Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Wittgenstein, Language and Chess
Eduardo Bermúdez Barrera, University of Atlántico, Colombia
Wittgenstein’s works on the field of philosophy of language
are usually seen as being inspired by the years he spent in
Cambridge, England. However, Janik and Toulmin (1974)
do debate this interpretation and look instead to the
Central European tradition, especially the Viennese
cultural and historical context of the late 19 th and early 20 th
century. One of the strongest influences is that of Fritz
Mauthner: “Language is just a convention just like a rule of
a game… Its task isn’t to alter the real world, anyway.” For
both Wittgenstein and Mauthner, language is an activity
that puts order in human life in the same way a rule does
in a game.
My intention is not to show that the Viennese
philosophical tradition influenced Wittgenstein, but rather
to show that great chess theoreticians and their points of
views had an influence on him. I refer here to authors such
as Reti and others that published classic works on chess in
Vienna.
The use of the chess analogy by Wittgenstein is not
a mere rhetoric figure, but rather an integral part of his
logical thought. Wittgenstein’s interest for chess is, no
doubt, related to the environment in which he grew up as a
child and as a young man. It is known that from the mid-
19 th century to the first three decades of 20th century
Vienna was the epicenter of chess activity in Europe.
Some international tournaments took place here in 1873,
1882, 1898, 1914, 1922. One of the oldest clubs in
Europe, the Wiener Schachklub, was also founded there in
1857 and the Wiener Schachzeitung began being
published as early as 1855. By 1914 Marco, its editor,
turned it into the world’s best publication dedicated to
chess by that time. Austrian chess was considered to be at
its peak during the Habsburg monarchy, especially
between 1873 and 1914. Top players also settled in
Vienna.
At first sight this information could be taken to be
excessively centered on the field of chess, if it were not for
that it is precisely within this context that the youngest of
the Witgensteins was born in 1889 and grew up at
Alleegasse 16. His house was one of Vienna’s musical
centers. Musicians frequently visited the home on the
musical evenings organized by the hosts. Ludwig also
used the analogy with music to express his conception of
language. And it is most probable that, at a young age
coinciding with the most prominent epoch of Viennese
chess, he learned there the rules of chess game – rules
that he would later use as a fundamental and
indispensable analogy to show his philosophical
conceptions of language.
The language-chess analogy has been used by
many philosophers and scientists before and after
Wittgenstein. We could mention Thomas Huxley
(Salzmann, 1949) amongst them. In the late 19 th century
he asserted metaphorically: “the chessboard is the world,
the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of
the game are what we call the laws of nature.” More
recently, a video has been released in which Richard
Feynmann uses the analogy to explain the laws of physics.
But perhaps the most important direct antecedent
with respect to language-chess relationship is Ferdinand
de Saussure. He relates the way in which language
operates like a chess game. The chess analogy in the
theories of de Saussure is considered to be a frontal attack
to the linguists of his time, who thought that language was
to be explained on the basis of analyzing etymologies and
that language analysis was nothing different from
describing the evolution of etymologies. He sustained that
the speaker very seldom knows the language he is using
very well, what he is interested in is the way he makes use
of it. This is also the case of chess: many players do not
even need to know neither the particular history of chess
ideas, nor the particular history of a game in order to be
able to find a move at a given position. It suffices to have
enough practice at playing to select the appropriate move.
Likewise, a speaker does not need to know the history of
the word he is about to speak within a given context. This
rendered as absurd the pretensions of the partisans of the
history of language and etymologies, who pretended to
reconstruct a chess game from the initial starting point of
each piece.
Let me illustrate the above mentioned with an
example:
In this position, a skilled player will recognize that
the immediate winning move is to place the black queen in
g3. He doesn’t need to know that the game was played by
Levitsky and Marshall, nor that the first move was 1.d4, nor
that the game was derived by transposition into a French
defense. It is irrelevant that German fans threw gold coins
to Marshall as a sign of admiration and so on. The skilled
player doesn’t need to know any of those things to find the
quickest winning move in this position. Again, the same is
valid for language: a speaker doesn’t need to know the
etymology of a word to use it appropriately.
Now we turn to Wittgenstein (1974). In the period
known as the intermediate one we find an endless number
of references to the analogies words-chess pieces and
language-chess rules. Here is a sample of the above
mentioned:
“Does not comprehension only start with the proposition,
with a whole proposition? Can half of a proposition be
comprehended? –Half a proposition is not a complete
proposition. But we might understand what this question
means as follows.Let’s assume that the movement of
the knight is always made by means of two movements
of the piece, one straight and one perpendicular. We
could thus say that ‘in the chess game the half of the
movement of the knight does not exist’, meaning that the
relationship between the half of the movement of the
knight| and a whole movement is not the same as that
existing between the half of a muffin and a whole muffin.
We mean that it is not a difference of degrees.”
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