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SANFORD I . BERMAN-
WITTGENSTEIN AND
GENERAL SEMANTICS
0 OTHER PHILOSOPHER has exerted a greater influence on twentiethcentury
Anglo-American thought than Ludwig Wittgenstein . Alfred
N
Korzybski had only a few references to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus in his Science and Sanity . And yet, there is a much greater
relationship between the thinking of Wittgenstein and Korzybski than these
references might suggest. I am sure that Korzybski would have considered some
of the Tractatus as ambiguous or meaningless, as many of the analytic
philosophers have done . But an analysis of Wittgenstein's philosophy should
be of interest to the general semanticist .
Wittgenstein said that all philosophy is "Critique of language" (4 .0031) and
that philosophy is not one of the natural sciences . The object of philosophy
is the logical clarification of thoughts . It is not a body of knowledge or a theory
about the world based upon empirical investigation. Moreover, it is not a special
knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality obtained a priori or by some extraempirical
revelation . It is a language-clarifying activity . In other words, says
Wittgenstein, philosophy is a pursuit of meaning and sense, and not of truth .
The task of a philosopher is to see that all discourse complies with the
following two conditions : (a) that it contain only the terms which have unique
and unambiguous meaning being assigned either by explicit definitions or by
pointing ; and (b) that its propositions be constructed according to the rules
of our language, so as to make determinate sense. It is the duty of a philosopher
to see that these conditions are complied with in all actual uses of
language, in everyday life, and in science, science being but an extension of
everyday life to more difficult and general cases .
The unchanging purpose of all philosophizing is to make our language clear
and unambiguous; to reject as meaningless all the statements for which we can
*Sanford I . Berman, Ph .D., is Vice President of the International Society for General
Semantics . An educator, President of Educational Cassettes, Inc ., and author of a number
of books on general semantics, he lives in La Jolla, California .
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WITTGENSTEIN AND GENERAL SEMANTICS 23
find no determinate meaning, and to make as clear and precise as we can those
statements which are vague and ambiguous .
The practice of Socrates was essentially in agreement with the philosophy
of Wittgenstein . Socrates' method was not to give any information, but to make
clear what was meant by asking certain questions concerning human nature
and conduct . This method consisted of attempts to make clear the sense of
the propositions under consideration .
For Wittgenstein, the pursuit of truth is the business of the activities of
everyday life and of its refined extension, science . But before we can proceed
to ascertain the truth or falsehood of a proposition, whether in science or in
everyday life, we must understand what the proposition says : "in order to be
able to say `p' is true (or false) I must have determined under what conditions
I call `p' true, and thereby I determine the sense of the proposition" (4 .063)
It is the proper and the only business of philosophy to see to it that we
understand the terms and propositions we use . Sometimes it happens that we
proceed to try to verify a proposition without realizing that we are not clear
as to what it says . Wittgenstein pointed out that such things have happened
even in scientific investigations, for example, in dealing with "space" and "time"
Thus Einstein was engaged in philosophic activity when he offered a precise
meaning to the term "simultaneity." In such a formal and nonfactual subject
as mathematics much depends on clarifying lingustic confusions .
Wittgenstein said that whenever and wherever we face any problem, one of
two things is possible : either (a) we understand the problem, or (b) we do not
understand it . In the first situation there is no need of any philosophy, and
the problem is to be solved by scientific methods . In the second situation we
have to investigate the statement of the problem, and in doing this we can arrive
at either of two results : (1) The problem after clarification becomes a genuine
or real problem, which can be referred for further investigation to science ;
or (2) it becomes no problem at all but a misunderstanding of our language
that makes no sense to us .
Wittgenstein pointed out that philosophers, even Bertrand Russell, have not
always seen clearly the distinction between the pursuit of meaning and sense
on the one hand, and the pursuit of truth about the world on the other,
and the confusion of the two has resulted in a great deal of nonsensical
disputation and literature .
He believed that this confusion very probably had its roots in the historical
fact that in ancient times philosophy was almost identical with the science of
the times . Ancient science was in an embryonic stage, its concepts vague and
ambiguous, and therefore the activity of scientists was almost subsidiary to the
clarification of the meanings of these concepts, that is, to the philosophical
activity. It was natural that philosophy became the "first" or fundamental
science of the essential nature of things . It was easy to believe that, in addition
to the special empirical truths of sciences and of everyday life, there are
general or universal and more essential truths about the world inaccessable

24 Et cetera • SPRING 1988
to science; and these ultimate truths can be attained by special philosophical,
as contrasted to scientific methods of (a) philosophical intuition, or (b) "dialectical"
or logical demonstration . For Wittgenstein, this original confusion had
persisted throughout the whole history of philosophy .
Wittgenstein felt that in addition to the task of clarifying the language of
contemporary science and everyday life, contemporary philosophy has also what
is essentially a negative task of analyzing the works of the great traditional
philosophers, of sifting out scientific propositions found there from the properly
philosophical work of clarification of language, and weeding out the meaningless
terms and nonsensical propositions . He said that we must not dogmatically
condemn as senseless all the work of the men who have been called
philosophers. If a man pursues truth in the scientific way of observation of
the world, then his work gives us real and important information about the
world, even if the author has intermingled it with nonsensical speculations .
The works of great philosophers contain a great deal of the valuable philosophical
work of clarification of language . But, according to Wittgenstein, outside
the properly philosophical activity of clarifying language, and the scientific
activity of pursuing truth, there is no additional and special province for the
philosophical pursuit of truth of a kind different from the truth accessible to
science, and therefore we must reject as nonsense all the special "philosophical
problems" of traditional philosophy .
Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical
matters, are not false, but senseless . We cannot, therefore, answer questions
of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness . Most questions and
propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand
the logic of our language . . . And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest
problems are really no problems (4 .003) .
Immanuel Kant held that there can be no solution to metaphysical problems,
that is, problems concerned with the "ultimate nature of things ;'
because the things-in-themselves are not accessible to the methods of science .
Wittgenstein, as we see, goes farther, declaring that all the problems which
are in principle not solvable by the methods of science are simply nonsensical
and due to the misuse of language. An attempt to say something metaphysical,
something that neither science nor common sense can say, is according
to Wittgenstein, "but a solemn humbug made rather imposing in the history
of philosophy by the special jargon of technical terminology"
He says that the history of philosophy seems to show a widely spread human
tendency to certain kinds of linguistic confusion, due perhaps to some vague
but nevertheless deeply seated intellectual aberrations with which the reflective
portion of mankind seems to be afflicted . The history of philosophy is
largely the history of the intellectual pathology of reflective people who try
to get out of their intellectual skins by means of some verbal contortions ; it
is the history of widely spread misuse of language .
Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not a doctrine about the world, but an activity

WITTGENSTEIN AND GENERAL SEMANTICS 25
of clarifying our language; and instead of answering questions it aims, as
Ramsey puts it, at curing headaches . We are impelled to philosophize by the
feeling of intellectual discomfort which we experience whenever our language
is not clear and unambiguous, and the philosophical task terminates as soon
as the linguistic confusion we meet with is eliminated .
Wittgenstein says of his Tractatus, "My propositions are elucidatory in this
way : he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he
has climbed out through them, on them, over them . (He must so to speak throw
away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it) . He must surmount these propositions;
then he sees the world rightly ." (6 .54)
While pointing out the tautological limitation of knowledge to the knowable,
the Tractatus also points out some general semantic principles : the
knowable does not exhaust reality, and there are things in life which cannot
be discussed . As Wittgenstein says, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent" (7)
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Ambiguity
Vj .H.S