatest difficulties I find in explaining what I mean is this: You are

inclined to put our difference in one way, as a difference of opinion. But I am not

trying to persuade you to change your opinion. I am only trying to recommend a

certain sort of investigation. If there is an opinion involved, my only opinion is

that this sort of investigation is immensely important, and very much against the

grain of some of you. If in this lectures I express any other opinions, I am making

a fool of myself [emphasis in the original]. (LFM 1976: 103).

Wittgenstein is also, in his own view, making a fool of himself if he expresses

opinions concerning ‘grammar’. In one of his lectures, Lewy said “I know what you want

me to say”. This was a “severe criticism” according to Wittgenstein (LFM 1976: 55).

When he goes on and explains that he cannot have opinions he exemplifies it with

‘grammar’:

…I have no right to want you to say anything except just one thing: “Let’s see” –

One cannot make a general formulation and say that I have the right to want to

make you say that. For what could that general formulation be? My opinion? But

obviously the whole point is that I must not have an opinion… For instance, I

have no right to want to make you say that mathematical propositions are rules of

grammar[my emphasis]. (LFM 1976: 55).

This suggests that the very idea that ‘grammar’ gives the “bounds of sense” or that

‘grammatical’ rules give us a de dicto or normative source of necessity is not an opinion


that we should ascribe to Wittgenstein. ‘Grammar’ is better taken as a heuristic device

that can be thrown away if Wittgenstein’s “whole point” is really that he “must not have

an opinion”. Maybe ‘grammar’ is part of “an interpretation” of language and necessity

that is as arbitrary as any other, “gas to expel old gas”, as Wittgenstein says:

I may occasionally produce new interpretations, not in order to suggest they are

right, but in order to show that the old interpretation and the new are equally

arbitrary…I will only make gas to expel old gas. (LFM 1976: 14; my emphasis).

Those passages from 1939 certainly suggest, to say the least, a very deflated

notion of ‘grammar’. They suggest that the supposedly de dicto explanation of necessity

that Hacker takes to be an alternative to the supposedly Tractarian realism is itself an

“equally arbitrary” ism (‘grammaticism’, ‘linguistic essentialism’, or ‘anti-realism’).

If it is correct, as I think it is, that Wittgenstein parts away from his Middle Period

notion of ‘grammar’ in his later philosophy, many (new) questions arise. Is ‘grammar’

merely an “arbitrary interpretation” in the Philosophical Investigations? Are

Wittgenstein’s goals and practice really consistent in his later writings? Why and how did

Wittgenstein change his views concerning ‘grammar’? What is the internal dialectic in

Wittgenstein’s Middle Period writings that brings him to a new role for ‘grammar’? All

those questions indicate that an alternative to Baker and Hacker’s interpretation, and a

consistent detailed interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, needs to introduce a

parallel account of Wittgenstein’s development. One needs to revaluate Wittgenstein’s

Middle Period Philosophy and explain how and why his views changed.47

It is quite

47 Many scholars (Schulte 2001; Diamond 2004; Stern 2004) have argued that the writings from the Middle

Period are to be taken carefully. They see significant differences between the Middle and Late Period

writings, for instance, that Wittgenstein is still quite dogmatic in the Big Typescript when compared with

the Philosophical Investigations. However, the questions why and how Wittgenstein changed his

philosophy still need to be answered. I give an account of Wittgenstein’s development in (Engelmann


amazing that, comparatively, so little research about the Middle Period has been done

among Wittgenstein scholars. This is certainly an urgent task especially for those who

think that Hacker’s account is not quite true to Wittgenstein’s intentions in the

Philosophical Investigations. One can, of course, also argue for an inconsistency between

Wittgenstein’s goals and practice in that book, a way-out that I personally don’t wish to

take.

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