DAVID BAKHURST AND CHERYL MISAK
The question of the affinity between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and pragmatism is one that has been often discussed, usually by philosophers sympathetic to a broadly affirmative answer (e.g., Haack, 1982; Goodman, 1998). Hilary Putnam (1995) asks “Was Wittgenstein a pragmatist?” and almost answers yes. And Robert Brandom (1994, p.23) makes so bold as to represent Wittgenstein as advancing a pragmatist theory of norms. But the question is a delicate one, if only because characterizing the core elements of pragmatism is almost as contestable as interpreting Wittgenstein’s thought. Moreover, while Wittgenstein was undoubtedly influenced by pragmatist thinkers, the nature of that influence is by no means straightforward. It is well known that Wittgenstein was impressed by William James (one of the few philosophers he would admit to having read), despite his mostly critical comments about James’s views. Less often noted, however, is the affinity between Wittgenstein’s thought and the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Though there are important differences of philosophical style and substance between the two thinkers, they share a number of profound insights about meaning, knowledge, and philosophical method. Or so we shall suggest.
Pragmatism came into being in 1867 in a reading group in Cambridge Massachusetts, the members of which included Peirce and James. Although Peirce was acknowledged as the founder of the movement, he was a difficult person and he could not secure an academic post. It was therefore James – America’s most famous academic and one of the fathers of modern psychology – who became the public face of pragmatism. James’s views were well known across the Atlantic. In 1901 he delivered the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh and in 1909 the Hibbert Lectures in Oxford. Both Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore reviewed James’s book Pragmatism (1907), and were outspoken in rejecting his account of truth (see Russell 1909, 1910; Moore 1907). Wittgenstein would have been aware of the hostile reception to James’s pragmatism, but this did not prevent him from finding things of interest in his writings. He read James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (the published Gifford Lectures, 1902) in 1912 and wrote to Russell that “This book does me a lot of good” (Letter to Russell, 22 June 1912). Many years later he commended the volume to his friend Maurice Drury. As has sometimes been noted (e.g., Hallett, 1977, p.40), Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance (PI §67) may have been inspired by James’s antiessentialist treatment of the concept of religion (1902, ch.2). Wittgenstein also studied James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) in the 1930s and 1940s (for a time it was the only philosophical work on his book case (Passmore, 1957/68, p.592, n.4)) and he discusses various Jamesian positions in his later writings. It is sometimes thought that Wittgenstein was interested in James merely as an exemplification of error, but as Russell Goodman has argued (2002, pp.62–3, citing Z §456), this fails to appreciate how much Wittgenstein admired James as a deep thinker not afflicted by the “loss of problems” syndrome that diminishes so many philosophers. Goodman stresses that Wittgenstein mentions Russell and Frege in the Investigations, but he addresses James (p.96).
No less than Russell and Moore, Wittgenstein explicitly rejected what he and other philosophers took to be the heart of Jamesian pragmatism: the identification of the true with the useful. Wittgenstein is clear: “But aren’t you a pragmatist? No. For I am not saying that a proposition is true if it is useful” (RPP I §266); “If I want to carve a block of wood into a particular shape any cut that gives it the right shape is a good one. But I don’t call an argument a good argument just because it has the consequences I want (Pragmatism)” (PG 185; cf. OC §474). Wittgenstein was also dismissive of the Jamesian ideas of the Oxford pragmatist F.C.S. Schiller, describing his “The Value of Formal Logic” (1932) as “philosophical nonsense” (and not in a good way!). There is no reason to think that Wittgenstein ever warmed to such views. O.K. Bouwsma relates that Wittgenstein was also very rude about John Dewey (see WC 28–9). In 1949, upon learning that Dewey was still living, Wittgenstein commented, “Ought not to be.”
For all that, however, there are parallels between Wittgenstein’s thought and aspects of James’s philosophy that we would now unhesitatingly associate with pragmatism, such as James’s interest in philosophy as “method only” (1907, p.31), his respect for “common sense,” and his concern to describe the complex detail of human life. Moreover, it is likely that Wittgenstein was influenced, albeit circuitously, by Peirce. Haack (1982) and Sahlin (1997) argue that Wittgenstein learnt about Peirce’s thought from his discussions with Frank Ramsey. Ramsey was one of the few scholars in England to have read Peirce attentively, and in the 1920s he explicitly advanced pragmatist views bearing Peirce’s influence (1926/90; [1927–29] 1991). So while it may be that Wittgenstein arrived independently at the themes of his philosophy that most resemble Peirce’s – the reflections posthumously published as On Certainty – it is probable that he was exposed to Peircean ideas through Ramsey.
Yet even where Wittgenstein is at his most pragmatist, he is not entirely comfortable with the idea. In On Certainty (§422), he writes, “So I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism. Here I am being thwarted by a kind of Weltanschauung.” What Wittgenstein meant by that last sentence is disputable. How exactly did a “worldview” get in the way of his embracing pragmatism? We shall return to this question after we have explored in detail a number of points of contact between Wittgenstein’s thought and the pragmatist tradition.
Putnam (1995, p.52) observes that though the later Wittgenstein may not have been a pragmatist “in the strict sense,” he “shares a central – perhaps the central – emphasis with pragmatism: the emphasis on the primacy of practice.” Though Wittgenstein might have resisted the idea that he gave “primacy” to any concept, there is clearly a sense in which Putnam is right. A lesson of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is that to understand mind and meaning, we must see them in their relation to human activity, as aspects of our natural history. Accordingly, explanation of mind and meaning finds its terminus in an appeal to practice – to customs, traditions, and forms of life. Wittgenstein was fond of quoting Goethe’s Faust, “Im Anfang war die Tat” (“In the beginning was the deed”) (OC §402; CV p.36). It would be hard to find a pragmatist, classical or contemporary, who would not concur. Wittgenstein and the pragmatists are united in their rejection of the contemplative (or, in Dewey’s words “spectator”) model of mind familiar from the Cartesian tradition. We should think of ideas, concepts, beliefs, and theories, not on the model of pictorial representations of reality, but as tools or instruments we deploy in our engagement with the world.
The devil is, of course, in the details. In “How to Make our Ideas Clear” [1878], Peirce advances a principle he later called “the pragmatic maxim.” To attain clarity we must:
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
(Peirce, 1982–99, vol.3, p.266)
As Peirce explains, to have a conception of, say, wine is to have a view about the consequences for experience of something’s being wine, and to believe that a substance is wine is to have certain dispositions to act (or habits of action) in accord with these consequences. In this way our concepts are essentially related to practice. In short: “we must look to the upshot of our concepts in order rightly to apprehend them” (1931–58, vol.5, §3).
Thus, from its inception, the pragmatic maxim was advanced broadly in the spirit of positivism and verificationism. Peirce reformulated the maxim many times over the course of his life (for example, replacing the indicative mood with the subjunctive: a diamond that lies on the ocean floor, never to be scratched, is still hard, for “it is a real fact that it would resist pressure” (1931–58, vol.8, §208)). As James portrays the maxim:
[T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought‐distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.
(James, 1907, p.29)
And: “there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere” (p.30). If a belief has no consequences for practice, it is empty, useless for inquiry. In Peirce’s words, the pragmatic maxim thus determines “the admissibility of hypotheses to rank as hypotheses” (1963, ms.318, p.8). On such grounds, Peirce attacks the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation:
We can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon.
(Peirce, 1982–99, vol.3, p.266)
And James too looks to the maxim to resolve philosophical disputes, maintaining that “in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved” (1982–99, vol.1, p.52). The meaning of any philosophical proposition must ultimately reside in “some particular consequence, in our future practical experience, whether active or passive”; so where a philosophical controversy turns on matters of “no conceivable practical consequence to anybody at any time or place,” the issue “is only a specious and verbal difference, unworthy of further contention” (1982–99, vol.1, pp.259–60).
In all this, parallels with Wittgenstein are evident. As Glock (1996, p.382) has argued, even in the Tractatus, with its picture theory of propositions, Wittgenstein is committed to a verificationist criterion of meaninglessness (a proposition is meaningless if it cannot be verified or falsified), and he later (at least for a short period of time) embraced verificationism full‐blown in his interactions with the Vienna Circle. He then moved to the more relaxed view of meaning and use expressed in the Investigations where: “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’ – though not for all – this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PI §43; cf. BB 4). Wittgenstein famously illuminates the relation of meaning and use with the notion of “language‐games,” invoked (a) to model “ways of using signs,” real and fictional, that are simpler than everyday language, and (b) to refer to human language as a whole, “the human language‐game” (OC §554) embracing “language and the activities into which it is woven” (PI §7). By reflecting on language‐games we appreciate the myriad ways that words can have or lack meaning. Thus although Wittgenstein often argues in a way that accords with the pragmatist dictum that a real difference must make a difference (such as in the famous case of the “beetle in the box” (PI §293)), his insights about the diversity of language led him away from any one‐dimensional verificationism toward the view that “Asking whether and how a proposition can be verified is only a special form of the question ‘What do you mean?’” (PI §353; translation modified DB/CM), and he came to disavow the very idea of a theory of meaning based on verification or any other notion.
This last point is important, because for all the parallels between Peirce and Wittgenstein, there is little doubt that the former’s approach to meaning would have struck the later Wittgenstein as too theoretical. For example, in his account of signs (well known to Ogden and Richards), Peirce argues that meaning resides in the sign’s effects on interpreters. The highest kind of meaning, he thinks, lies in the effects of the acceptance of a proposition on the interpreter’s train of thought and action. This distinguishes Peirce’s pragmatism from crude forms of behaviorism, where meaning and mental states are reducible to overt behavior, but this would not redeem the position for Wittgenstein, who (perhaps with Ramsey in mind) explicitly denies we can equate meaning with the effects of utterances (see, e.g., PI §§493–8). To understand the meaning of an expression we must look to its use; but Wittgenstein insisted this is not to theorize meaning as use.
It is important, however, that Peirce did not think that a sign’s effects are all there is to its meaning, or that there is a single way to elucidate meaning. The pragmatic maxim captures only one way, albeit the most efficacious for inquiry (Misak, 1991, pp.12ff). Moreover, Peirce is not the kind of pragmatist (think of Quine or Rorty) who holds that normative notions such as a meaning or intentionality can be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, talk about practices or behavior. Indeed, Peirce’s enemy is the nominalist who refuses to admit law, intentions, and norms into his picture of reality. Expounding his (admittedly obscure) category of thirdness, Peirce asserts:
Brute action is secondness, any mentality involves thirdness. Analyze for instance the relation involved in ‘A gives B to C.’ Now what is giving? It does not consist [in] A’s putting B away from him and C’s subsequently taking B up. It is not necessary that any material transfer should take place. It consists in A’s making C the possessor according to Law. There must be some kind of law before there can be any kind of giving, – be it but the law of the strongest.
(Peirce, 1931–58, vol.8, §331)
Thus, Peirce would likely have concurred with the wholeheartedly “normativist” view of the relation of meaning and practice attributed to Wittgenstein by Glock (Glock, 2005; for similar readings see, e.g., Baker and Hacker, 1985/2014; McDowell, 1998, chs 11–14). On such a reading, the meaning of an expression is linked to the rules for its use. Such rules are exemplified by the practices that are constitutive of them, and understanding them cannot (on pain of a regress) be a matter of grasping an interpretation; it is rather acquiring a technique, entering a custom, learning a practice. But there is no suggestion that such techniques, customs, and practices can be characterized without reference to normative notions. This is at least one of the senses in which language‐games are autonomous according to Wittgenstein (PG §§68, 133, 184–5; Z §320). They may be embedded in “the stream of life,” in our nonlinguistic practices and our natural reactions and activities, but they cannot be reduced to such behaviors or explained in terms of ends and purposes that are external to them. All this Peirce could have accepted, save Wittgenstein’s conclusion that such insights put paid to systematic philosophical theorizing about meaning.
If the most obvious affinity between Wittgenstein and the pragmatists resides in their mutual emphasis on practice, the most explicit coincidence of views is found in the comparison of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and pragmatist conceptions of knowledge, especially Peirce’s. Peirce maintains that no attempt to revise human knowledge can start from scratch, aspiring, as Descartes did, to establish knowledge on an indubitable foundation of certain belief. Rather, we must start from where we find ourselves, already possessed of beliefs. Any inquirer has a body of settled belief, on which to act and against which to assess new evidence and hypotheses. It is doubt that leads us to inquire into the cogency of our beliefs, but we can evaluate some belief only if we hold others steady. Peirce maintains that only genuine, properly motivated doubts can stimulate inquiry. He gives no credence to what he calls “paper” or “tin” doubts of the kind marshaled by Descartes. The mere possibility of being mistaken does not engender a living doubt:
But in truth, there is but one state of mind from which you can ‘set out’, namely, the very state of mind in which you actually find yourself at the time you do ‘set out’ – a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would […]. Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business.
(Peirce, 1931–58, vol.5, p.416)
Our body of belief is an interconnected whole, any part of which is fallible, and which we revise as and when the force of experience throws particular beliefs into genuine doubt.
Wittgenstein seems entirely in step with this holistic account of knowledge. Many remarks in On Certainty describe knowledge as “an enormous system” in which alone any “particular bit” has “the value we give it” (§410). Like Peirce, Wittgenstein holds that the revision of belief makes sense only against a background that is not called into question (“A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt” (§450)) and that doubt must be properly motivated and purposeful (“A doubt without an end is not even a doubt” (§625)).
Both Wittgenstein and Peirce have interesting things to say about propositions that are “exempt from doubt.” Wittgenstein writes that,
341. […] the questions that we raise and our doubts depend upon the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.
342. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.
(OC §§341–2)
Wittgenstein describes these “propositions” (often referred to as “hinge” or “framework” propositions) as lying apart “from the route travelled by enquiry” (§88), “removed from the traffic” or “shunted onto an unused siding” (§210). They include “The earth has existed for many years past” (§411) and “This is my hand” (§§412–14), together with very particular claims, such as “I have never been in Asia Minor” (§419) and “I am in England” (§§420–1). Propositions of this kind are part of the scaffolding of our thoughts (§211) or our “frame of reference” (§83). There is no logical guarantee that any such proposition will not legitimately be called into question in future – even the “river bed” of thought can shift. But if knowledge is to be possible at all, a large number of such beliefs must simply stand fast.
Wittgenstein also admits a class of propositions he calls “grammatical propositions” or “norms of description.” Such propositions express the rules by which language‐games are to be played. They include definitions (verbal and ostensive); exemplifications; mathematical propositions; and such truths about color as “nothing can be red and green all over” (see Glock, 1996, p.152). The truth of such propositions is guaranteed not by their form but by their role in constituting language rules. Though Wittgenstein admits these roles can change and hence that the relation between grammatical and empirical propositions is fluid (OC §§309, 321), his philosophy distinguishes between (a) propositions that are necessarily true because their negation is rendered nonsensical by a grammatical rule and (b) those that we cannot give up without undermining our entire system of beliefs. Thus there is an – admittedly nonstandard – sense in which a distinction between conceptual and empirical truth is preserved in Wittgenstein’s thought.
Peirce would have no complaint about Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions, acknowledging them as part of the body of background belief that must be accepted if inquiry is to be possible. Peirce is skeptical about the idea of conceptual or analytic truth, like many of his successors in the pragmatist tradition, and nothing in his philosophy plays quite the role of Wittgenstein’s grammatical propositions. He does, however, admit certain “regulative assumptions” that provide the framework within which inquiry is possible and as such are placed beyond doubt. We have to accept, for instance, that on the whole our observations can be explained; that there are answers to the questions into which we are inquiring; and that there are real things independent of our beliefs that can be explored by empirical investigation. Though their acceptance may be a necessary condition of inquiry, such regulative assumptions have no logical guarantee. If inquiry demands that we accept the principle of bivalence, we do so by a “saltus” – an unjustified leap (Peirce, 1976, p.xiii). The necessity that compels the assumption is practical. “[H]owever destitute of evidentiary support it may be,” we adopt it:
For the same reason that a general who has to capture a position, or see his country ruined, must go on the hypothesis that there is some way in which he can and shall capture it.
(Peirce, 1931–58, vol.7, p.219)
Where such assumptions enable practices at the heart of our humanity – seeking answers to questions, for instance – they will be deeply entrenched. Nonetheless, they remain hypotheses or “hopes,” rather than transcendental truths or constitutive principles.
For all they share, Wittgenstein’s and Peirce’s respective treatments of knowledge betray an important difference of philosophical temperament. For Peirce, as for many pragmatists, the central notion in his account of knowledge is inquiry and the guiding picture is one of the knower constructing and sustaining a conception of the world, under the impetus of experience and in the course of his practical engagement with reality. His style of thinking is systematic and scientific, and he casts the knower in the role of the inquirer concerned to order and categorize, theorize and explain, in order to solve problems and thereby, so far as possible, to master and control. Wittgenstein, in contrast, does not embrace this rather monolithic view of inquiry. All pragmatists would agree with him on the following:
I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
(OC §94)
But where James, for example, casts the background as comprising “discoveries of our remote ancestors,” Wittgenstein does not portray it as emerging out of any kind of inquiry. For him, we inherit a world‐picture as we acquire language, and language “did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination” (§475). The language‐game “is not based on grounds […]. It is there – like our life” (§559).
Similarly, Wittgenstein writes:
But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.
(OC §343)
Hinge propositions are not assumptions in the sense that, though they are amenable to confirmation or proof, we are forced for reasons of expediency to accept them (like the General in Peirce’s example). Rather, such propositions stand beyond or (better) beneath proof (more like Peirce’s example of the principle of bivalence and other regulative assumptions). Not that the term assumption is entirely out of place. At §411, Wittgenstein writes:
If I say ‘we assume that the earth has existed for many years past’ (or something similar), then of course it sounds strange that we should assume such a thing. But in the entire system of our language‐games it belongs to the foundations. The assumption, one might say, forms the basis of action, and therefore, naturally, of thought.
(OC §411)
But if hinge propositions are assumptions, they are not assumptions we make on pragmatic grounds. (I do not assume that the earth existed before my birth in the way I might assume that my children are at school, or that my car will start.) Such beliefs, if so we may call them, are too deeply entrenched for that. Indeed, if there is awkwardness about our being said to “believe” or “know” hinge propositions, as Wittgenstein suggests, it is not because such propositions could only warrant cognitive attitudes less than belief and knowledge. It is not that, bereft of grounds, our only recourse is to adopt such propositions for practical purposes, as if our reason for thinking that objects exist is that we should never get anything done on the basis of a contrary hypothesis. When it comes to hinge propositions, we are beyond giving reasons for their acceptance, whether it be reasons supporting them directly or reasons deriving from the calamitous consequences of abandoning them. The same is true of grammatical propositions – if we ask “What is the reason why the King in chess may move only one square in any direction?,” we cannot expect anything but the answer “That’s how the game is played,” together perhaps with some historical facts about the evolution of chess. And this is also true of norms of reasoning: Wittgenstein rejects the view that we engage in inductive reasoning because it pays, arguing that principles of induction are not justified by the success of inductive reasoning; rather they define what it is to make rational predictions (see, e.g., OC §§128–31; PI §§466–85).
The thought that Wittgenstein and Peirce share is that what is exempt from doubt is so because otherwise we lose our bearings. But it is a question whether they characterize this loss differently or not. Does Peirce think that without such assumptions, we could not go on with inquiry? Or, does he maintain, with Wittgenstein, that without them the fabric of our language‐games, of our very form of life, would begin to unravel?
Peirce thought it a small step from his conception of inquiry to a compelling view of truth. Like James, Peirce links the truth of a hypothesis to the consequences of believing it. But he takes a different view of what the relevant consequences are. As J.B. Pratt (1909, pp.186–7) put it:
[A] distinction must be made; namely between the ‘good’, harmonious, and logically confirmatory consequences of religious concepts as such, and the good and pleasant consequences which come from believing these concepts. It is one thing to say a belief is true because the logical consequences that flow from it fit in harmoniously with our otherwise grounded knowledge; and quite another to call it true because it is pleasant to believe.
James takes the latter view; Peirce the former. (Indeed, Peirce mocked James’s view: “Oh, I could not believe so‐and‐so, because I should be wretched if I did” (1931–58, vol.5, §377).) Peirce takes the truth of a hypothesis to rest on its empirical confirmation, its fit with our otherwise well‐established knowledge, and so on. The relevant consequence, then, resides in the durability of the beliefs in question. They are true insofar as they will stand up to anything inquiry can throw at them, now and in the future. True belief is “indefeasible” belief. This leads Peirce to his less‐than‐ideal formulation: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real” (1982–99, vol.3, p.273).
When Wittgenstein distances himself from the pragmatist view of truth, he has James in mind. What, then, would he say about Peirce’s account? In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein abandoned the broadly correspondence account of truth he had assumed in his early work and, like Ramsey, embraced a deflationary account of truth with pragmatist overtones, observing that the proposition “‘p’ is true” is equivalent to “p” (see PI §136). This approach might be thought too austere to be aligned with Peirce’s. Yet both Peirce and Wittgenstein are concerned to link truth to assertion. Moreover, the Peircean could be seen as correcting Wittgenstein in this respect: to assert that p is true is not just to assert that p, but to warrant that p is and will remain assertible come what may. It might be countered that Peirce links truth to agreement in a problematic way and that at Investigations §241 Wittgenstein takes pains to distance himself from such a position:
“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?” – What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.
But it is by no means obvious that Peirce is cornered into a form of linguistic idealism: the idea that true beliefs are those on which there is agreement at the end of inquiry is internally related to the thought that the agreement is warranted by how things are. It is not the idea that truth depends on what some finite collection of finite beings happen to agree is the case at some finite time (see Misak, 1991, ch.1; note that even James in “The Will to Believe” writes that “throughout the breadth of physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us” (1896, p.26)). Thus though there are differences of substance and style between Peirce and Wittgenstein, they may be less dramatic than might first appear.
James is well known (and was so during Wittgenstein’s time) for a strong claim he made in “The Will to Believe.” He argues there that it is sometimes reasonable to believe a hypothesis before one has conclusive evidence in its favor. If a hypothesis is underdetermined by the data, it can nevertheless be reasonable to accept it if there is something to gain by so doing. This is true, he argues, especially of religious beliefs. In this, James rejects William Clifford’s evidentialism – the view that it is only rational to believe that p in proportion to the evidence for p. For Clifford, where evidence underdetermines the matter, one must suspend judgment: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” (1879, p.186). James responds that in religious matters, agnosticism is also a decision, and one based as much on an act of will as the theist’s commitment. Where religious hypotheses are live options for us, the issues they raise are so “momentous” that we are “forced” to take a side: the agnostic, it might be said, is therefore in bad faith.
For James, then, religious beliefs may be adopted for the role they play in our lives and it is from that role that religious terms derive their significance. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James explores in careful detail the significance of religious ideas in personal life (he is not concerned with issues theological or ecclesiastical). In his postscript to that work, James takes a bolder position than in “The Will to Believe,” confessing his willingness to entertain a form of supernaturalism. With regard to the evidence for God’s existence, James cites “the phenomenon of ‘prayerful communion’” in which it appears that “something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways,” and attests that he is so “impressed by the importance of these phenomena” that he adopts “the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest” (1902, pp.411–12).
As we have noted, Wittgenstein greatly admired James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein regards religion, together with ethics, aesthetics, and all matters of value, as entirely transcendental: “The sense of the world,” he writes, “must lie outside the world” (TLP 6.41) and hence religious belief does not pertain to the facts of the world, but is more like a way of seeing those facts under a certain aspect, so that “the world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy” (6.43). But he later modified this view, stressing that the meaning of religious expressions, and the significance of religious practices, resides in their role in our lives. Contrary to appearances, religious statements are not descriptions of reality, natural or supernatural; religious terms do not refer to entities; religious explanations of events are not causal; and religious stories are not historical narratives. Religious beliefs are “pictures” that we can make use of in our lives and “practice gives the words their sense” (CV p.97). Thus to embrace religious belief is “(something like) passionately committing oneself to a system of coordinates. Hence although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of judging life” (CV p.73).
All of this shows James’s influence. There is nonetheless an important difference between them. While James sometimes sounds much like Wittgenstein in arguing that religious experience lies beyond the realm of evidence, he more often than not takes religion to be a part of inquiry. Contrast the following quotation from Wittgenstein:
Life can educate you to ‘believing in God’. And experiences too are what do this but not visions, or other sense experiences, which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g. sufferings of various sorts. And they do not show us God as sense experience does an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, – life can force this concept on us.
(CV p.97)
Although there is much here with which James would have agreed, the crucial difference is that Wittgenstein does not think of God’s existence as a hypothesis. Hence it is wrongheaded to ask, as James does, into the merits of the evidence that supports it and to consider grounds on which it is reasonable to adopt it. Accepting God’s existence is a matter of “shaping” one’s life a certain way (CV p.97), but the decision to do so is not based on reasons, practical or evidential. James’s position is too epistemological for Wittgenstein’s tastes.
In this sense Wittgenstein’s position is more radical than James’s. It is also less obviously coherent. For how can a believer understand the true character of her own religious beliefs, if that requires acknowledging that such beliefs do not assert what they purport to? If the picture of God’s grace is to uplift me, I cannot believe that it is merely a picture; that there is in fact nothing for my redemption to consist in, except perhaps for my engendering a mood by the use of a metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Of course, advocates of Wittgensteinian fideism might complain that such questions only reveal a missing of the point and a hollowness of spirit. But here James seems on a surer footing, even if his case for the reasonableness of religious belief is some way short of compelling.
James’s most significant influence over Wittgenstein lies in the philosophy of psychology. Wittgenstein was fascinated by James’s masterpiece The Principles of Psychology, especially the chapter “The Stream of Thought,” and in his later writing on mind and meaning he engages repeatedly with James’s ideas.
James’s method in psychology is empiricist and introspectionist, and he is a master of the description of mental life. Even when those descriptions are misleading, as Wittgenstein often thought they were, they reveal something interesting about the way we understand ourselves. But, as we observed above, Wittgenstein did not turn to James only as a source of illuminating error. He agreed, for instance, with James’s perceptive rejection of the idea that all action is initiated by an act of volition, and in making this point Wittgenstein deployed an example taken straight from James: that of simply finding oneself getting out of bed (BB 151; 1890, pp.1132–3). In general, however, James’s empiricism inclines him to believe there are subjective psychological events accompanying all manifestations of mind and meaning, and it is the various expressions of this inclination (including James’s ideo‐motor theory of action), that Wittgenstein subjects to criticism in the Investigations and other writings on psychology. For example, Wittgenstein thinks James guilty of confusing meanings with experiences and feelings. In the “Blue Book” (pp.78–9), Wittgenstein criticizes James’s view that the meaning of such terms as “and,” “if,” “or” is bound up with feelings associated with them. But even though Wittgenstein concludes that “[t]he meaning of a word is not the experience one has in hearing or uttering it, and the sense of a sentence is not a complex of these experiences” (PPF §37), he does not pour scorn on James’s interest in the phenomenology of meaning and understanding. In the Investigations, he discusses mental imagery associated with the names of the days of the week and how such imagery can contribute to the “secondary meaning” of expressions (PPF §§275–8); James’s view (1890, p.726) that words have a soul as well as a body (evinced by the fact that in some contexts words cannot be replaced without violence to what is said, just as one musical phrase cannot just be substituted for another (PI §§530–1; cf. p.215)); and the feeling of words being on the tip of one’s tongue (PPF §§298–300). In all this, Wittgenstein takes James tremendously seriously. There is such a thing as the “field of a word” (§297), but, as Goodman observes (2002, p.145), the context needed to elucidate it is not experience, but grammar and culture, practices and forms of life. For James, in contrast, everything returns to experience, to how “every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it” (1890, p.246). James’s views on intention, emotion, the self, and personal identity all inform Wittgenstein’s treatment of these and cognate issues, and though Wittgenstein is consistently preoccupied with how little such concepts are illuminated by appeal to experiences that supposedly accompany their deployment or constitute their objects, he always “proceeds with the assistance, and not just on the wreckage of the theories of William James,” as Goodman nicely puts it (2002, p.120). He admired the depth and sensitivity of James’s powers of description and the humanity of his vision. In all this, of course, it is James’s distinctive style of empiricism that engages Wittgenstein’s imagination. Indeed, had Wittgenstein not, with Russell and Moore, taken pragmatism to amount to Jamesian views of truth, he might have concluded that the principal problem with James’s psychology is that it does not go far enough down the pragmatist path. Though James is attentive, especially in his account of the emotions, to the bodily manifestations of mind, his preoccupation with experience means that he fails to do precisely what an all‐out pragmatist must; namely, to understand mind and meaning in the context of the “stream of life” (LW I §913; PR 81) rather than the stream of thought.
Let us return to On Certainty §422 and consider what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote: “So I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism. Here I am being thwarted by a kind of Weltanschauung.” One possible explanation is that Wittgenstein rejects pragmatism because it is itself a Weltanschauung, a substantive philosophical theory (an “ism”). To embrace it would thus be at odds with his therapeutic approach to philosophy, on which the philosopher advances no theses (PI §128) but marshals “recollections for a particular purpose” (§127); namely, to attain a “surveyable representation,” “an overview of the use of our words” (§122). In this way, we “struggle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by the resources of our language” (§109), so that we should be able “to break off philosophizing” when we want to (§133). For Wittgenstein, both early and later, philosophy is not doctrine but method (TLP 4.112, 6.53; M 113–14; BT 406–35; PI §§118–33).
If this was behind Wittgenstein’s rejection of pragmatism it is too bad that he did not know Peirce better. For Peirce himself advanced the view that pragmatism should be seen exclusively as a method for the clarification of concepts and writes, almost as if in answer to Wittgenstein: “It will be seen that pragmatism is not a Weltanschauung but is a method of reflexion having for its purpose to render ideas clear” (from Peirce’s personal interleaved copy of the Century Dictionary, 1931–58, vol.5, p.13, n.1). And, as we have already noted, James also asserts that pragmatism “is method only.” Peirce expresses his view as a matter of getting clear about our ideas rather than the meaning of words, but he is sufficiently attentive to questions of meaning that this emphasis does not strike a significant discord with Wittgenstein. One bone of contention is that Peirce, at least, did not think philosophy could or should wither away. Another is whether we may speak of a single method (which Wittgenstein denies: “There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were” (PI §133d)).
It is not obvious, however, that the suggested interpretation is correct. Wittgenstein did not identify a Weltanschauung with a substantive doctrine. Indeed, he was not averse to using the term to describe his own stance. In the so‐called Big Typescript, he writes:
The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It designates our form of representation, the way we look at things. (A kind of “Weltanschauung”, as is apparently typical of our time. Spengler.)
(BT 417)
In the Investigations (§122), the parenthetical remark transforms into “(Is this a “Weltanschauung”?)” but this does not suggest Wittgenstein is unfriendly to the notion. Of course even if Wittgenstein meant, not that he was uncomfortable by pragmatism’s being a Weltanschauung, but that his own Weltanschauung was an obstacle to accepting it, his reason may yet have been that he wanted nothing to do with an “ism.”
We feel, however, that there is more to Wittgenstein’s reticence than this. It may issue from his perception that pragmatism is too scientific in style, too epistemological in orientation. In the passages leading up to OC §422, Wittgenstein discusses empirical propositions that are the “foundation of all my action” (§414). The reference to action suggests “something like” pragmatism, but, as we argued above, Wittgenstein does not see such background beliefs as adopted or accepted out of a kind of practical necessity as preconditions of inquiry. For Wittgenstein, there is no reason, rational or pragmatic, why we embrace such propositions (§359). Their certainty lies “beyond being justified or unjustified”; it is “something animal.” (Here, though, the resonances with Santayana’s version of pragmatism as “animal faith” are striking.) They are accepted, not as preconditions of inquiry, but because: “My life consists in my being content to accept many things” (§344), including the character of that life itself: “What has to be accepted, the given, is – one might say – forms of life” (PPF §345). One might say that, while for the pragmatists the fundamental concept is inquiry, for Wittgenstein it is life. This marks a crucial difference of perspective, awareness of which may have underlain OC §422.
There are other, related, differences of intellectual temperament that deserve note. Much as Wittgenstein found uplifting James’s exploration of “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude” (1902, p.34), it is hard to believe he had sympathy with the optimism and meliorism pervading James’s pragmatism. James writes that,
if you follow the pragmatist method, you cannot look on any such word [God, Matter, Reason, the Absolute, Energy] as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash‐value […]. Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.
(James, 1907, pp.31–2)
And that cash‐value, James thinks, ought to be positive:
Design, free‐will, the absolute mind, spirit instead of matter, have for their sole meaning a better promise as to this world’s outcome. Be they false or be they true the meaning of them is this meliorism. (p.63)
Dewey, of course, takes this melioristic strain of pragmatism even further. This is all very unlike Wittgenstein, whose outlook “was typically one of gloom” (von Wright, 1967, p.27). He would have deplored the idea of philosophy as a social project devoted to the betterment of humanity, and double‐deplored the idea that this required an alliance between philosophy and natural science (see Goodman, 2002, p.166). Wittgenstein never departed from the Tractarian view that “the word ‘philosophy’ must mean something that stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences” (TLP 4.111), and he was adamant that philosophy, done properly, “just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything” (PI §126). While philosophical illumination may result in the betterment of the individual, the proper end of philosophy is not social improvement. Even when it comes to language, philosophy “leaves everything as it is” (PI §124). Such differences of philosophical temper may also lie behind OC §422.
It is one thing, however, to understand the differences between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the spirit of pragmatism, another to take a view about how significant those differences are, whether, in view of all the affinities, they might be surmounted, and if so, where the path to reconciliation may lie. Those are issues over which reasonable people, including the authors of this chapter, may fail to see eye‐to‐eye.