What is the ”everyday” of the everyday language Wittgenstein talks about in the Philosophical Investigations? Actually, there are several contrasts between the everyday and the non-everyday that seem to be of relevance in connection with Wittgenstein’s thought.
In
most cases in the Philosophical
Investigations where the English has ”everyday” it’s a translation of “alltäglich” (§ 106 “alltägliches Denken”, § 116
“alltägliche Verwendung”, § 134 “alltägliche
Sprache”, § 412 “alltäglicher Sinn”).
In § 81 Wittgenstein uses the word “Umgangssprache”
[literally “the language of social intercourse”]. The contrast in most of these cases is with a metaphysical use (§
116) or with an ideal language (e.g. §§ 81, 106, 134); as we might put it, with
a language imagined by philosophers, a language in which things are expressed,
as it were, in a mode true to their real essence; this could also be something
like Frege’s concept script which, although it may not be intended for actual
use, is supposed to express thoughts in a logically transparent way. This idea
exerted a powerful attraction on philosophers of the day, but Wittgenstein at
this stage considered its attraction to be insidious: the idea that such an imagined
language might somehow deepen our understanding of our concepts was illusory. To
get clear about them we should attend to their actual uses.
*
§ 18 hints
at a different contrast:
Our language can be
regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and
new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this
surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and
uniform houses.
Here the contrast is between
different areas of our actual language. The suburbs, it would appear, are
mainly symbolic of the technical terminologies used in science and in various
professions, words like “ionized”, or “erythrocyte”, or “conditioned reflex”, or
“Alzheimer’s disease”, or “eminent domain”. These are well-regulated
terminologies, often created by means of stipulative definitions, and hence
their use is mostly easy to survey, in distinction to that of the central parts
of the city with its mixture of old and new buildings, and a street pattern
that has developed more organically. It is because the organic, “vernacular”
parts of language (we might call it the language of everyman, and every woman) are
difficult to survey that they tend to give rise to philosophical problems. The
suburbs hold less of philosophical interest. They are a kind of artifical
language. (Though sometimes seemingly clean and straightforward technical terms
carry a subconscious burden inherited from the areas of language out of which
they have been created. Or they may take on a life of their own, perhaps
returning to the contexts of everyday conversation.)
Many, though not all, of the words belonging to
what might be called the ageless core of our language are philosophically
problematic because they have a variety of different but related uses, and thus
tend to recur in a large variety of contexts: I am thinking of words such as “see”,
“know”, “think”, “will”, “feel”, “mean”, “time”, “because”, “just”. (In some
passage that I have been unable to retrieve, Strawson, I believe, refers to
this vocabulary as words without a history. In some sense, we might say, they have
always been there. Indeed, what would it be to imagine language without them?)
Wittgenstein makes a related point, in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology,
Volume II:
§
216 ... our concept “thinking” is widely ramified. Like a ramified traffic
network which connects many out-of-the-way places with each other.
§
218 Couldn’t the same be said of “believing”, “doing”, “being glad”?
Between the “ageless” and the
artificial lie words with a history, words such as “religion”, or “citizen”, or
“intelligence”, or “literature”. They too give rise to philosophical
bewilderment, but maybe not as deep or intractable as the other kind. (This
trichotomy is not intended to be exhaustive, simply to point to some
characteristic differences between types of words.)
*
A third contrast is that
between thinking about a word or sentence in isolation and thinking about its
role in human interaction; holiday vs. workday. This of course is the theme of
two oft-quoted remarks in the Philosophical
Investigations:
§ 38: Naming seems to be a strange connection of a word with an
object. – And such a strange connection really obtains, particularly when a
philosopher tries to fathom the relation between name and what is named
by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word
“this” innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes
on holiday. And then we may indeed imagine naming to be some
remarkable mental act , as it were the baptism of an object.
§
132: ... a reform for particular practical purposes, an improvement in our
terminology designed to prevent misunderstandings in practice, may well be
possible. But these are not the cases we are dealing with. The confusions which
occupy us arise when language is, as it were, idling, not when it is doing
work.
Here the idea is that our bewilderment
is dissolved when we attend to the actual functioning of our expressions. Not because
doing so provides answers to our questions, but because it reminds us that in the
context of actual conversation, the problems that beset us do not arise. The need
to attend to actual functioning, of course, does not simply concern the language
of social intercourse, but the languages of the sciences, law, theology, etc as
well. The everyday of the language, not just the language of everyday.
