Wittgenstein, Hypothesis and Use: The Analyses of Time and the Pragmatics of Language, in the Early Thirties

Abstract

The aim of this article is to approach, from the point of view of Wittgenstein’s analyses of time, an important shift that leads him, in his later philosophy, to connect meaning and use (stressing the importance of the pragmatical aspect of the language). Wittgenstein will give up, in the early thirties, the relation between phenomenology and grammar (supported from 1929 to 1930). The first moment of this shift is the acknowledgement of the impossibility of a language that restricts itself to the temporality of the phenomena (language must unwind in physical/hypothetical time). However, Wittgenstein will still support a distinction between genuine propositions (that describe the immediately given data) and the hypothetical/physicalist propositions (that deal with physical objects). It is only around 1931 that the concept of use comes to the foreground, with the abandonment of the grammatical, semantical and ontological primacy of the phenomenological present (putting an end to the idea of genuine propositions). This is a point of departure that brings Wittgenstein closer to pragmatism. Even though Wittgenstein will regard onwards grammatical rules as arbitrary (not determined by the phenomena), there is a pragmatical aspect that restricts the arbitrariness. Propositions will only be grammatical propositions in the contexts in which it is practical and useful to use these propositions as rules. In other words, each context will determine, according to what it regards as useful, which propositions have its truth-value fixated throughout time (functioning as rules) and which can change the truth-value (as empirical propositions).