Augustine and Wittgenstein

Augustine and Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations with a quotation from Saint Augustine (in Latin). He then comments: “These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands”. In other words, Augustine’s statement implies or presupposes that the theory of language proposed in the Tractatus is correct. This seems to me a tremendous overreach and not at all what Augustine had in mind; it is a flimsy interpretation at best. Augustine says, “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out… Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.” Wittgenstein comments: “Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of words. If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like “table”, “chair”, “bread”, and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of words as something that will take care of itself”.

What are we to make of this? It seems wrong in every way. First, notice that Wittgenstein himself speaks of names of actions and properties, so he is not denying that it is proper to speak this way—that verbs and adjectives are names. He accepts that nouns, verbs, and adjectives are all names! Not names of objects, presumably, whatever objects are, but still names of something—actions and properties. This is what such names denote—events and attributes, to vary the terminology. So, was Augustine’s error to suppose that all names are names of objects? But surely Augustine was assuming no such thing; he was just considering names of concrete objects. He would have accepted instantly that not all words name or denote objects—some words name or denote entities of other kinds. He is simply describing how he learned the meanings of names of objects, not words generally. Wittgenstein is foisting onto him a manifestly false doctrine—the one he invented and defended in the Tractatus. Augustine knew perfectly well that language contains other kinds of word, as we all do. He didn’t even suppose that names of objects are primary in language; he simply didn’t talk about other words. Maybe they are primary, maybe not; in any case, he was not somehow ignorant of other words. Did he think that the rest of language would “take care of itself”? I see no evidence of that; he was restricting himself to the learning of names of objects and what he recollected of that. And did Wittgenstein himself regard other words as names, as verbs and adjective are said to be? Not names of objects, to be sure, but names of (say) functions or relations or concepts. He also runs together several different semantic notions: having a meaning, meanings as correlated with words, meanings as the objects for which words stand. The first of these sounds like a truism, the second perfectly arguable, the third clearly false. Augustine never asserts or presupposes the last, but he would no doubt subscribe to the first.

But are all words names? What is a name? The OED gives “a word or set of words by which someone or something is known, addressed, or referred to”. By this definition it is not too outlandish to describe all words as names: the word by which conjunction is known or referred to in Italian is “e”—that is the word forconjunction. It is the verbal sign or symbol that Italians use to refer to conjunction, i.e., to express or denote or signify conjunction. Similarly for verbs and adjectives. Not much is packed into the word “name”. It is like “denote”: “be a sign of; indicate—stand as a name or symbol for” (OED). No grotesque error is contained in these ordinary words; they are just vernacular expressions. Using them doesn’t commit us to regarding every word as standing for an object, though it stands for something—a person, an animal, a chemical substance, a number, a theory, an action, a truth function, etc. No heavy-duty ontology is thereby introduced. We are not led astray by these familiar locutions into crazy metaphysical views. Augustine didn’t somehow think that everything we talk about is just like a boulder or a dog or a city—any more than Wittgenstein thought that actions are like body parts when he spoke of them as names. We are not all proto-Tractarians as children and adults. Wittgenstein is using Augustine as an exemplar of a mistaken way of thinking about language that we are all prone to, and which he will go on to combat. But he is quite wrong about the import of Augustine’s words and about what we normally pre-theoretically believe. So, the book gets off on the wrong foot from the very beginning, and is argumentatively shoddy.