HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
PUTNAM, WITTGENSTEIN AND
VERIFICATION
Cora Diamond and Steven Gerrard
I—Cora Diamond
ABSTRACT Hilary Putnam has argued against philosophical theories which tie
the content of truth-claims closely to the available methods of investigation and
verification. Such theories, he argues, threaten our idea of human communication, which we take to be possible between people of different cultures and
across periods of time during which methods of investigation change dramatically. Putnam rejects any reading of Wittgenstein which takes him to make a
close tie between meaning and method of verification. What strands in Wittgenstein’s thought appear to lend support to such a reading? Can we do justice to
the role which method of verification does have for Wittgenstein while retaining
our hold on the idea that communication between people is possible despite
substantial differences in methods of verification and investigation?
Thus it is as if the proof did not determine the sense of the
proposition proved ; and yet as if it did determine it.
But isn’t it like that with any verification of any proposition?1
I
I
n this paper I consider a case invented by Hilary Putnam in the
course of his long-running philosophical debate with Richard
Rorty.2
Back in the seventeenth century, strange bones have been dug
up at Whoozie, and someone wonders how old the bones are.
We now know that they are over a million years old; we have
used twentieth-century techniques to establish their age. In
Newton’s time there were no such techniques. But suppose
someone to have speculated about the age of the bones. Putnam
says that if this person had entertained the idea that the bones
1. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford, 1978),
pp. 312–313.
2. H. Putnam, ‘Newton in His Time and Ours: Will the Real Richard Rorty Please
Stand Up?’, unpublished. I refer to this article as NTO.
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I—CORA DIAMOND
were a million years old he would have been right, and if he
had rejected it as absurd, he would have been wrong. (Since
I refer to this speculator many times, I have given him a name:
Leibniz.)
Putnam was responding to a suggestion by Rorty that we
should redefine ‘true’ to ‘chime with’ Heidegger’s claim that
Newton’s laws became true through Newton’s work, and that
before Newton’s discovery they were neither true nor false.3 In
developing Heidegger’s point, Rorty had said that, if the Latin
sentence which Newton used in the seventeenth century to state
the principle of inertia had been uttered by someone in the tenth
century, it would not then have been a truth-value candidate. It
became a candidate for being true or false when there developed
a set of coherent and useful practices within which there could
be embedded uses of that sentence to make assertions.4 So, if we
follow Rorty’s recommendation, we should say that the sentence
‘The bones found at Whoozie are a million years old’ became a
candidate for being true or false during the twentieth century;
and it seems then that we should reject Putnam’s claim that, if
Leibniz had said that the bones were a million years old, he got
something right.
Putnam recognizes that there is a reply that Rorty might make.
If we say of the sentence ‘The bones at Whoozie are a million
years old’, that it did not become true in the twentieth century
but was true even back in Leibniz’s time, we are merely paying
3. R. Rorty, ‘Were Newton’s Laws True Before Newton?’, unpublished manuscript
of 8y7y87. For a recent statement of related views, see Rorty, Truth and Progress
(Cambridge, 1998), pp. 136–137; for a recent statement of Rorty’s view of what is at
stake in the debate with Putnam, see ‘Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace’,
Truth and Progress, pp. 43–62. The disagreement with which I am concerned in the
present essay is related closely to Rorty’s remark there (p. 60) that he can give no
content to the idea of non-local correctness of assertion, without falling back into
some form of metaphysical realism. Putnam has denied, throughout the debate, that
the idea of non-local correctness makes sense only if we accept metaphysical realism;
hence his claim that the seventeenth century speculator was right involves, as he sees
it, no going back on his rejection of metaphysical realism. The material in NTO
makes explicit the tie between the debate with Rorty and questions about Wittgenstein and verificationism. See also Putnam’s discussion of Wittgenstein and verificationism, in ‘The Face of Cognition’, the third of his Dewey Lectures, in Journal of
Philosophy, 111: 488–517 (1994).
4. Rorty modifies a first, and relatively simple, statement of his view to allow for
translations, but he retains the idea that Newton’s sentence, uttered in the tenth
century, would not at that point have been a truth-value candidate.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
101
a post-Leibnizian compliment to ourselves. But this, Putnam
argues, will not do. He is concerned not just with our
twentieth-century talk about the sentence but also with what
it means for people to communicate with others, even across
periods of time in which techniques of investigation change
dramatically. The remark Putnam wants to make about Leibniz, that he was right about the age of the bones, is then
meant to go further than a mere compliment to Leibniz’s
sentence (understood our way).5 What Leibniz thought,
guessed, is what we now know to be so. (One might say that
his guess and our knowledge meet.)
II
How does Wittgenstein come in? Putnam explains his response
to Rorty in part by a contrast between Wittgenstein’s views and
those that were ascribed to Wittgenstein by Norman Malcolm.
As Malcolm read him, Wittgenstein closely identified meaning
with use in a language-game, and thought of language-games
as closed bodies of practices. On that sort of reading, every time
a new way of verifying a sentence is invented, the sentence
changes in meaning. So Wittgenstein is read as an extreme
verificationist.
From the Malcolmian point of view, the sentence ‘These
bones are at least a million years old’ could not have been
used in the seventeenth century to make the statement that we
make when we use those words today (see NTO, p. 3). There
were then no practices of investigation within which the sentence was embedded. No seventeenth-century language-game,
including those in which the dates of past events were determined and the ages of different objects established, had a route
to any sentence like the one about the bones being a million
years old. Since, in our use of the sentence, we are playing
quite a different language-game from any that existed in the
5. It is meant to be incompatible with the idea that Leibniz’s sentence, so far as it is
a truth-value candidate, is so only in that we can use it (or a translation of it) to
make an assertion.
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seventeenth century, the sentence now has a different meaning.6
That argument, Putnam says, rests on a tired pseudo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language; Wittgenstein himself did not
think that a difference in use, in techniques of investigation,
implies that there must be a corresponding difference in meaning.
Putnam uses the contrast between Wittgenstein’s views as he
understands them and tired pseudo-Wittgensteinian philosophy
of language to formulate his question to Rorty. If Rorty is not
trying to return us to something like tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism, if he is willing to allow meaning to be shared by people
who do not necessarily share techniques of investigation, then
what exactly can be the force of Rorty’s recommendation that
we treat Newton’s laws as becoming candidates for having a
truth-value only through the work of Galileo and Newton? The
recommendation would be tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism if it
leads us to deny that we might agree with Leibniz about the
bones, and leaves us instead merely taking Leibniz’s sentence and
sticking on to it an honorific label of ‘true’ or ‘correct’ or ‘right’.
Tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism would leave us and Leibniz
speaking ‘incommensurable’ languages. But if Rorty is not a tired
Wittgensteinian, then he will allow that sentences do not change
in meaning with every change in technique of investigation. He
will allow that we do not just recognize the seventeenth-century
sentence as verbally coinciding with a sentence we call true; we
understand it—uttered then—just as we understand it uttered
today. Its truth-conditions have not changed; the change is
merely that we now know that it was true. How does Rorty stop
6. There is a slight complication in the argument. I earlier spoke of Leibniz as speculating. That is, the sentence as he uses it expresses a conjecture or bet rather than a
statement that something is so. In giving the Malcolmian view, I follow Putnam in
speaking of the statement made in the seventeenth century by a use of the sentence
about the age of the bones. If someone using the sentence in the seventeenth century
were to be stating, as opposed to guessing, that the bones were a million years old,
more conditions would need to be filled in. Perhaps the person takes himself to have
been told the age of the bones by God in a dream; and so he now asserts ‘They are
a million years old’. The word ‘statement’ can be used in a more general way to cover
a wide class of uses of indicative sentences, or a wide class of such sentences themselves. But the class in question can perhaps be delimited only through the use of
notions, like ‘truth-value candidate’, that are at issue in the debate between Putnam
and Rorty. These problems about statement-making can be avoided; the point Putnam needs is simply that a conjecture made in the seventeenth century would have
been correct. The issues about communication, central for Putnam, still arise, and
can be formulated entirely in terms of the idea that Leibniz entertained or in terms
of the question that he asked himself about the age of the bones.
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103
short of saying that, if he is not a tired pseudo-Wittgensteinian?
And what can be meant by saying that the sentence was not then
a truth-value candidate, if it is not meant to deny that understanding of the situation?
III
Was Wittgenstein a tired Wittgensteinian? That is the question
to which I now turn, because it may help us to understand the
questions about meaning and understanding raised by Putnam.
In this section I discuss Putnam’s reasons for denying that Wittgenstein was a tired Wittgensteinian.7
Putnam appeals to one of Wittgenstein’s lectures on belief 8 as
a basis for saying that Wittgenstein did not identify every difference in the use of a word with a difference in meaning. The relevant passage in the lecture is a striking one, and not altogether
straightforward. Of two people whose use of words in connection
with the Last Judgment is very different, Wittgenstein says first
that you might express that difference by saying that one of them
means something altogether different from the other; and he then
says that the difference might not show up in any explanation of
the meaning. The explanation of the meaning would not, that is,
be an explanation that was tied to one use rather than the other.
Putnam reads this passage as one in which the first remark (the
one that ‘you’ supposedly might make, about the two people not
meaning the same) is made by an interlocutor, who is then
reminded by Wittgenstein speaking in his own voice that that is
not how we use the word ‘meaning’: the explanation of meaning
is the same; so (this is the implication Putnam sees) we would
say that the two people do mean the same.
The lecture as a whole suggests a somewhat different reading.
Wittgenstein argues that our ordinary ways of talking about
meaning and understanding are no help to us in the kinds of
7. My account of Putnam’s reading of Wittgenstein draws on his ‘Wittgenstein on
Religious Belief’, in On Community, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: Indiana,
1991), pp. 56–75; see especially pp. 63–64; a version of this material appears in Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992), pp. 134–157.
8. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious
Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford, 1966), pp. 53–59.
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cases being discussed in the lecture.9 He does not come down in
favour of saying either that the two imagined speakers do or that
they do not mean the same, just as, later in the lecture, he does
not come down in favour of saying (in a similar case) either that
two speakers do or that they do not understand one another. I
suggest that, in the background of the passage to which Putnam
refers, there is an important feature of the use of many
expressions, namely, that if we are given an explanation of meaning, we go on to use the expression in much the same ways; we
do not ride off in different directions. In the case Wittgenstein is
describing, that normal response to the explanation of meaning
is absent. And that is why we have the two contrasting reactions
to the case: an inclination to say, if we think about the great
difference in use, that the two people do not mean the same, and
an inclination to say, if we note that there are not here two different explanations of meaning, that the meaning is the same.
In a later lecture of the series,10 Wittgenstein spoke about the
word ‘death’ and what it means to have an idea of death. What
is commonly called ‘having an idea’ has a reference to the technique of using the word. It is a public word, tied to a whole
technique. If someone says that he has his own idea of death, and
it is not tied to the public technique, Wittgenstein says that we
might ask with what right he calls it an idea of death. What
connection has it with our game? Here, and earlier in this lecture,
Wittgenstein appears to be questioning whether we can speak of
understanding a word or sentence when we detach the supposed
understanding from the familiar techniques of our language.
I do not think that these lectures of Wittgenstein’s on belief
provide clear answers to the question whether or how far or in
what sorts of context Wittgenstein rejected the Malcolmian view
of language. The lectures are not easy to interpret; and they deal
with cases of religious language, which might well be thought to
differ significantly from the kinds of case at issue between Rorty
and Putnam. That is, even if we suppose that the lectures are to
9. This point is indeed made clear by Putnam in ‘Wittgenstein on Religious Belief’,
p. 64. But he does not use it to question, as I should, the reading of the passage about
difference in meaning.
10. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, pp. 65–
72.
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105
be read as Putnam reads them, they settle at most that Wittgenstein did not then simply identify difference in meaning with
difference in use in all cases. It would still be possible that he
took such an identification to be helpful for a great range of
cases. Putnam notes that his reading of the lectures can be seen
to be connected with Philosophical Investigations §43, where
Wittgenstein says that, for a large class of cases—though not for
all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined
thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Whether or
not the use of words in religion provides some of the exceptions
Wittgenstein had in mind, there would still be a question about
words like ‘gold’ and ‘water’, expressions like ‘how old this is’,
and so on. Are such cases meant to be included in the large class
of cases in which meaning can be explained as use in the language? If so, would it then follow, as it might seem to, that a
shift in the use of such an expression would be a shift in its
meaning? Was Wittgenstein a tired Wittgensteinian with respect
to those cases?
IV
I shall turn now to an earlier lecture of Wittgenstein’s, which
seems quite verificationist in character. He described a case in
which there are two chairs which look exactly the same. They are
taken out of your sight and then returned; you are then asked
‘Is this the chair on which you sat?’ He says of the question that
in those circumstances it would have no answer, and that it
would have no sense.11 He invited his audience to compare that
case with the case of two rivers which flow into each other.
Which river is it that goes on?
If a brook flows into the Danube, we should be inclined to say it
is the Danube that goes on and not the brook. But suppose two
rivers join and go on with a new name, then we can say: two have
disappeared and one has no source! You can imagine people who
would say in such cases ‘Well, it is either the same river or it is
not, even though we cannot discover this’. This would be nonsense.
11. Lecture of 18th November 1935. All references to this lecture are to Margaret
Macdonald’s notes to it (unpublished), relevant sections of which are included in the
Appendix to this paper.
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The point of the comparison is that, in the case of the chairs, as
in the case of the rivers, if there is no criterion for having the
same such-and-such, there is no sense in the question whether we
have the same one. The comparison may strike one as utterly
unconvincing. Consider an objection (A. D. Woozley’s) to
Wittgenstein’s remark about the chair:
It is ridiculous to say that, since we have no way of telling whether
this is the same chair, there is no sense in asking whether it is. For
we may go on to try to find a way of telling (e.g., training dogs
capable of sniffing out which is the chair that was sat in by someone, or developing techniques for microscopic examination of the
upholstery). We understand perfectly well what it is we are trying
to find a way to determine; otherwise we could not engage in these
attempts to develop techniques for finding out which was the chair
you sat in. It is precisely our understanding of the question ‘Which
is the chair you sat in?’ that guides us in these attempts. So, to say
that the question makes no sense is absurd.12
I shall not try to defend Wittgenstein’s remark about the
chairs. I shall instead use it to lead into a discussion of an element
in Wittgenstein’s thinking which is in a sense verificationist (in
what sense exactly needs to be made clear). We tend to think
that verificationism is what the logical positivists held; and so the
idea that there is a verficationist element in Wittgenstein looks
like the idea that his views can to some degree be identified with
theirs. That is not what I am claiming, and perhaps it is best to
speak of a ‘verificationist’ element in his thought. There are
indeed similarities between some of Wittgenstein’s remarks during the 1930s and familiar expressions, by logical positivists, of
their views.13 Even if we consider just those remarks of Wittgenstein’s, there are important differences in both the ideas
expressed and the larger philosophical aims.14 More important
12. The objection was made in conversation; the formulation of the objection is mine.
13. There is a question how far the 1930s remarks make explicit ideas which are
already present in the Tractatus. One might ask, for example, how far the Tractatus
is committed to the idea that ‘He is angry’ means roughly ‘The behaviour of that
body is similar to the behaviour of this (my) body when there is anger’. See Norman
Malcolm, Wittgensteinian Themes (Ithaca, 1995), pp. 88–89; cf. also my ‘Does
Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box? The Private Language Argument in the Tractatus’, in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read, forthcoming.
14. See, for example, the conversation with Friedrich Waismann, 9th December 1931,
in Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed B. McGuinness, trans. J. Schulte
and B. McGuinness (Oxford, 1979), pp. 182–186.
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still, we need to distinguish between those, as we might say, ‘verificationist’ ideas in Wittgenstein’s writings of that period, and
something else, which might also be regarded as a kind of ‘verificationist element’ in his thought. What the ‘something else’ is I
hope to make clear; it may seem to push us towards or into some
familiar form of verificationism or anti-realism, but should not
be taken to do so. So, I shall be trying to show what a ‘verificationist element’ in philosophical thought can be, which is not
identifiable either with the verificationism of the positivists or
with the ‘verificationism’ of remarks like that about the chair.
In Sections V and VI, I consider a reply, open to Wittgenstein,
to Woozley’s objection. By a reply, I do not mean a defence of
the original remark about the chairs but a response, drawing on
things Wittgenstein says elsewhere, to the ideas expressed in
Woozley’s objection.
V
Suppose Wittgenstein asks us to consider two sentences:
(1) ‘I wonder whether this is the same chair as the one you sat
in yesterday’. (No one knows of any way of distinguishing
it from the similar chair next to it.)
(2) ‘I wonder whether Hannibal sneezed six times while crossing the Alps’. (I have no idea what it would be like to try
to find a way to tell how many times this happened.)
In reply to the Woozley point that the question about the chair
must make sense, because our understanding of it guides our
attempt to find a technique for answering it, Wittgenstein might
say that it is the very fact that we do turn to such ways of looking
for an answer as those mentioned (dogs and microscopic techniques) that is the question’s having sense. The question about
Hannibal is different from the question about the chair precisely
in that it has no location within our activities of looking-forways-of-establishing-things. The imaginary Wittgensteinian reply
continues: We should not go on to say ‘And therefore the question about Hannibal is meaningless’, as if that were some further
point, a conclusion to be drawn. It is rather that the two questions are different in the respect just pointed out, and that is a
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respect to which we may give insufficient attention. We want to
draw a conclusion about meaningfulness after we are clear about
the difference in use. But, if we say that the first question has
sense and the second does not, we are merely drawing attention
to the difference.
It is not essential to this reply that we say that the second
sentence has no sense. Here is another way of putting the reply
(based on material in the 1935 series of lectures quoted in Section
IV).
If someone says that we might wonder whether Hannibal
sneezed exactly six times while crossing the Alps, what such wondering consists in is his saying ‘I wonder whether Hannibal
sneezed exactly six times while crossing the Alps’, and perhaps
also having some state of mind; whereas, if someone says ‘I wonder whether this is the chair you sat in yesterday’, wondering in
this case does not consist only in a state of mind and in saying
‘I wonder...’ etc. I might get in touch with a dog trainer who
specializes in the use of dogs in forensic investigations. Our talk
about which chair you sat in is then connected with practices in
which scent discrimination by dogs is accepted as showing that
one object rather than another was touched by a particular person. Whether or not I find a way of telling, there is much that I
do in this case besides saying ‘I wonder’.
VI
We should look further at that reply. What implications has it
for the question whether every change in our techniques of investigation, every new test for the presence of something, results in
a change in the meaning of our words? Putnam argues that such
changes in tests and techniques of enquiry do not appear to us
to change the meaning of our words. If we develop a new chemical test for water, we still take ourselves to mean the same as we
earlier did by the sentence ‘The stuff in this glass is water’ (NTO,
p. 3).
The Wittgensteinian reply that I imagined need have no quarrel with that phenomenology, with what we are inclined to say.
But we should note that the cases in which we may be inclined
to say that the sense of some sentence is unchanged differ significantly among each other. We shall naturally be inclined to say
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
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that sense is unchanged when we keep on applying our words on
the basis of the same techniques we have been using; but sometimes we may be inclined to say that sense is unchanged although
we now are applying terms on the basis of newly developed techniques. Attention to phenomenology, to what we are inclined to
say, may direct our attention away from such differences between
the cases.15 That is not an argument that, whenever we develop a
new test, meaning does change. The philosophical aim of drawing
attention to the facts here (the fact that the phenomenological
inclination to say ‘no change in sense’ can be present when there
is a change in how words are applied and present also in other
cases in which there is no such change) is to help break the hold
of philosophical puzzlement concerning whether the sense has or
has not changed. Say what you like; it may be that you will not
want to go on saying that sense is unchanged when techniques
of investigation change. In fact I think that we may well want to
go on saying (in many of the cases in which there is change in
techniques) that sense has not changed, for reasons that I shall
come to.
We need first to look at a different matter: the inadequacy of
the reply I imagined Wittgenstein giving. The trouble with it is
not so much what it says as what it leaves out. It does not make
clear what in Wittgenstein’s thought leads towards exactly those
views that Putnam thinks of as tired pseudo-Wittgensteinianism.
What reasons did Wittgenstein have for saying in many contexts
and over many years such things as that sense depends on
methods of enquiry, and that, where we have no idea how we
would conduct an enquiry, we may indeed say the words ‘I wonder whether p’, but the question whether it is the case that p is
nonsense or empty? And the reply fails to push far enough the
reasons, which also surface in Wittgenstein’s writings, for not
saying that sense depends on methods of enquiry.
15. There are, I think, substantial differences between Wittgenstein and some philosophers influenced by him, including John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, over the
significance of what the latter refer to as phenomenology. Thus, for example,
McDowell accepts John Mackie’s description of the phenomenology of our experience of value, that it ‘presents itself as a matter of sensitivity to aspects of the world’
Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998), p. 131. Remarks of that
sort (in the context of mathematics) are spoken of by Wittgenstein as the ‘raw material’ of philosophy, something for philosophical treatment (Philosophical Investigations, §254). But I shall not here do more than note this disagreement.
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These problems come up for Wittgenstein in a variety of
forms. The things we wonder about may be empirical, like
whether the chair you sat in was that chair there or this similar
one. Or they may be mathematical: before there was a proof that
there was no greatest prime number, we might have wondered
how many prime numbers there were. We may nowadays wonder
whether every even number is the sum of two primes. The tensions within Wittgenstein’s thought about the mathematical cases
are similar to those in his thought about the empirical cases (as
is clear in the epigraph to this paper). In Section VII, I turn
to the mathematical cases, and argue further that my imagined
Wittgensteinian reply to Woozley does not go far enough.
VII
Wittgenstein said repeatedly that the sense of what is proved in
mathematics is given by the proof. This has, as he recognized, an
apparently paradoxical consequence. If I ask, before there is a
proof, whether all even numbers are the sum of two primes, then
when the proof is given what it proves is not that a certain answer
to my original question is correct. That is, when (before I had a
proof ) I said ‘I wonder whether p’, my sentence ‘p’ does not
mean what the sentence ‘p’ at the end of the proof means. There’s
incommensurability for you! That the meaning of a theorem is
given by the proof is stated most uncompromisingly by Wittgenstein during the early 1930s (see, e.g., Philosophical Remarks,
pp. 188–189), but he continued to express the view long after
that. What there is to be said on the opposite side is brought out
clearly by Wittgenstein in a discussion of Fermat’s last theorem.16
Now isn’t it absurd to say that one doesn’t understand the sense
of Fermat’s last theorem?—Well, one might reply: the mathematicians are not completely blank and helpless when they are confronted by this proposition. After all, they try certain methods of
proving it; and, so far as they try methods, so far do they understand the proposition.—But is that correct? Don’t they understand
it just as completely as one can possibly understand it?
16. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford, 1978). The passage
(pp. 314–315) comes from some time between 1941 and 1944. I have altered the punctuation of one of the quoted remarks to make it correspond more closely to the
German.
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Some further remarks from the same context are also helpful
here:
But, if I am to know what a proposition like Fermat’s last theorem
says, must I not know what the criterion is, for the proposition to
be true? And I am of course acquainted with criteria for the truth
of similar propositions, but not with any criterion for the truth of
this proposition.
‘Understanding’: a vague concept!...
‘I am going to shew you how there are infinitely many prime numbers’ presupposes a condition in which the proposition that there
are infinitely many prime numbers had no, or only the vaguest,
meaning. It might have been merely a joke to him, or a paradox.
In those remarks we can see that the problems about understanding a mathematical proposition before we have a proof are
quite similar to the problems about talk of the age of the bones
at Whoozie, before we have any method of dating the bones.17
The passage also suggests that my proposed Wittgensteinian
reply to Woozley’s argument does not go far enough. To ask
whether mathematicians do not understand Fermat’s proposition
as completely as one can possibly understand it (i.e., as completely as they will if they discover a proof ), is to call into question the sort of approach that says that what ‘understanding it’
comes to can be seen in what mathematicians do, and that what
they now do is try various methods of proving it. That is different
from what they will do with it once there have been developments
in mathematics (perhaps including unforeseeable shifts in what
are recognized as techniques of proof ), and they come to have
what they recognize as a proof.
(I cannot here discuss the question whether we should identify
any of the remarks in the passage quoted with a Wittgensteinian
17. An important remark of Wittgenstein’s concerns the analogy between ‘mathematical propositions’ and the other things we call propositions: the analogy depends
on treating method of verification (in the case of an experiential proposition) as analogous to method of checking truth (in the case of a mathematical proposition). See
Philosophical Grammar, p. 366. The implication is that there is then an analogy
between the problems concerning empirical propositions with no method of verification and problems concerning unproved mathematical propositions, and an analogy between the effect of a new method of verification on the meaning of an empirical
proposition and the effect of a new method of proof on the meaning of a mathematical proposition.
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‘interlocutor’. Whether or not we take this or that point in the
passage to be made in Wittgenstein’s own voice, the remarks
indicate the complexity which he recognized the problems about
meaning and proof to have.)
VIII
Why did Wittgenstein tie the sense of empirical questions to
methods of discovery, and the sense of mathematical propositions to proofs? His reasons are closely connected to his ideas
about grammar. It is neither necessary nor possible for me to
give a full account of how he uses that term; one way he uses it
is in exploring the significance of departures from our ways of
using words. Suppose there were people whose body of practices
of dating things overlapped but in some ways differed from ours.
Would they be getting the dates of things wrong, or not exactly
dating things but (let us say) snating them? The difference
between them and us is in the grammar of the expressions used:
that is, ‘grammar’ is Wittgenstein’s term for the characterizing
features of people’s ways of using an expression, including their
methods of investigation.18 For the relation between methods of
verification and grammar, see Philosophical Investigations §353:
the specification of how we verify a proposition is ‘a contribution
to the grammar of the proposition’. Wittgenstein also treats the
proof of a mathematical proposition as a contribution to its
grammar. Think of how the proof that there is no greatest prime
number provides us with a method that we did not have before
for upsetting any claim that such-and-such is the greatest prime,
and in that way changes the available ways of talking. Proofs,
then, and new methods of empirical investigation, in that they
alter the ways we establish what is the case, the ways we call into
question various sorts of claim, are contributions to the activities
of using language; they belong (that is) to grammar.
In the 1935 lectures that I quoted earlier, Wittgenstein discussed the ‘arbitrariness of grammar’, though he notes that that
label is misleading. He argues that, if we arrange grammar differently, we should not be getting wrong the nature of what we are
talking about; rather, we should be talking about something else.
18. What a ‘characterizing feature’ is is vague; see, e.g., PI §§562–568.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
113
(See also Zettel §320, and Philosophical Investigations §§371 and
373.) How we arrange grammar may be practically convenient
or inconvenient, but it is not answerable to the nature of the
things we speak about (because not separable from what things
we are speaking about). In the case of empirical questions, it
belongs to the grammar of a question what techniques there are
for settling such matters. Thus, in a significant sense, what it is
about which we are asking (the ‘age of the bones at Whoozie’) is
dependent on techniques of enquiry, on the ways we do settle
such questions.
We can now see that the Woozley argument concerns the heart
of the issue. Woozley said that when we have a question but no
way of answering it, what guides our search for a method and
our judgment that we have found an appropriate method is our
understanding of the question, our grasp of what it is we are
trying to find out. And so, if methods of investigation belong to
what Wittgenstein speaks of as grammar, then (on the Woozley
argument) our grasp of what it is we are trying to find out properly guides us in fixing grammar. That, then, is a clear rejection
of the idea that grammar fixes what we are talking about.
The relation between the Woozley argument and Wittgenstein’s fundamental ideas can also be seen in Roger White’s
‘Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle’.19 White discusses the consequences of Wittgenstein’s view that it is the proof of a mathematical proposition that shows us the meaning of the
proved proposition. Writing before the publication in English
of the passages I quoted from Remarks on the Foundations of
Mathematics, and before the availability of a proof of Fermat’s
last theorem, he argues in more detail just what is argued in the
first quoted paragraph: that we understand the theorem perfectly
well. He then gives an argument parallel to Woozley’s: he says
that it is ‘difficult to give a characterisation of the centuries of
research devoted to the attempt to prove or disprove this
Theorem on the supposition that the mathematicians were
exploring a thesis whose sense they did not understand perfectly
well’. We ought not to think that there is some philosophical
doubt about whether we can believe Fermat’s theorem now.
19. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 51 (1977), pp. 169–186; see
especially pp. 171–173.
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I—CORA DIAMOND
IX
Where are we? Putnam’s idea was that, if Leibniz had thought
that the bones at Whoozie were a million years old, he would
have been right; and he also argued that it takes a crude pseudoWittgensteinianism to deny it. I have been trying to show the
kinds of consideration that led Wittgenstein to tie meaning to
methods of investigation. These considerations may indeed seem
to support the most radical anti-realist readings of Wittgenstein.
I have in mind Crispin Wright’s reading of Wittgenstein, and his
claim that Wittgenstein’s arguments undercut the idea we have of
facts independent of our actual investigations. On a Malcolmian
reading what is meant by ‘These bones are at least a million years
old’ is settled only when we have some means of establishing the
age of the bones. The sentence has no meaning until then. On
the more radical anti-realist reading, the truth-conditions of
‘These bones are at least a million years old’ are not settled even
when we have techniques for investigating such matters, because
it is not yet settled how we shall apply those techniques to the
particular case of these bones. What counts as applying those
techniques in the same way as we have been doing depends on
what we accept, when the investigation is carried out, as applying
them in the same way. Until we have actually carried out the
investigation, what ‘aspects of the world’ count as showing our
sentence about the bones to be true or false is undetermined.20
20. See Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics (London, 1980),
p. 196; also chap. XI. I shall not here discuss Wright’s reading of Wittgenstein or its
more recent development. Any criticism of the 1980 reading should, however, take
seriously the textual support it can be given. One cannot argue against it that the
reading misses the significance of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the internal relation
between a rule and its application to a particular case. Wittgenstein himself rejected
the philosophical attempt to appeal to internal relations to explain what counts as
applying the rule properly. He argued that, after we have introduced the use of ‘red’
by an ostensive definition, we could go on to use the word, not (as we do) for many
different shades of red, but for top C and the smell of lavender. No internal relation
stands in the way of doing so; for if we did call such things red, we should say that
they are related to the earlier things we called red by the internal relation of ‘being
similar in colour’. To say that we call blood and strawberries red, after we have given
the ostensive definition, because there is an internal relation between the things we
call red is, he said, to give another rule of grammar for ‘red’. What Wittgenstein made
clear (in a lecture on 21st January 1936, part of which is included in the Appendix to
this paper), is that one cannot reply to a reading like Wright’s by the arguments of
G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker in Scepticism, Rules and Language (Oxford, 1984);
he deals specifically with the central point they make on p. 96.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
115
What then are the consequences of this anti-realist reading for
the sameness of beliefs at different times? If, at any time prior to
the actual dating of the bones, you say ‘I believe that the bones
are a million years old’, the most your belief could come to, it
seems, is the belief that, when it is fixed what counts as making
the sentence ‘The bones are a million years old’ true, the sentence
will turn out to express something true. But that is not what we
believe afterwards. (Compare Wittgenstein’s own remarks about
having a hunch that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct. He says
that, since we can extend mathematics so that the conjecture
comes out true, or extend mathematics so that it does not, having
a hunch that Goldbach’s conjecture is correct is having a hunch
that mathematics will be extended so that the conjecture will be
said to be right.21)
I have tried to show that Wittgenstein’s apparent ‘verificationism’ is a matter neither of bad readings imposed on the
texts nor of a view that he took for a few years and left behind
as a kind of philosophical temptation of which he had been
cured. A ‘verificationist’ element within his thought is tied to his
ideas about grammar: grammar as showing what we are talking
about;22 and the view that grammar shows what we are talking
21. Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 137; see also Philosophical Grammar, p. 161. See also the very interesting discussion in Wittgenstein’s lecture on 18th
November 1946 of the difference between two language-games in which there might
be said to be conjectures about what someone was thinking. In one game we form
conjectures and we then ask the person what he thought; what is said in this game
has important practical consequences of various sorts. There is another sort of game
in which we might say such things as ‘Queen Victoria may have thought so-and-so
as she lay dying’. Is this guessing at what she thought? We might call it guessing at
what she thought, Wittgenstein says, but we should note that this is a different use
of ‘guess’, a different game. (See Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology,
1946–47, ed. P. T. Geach (Hemel Hempstead, 1988), p. 274.)
22. It is also connected, in ways I shall not discuss, with his treatment of rules. My
reading of Wittgenstein on the issue of verificationism is different not only from that
of Putnam, but also from that of Peter Winch in Simone Weil: ‘The Just Balance’
(Cambridge, 1989). Winch argues that, although Wittgenstein was concerned with
the problems that preoccupied the logical positivists, there is no ‘close kinship’
between his view and theirs. But ‘close kinship’ and mere concern with the same
problems are not the only possibilities. As I read Wittgenstein’s 1935 lectures, he
thought it was useful (in connection with problems about personal experience and
the sameness of after-images) to say that a would-be empirical sentence that could
not be verified had no sense. I should agree with Winch that this should not be read
as verificationism of the sort held by the positivists. But I think that there need
be nothing misleading in noting it as an expression of a verificationist element in
Wittgenstein’s approach to various problems.
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about is not given up after the 1930s. (A good example from well
after the 1930s can be found in Geach’s notes to Wittgenstein’s
lectures of 1946–7. Wittgenstein said of describing oneself as
remembering having done a calculation in one’s head, that this
use of the past tense, when someone first comes up with it, ‘is a
new use, like the use of the past tense about dreams’, and he
added ‘What we mean by memory depends on how the memory
is checked’. This is a new language-game, he said, with a new
sense of memory.23)
Putnam is right that Wittgenstein is not properly read as a
verificationist; but he does not (I think) see how far the ‘verificationism’ is internal to Wittgenstein’s thinking. It is not merely
a philosophical temptation, although some modes of expressing
it are. And so the reply (within the context of Wittgenstein’s philosophy) to the voice of verificationism is complex, and is not
merely a correction of philosophically confused expressions of
verificationism (as Putnam seems to suggest in ‘Wittgenstein on
Religious Belief ’.24) I explore these matters further in Sections
X–XII, but I want first to note the relation between my reading
of Wittgenstein and two remarks of his already quoted: the epigraph to this paper, and §353 of the Investigations. The two
remarks in different ways bring out both the importance of the
tie between what is meant by a sentence and what justifies
asserting it and the importance of not treating that tie as the
basis for a reductive identification of meaning with method of
verification or with assertability conditions.25
X
It will be useful here to look at another example, resembling
those we considered earlier. Suppose that we have a method
determining whether dogs dream or not. Even if we actually had
such a method, it would not determine the content of their
23. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, pp. 30 and 148.
24. See pp. 63–64, the passage discussed in Section III above.
25. I am indebted to James Conant for suggestions about my arguments here. He
has also emphasized the significance of the first sentence of §353, which I have not
quoted earlier: ‘The question about the method and possibility of verification of a
proposition is only a particular form of the question ‘‘How do you mean that?’’’. It
is a form of that question but only a particular form.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
117
dreams. Yet it seems possible, does it not, that they should dream
about chasing rabbits, or even about being chased by giant rabbits? If, in a story told from a dog’s point of view, we were told
of such dreams, we should certainly not think that the sentences
we were reading were meaningless.26 Now take this sentence: ‘If
someone believes that his dog has been dreaming about chasing
squirrels, then either he is right or he is wrong, whether or no we
have a way of telling’.
How might Wittgenstein respond to someone who said that?27
He might say that, when we talk in that ‘either... or’ way, it
sounds as if we are asserting that there are two alternatives: the
person who believes that dogs dream about squirrels believes
rightly, or he believes wrongly. But what we are doing is insisting
on a particular use of ‘believes’. If we are going to say of this
person ‘He believes this about dogs’, that way of talking brings
with it (in the use we are insisting on) talk of believing rightly or
wrongly. But we are not advancing beyond the fact that we want
to use ‘believe that’ in this context.
(There are other ways of using ‘believe that’. In discussing
related issues, Rorty uses the example ‘Theseus was the son of
Poseidon, not of Zeus’. If we say of someone that he believes
that Theseus was the son of Poseidon, that use of ‘believe’ does
not bring with it ‘he believes rightly or he believes wrongly’.28)
We are willing to say of someone: he believes dogs dream that
sort of thing. We use ‘believe’ in that sort of context, although
we have no way of investigating the question. If he says ‘I believe
etc.’ we would not say that he had merely uttered a sentence that
will some day be usable to express a belief, nor do we think that
the person believes merely that when it is fixed what ‘aspects of
26. See, for example, Don Marquis, ‘Blood Will Tell’, in Treasury of Great Dog
Stories (New York, 1990), ed. Roger Caras, pp. 422–430, at p. 428. See also Wittgenstein’s remarks in the lecture referred to in note 21 above, about Lytton Strachey’s
description of the dying thoughts of Queen Victoria. Wittgenstein denied that Strachey’s description was meaningless because of its unverifiability. It has its meaning
through its connection with the public language-game of description of people’s
thoughts. See Geach, Mental Acts (London, 1957), p. 3; cf. also the descriptions of
that lecture in Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–47, pp. 32,
152, 274.
27. The response I imagine is based on Wittgenstein’s discussion of the Michelson–
Morley experiment in the lecture of 18th November 1935, included in the Appendix.
28. For a discussion of these issues, see John McDowell, ‘On the Sense and Reference
of a Proper Name’, Mind 86: 159–185 (1977), especially §8.
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the world’ establish the truth or falsity of the sentence, it will
turn out to be a true sentence. Again, and similarly, we do use
‘believe that’ this way: if the story Putnam told us were true, then
someone in the seventeenth century did believe that the bones at
Whoozie were a million years old. We are, that is, willing to
talk about people, whose lives differ from ours in lacking many
techniques of investigation important for us, as believing what
we do. And when, in philosophy, we discuss this willingness we
do not get beyond it, to anything else which supports it, although
we may appear to do so.
That willingness to ascribe the same beliefs as ours to people
whose lives with words (including the words they use in expressing what we take to be beliefs which are the same as ours), are
in some respects very different from our lives with words (including in particular the words we use in expressing the beliefs we
take to be the same as theirs): that willingness is a striking and
significant human phenomenon. It is one of the characteristic
features of our relation to the thought of other people.
We can connect it with the case of translation. When Putnam
discusses Malcolm’s understanding of Wittgenstein, he objects
that the view Malcolm ascribes to Wittgenstein forces us to say
that the word ‘water’, used in a novel or letter written in 1700,
does not mean what the word means today, because our techniques for telling whether something is water have changed. And
so it would follow that we should not translate the word ‘water’
used in 1700 into present-day English as ‘water’. Against this,
Putnam protests that Wittgenstein quite sensibly would allow
there to be sameness of meaning despite differences in methods
of verification, and so would not be committed to the impossibility of such translations. Wittgenstein as I read him might draw
our attention to the phenomenon here, our simply going ahead
and taking those people’s word ‘water’ as ours, our simple willingness to ‘translate’ their word ‘water’ by ‘water’. This is not
made correct by a word’s meaning being independent of techniques of investigation. Rather, seventeenth-century life with the
word ‘water’ is in many ways very like ours; in the presence of
the many similarities and the limited differences, what we do in
most of the contexts in which we want to talk about their thought
is connect it with ours, in that we treat their word in just the
same way we treat the word in the mouth of one of our
contemporaries.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
119
When Putnam said that, if a seventeenth-century person had
entertained the idea that the bones at Whoozie were a million
years old, he would have been right, he says that there is a picture
we have: a picture ‘which has as much weight in our lives as the
idea that there are people out there, in the past, and in other
cultures in the present, with whom we can communicate’. Such
pictures are intrinsic to the practices which they inform and support. The suggestion there is that we see others as in the same
thought-space as ourselves, able to speak of the same things, able
to say and mean at least roughly what we can. This is an idea of
what is possible in the relation between their thought and ours.
But does such an idea support and inform our judgments of what
is actually the case, our practice? Our practice here is the complex
one of communicating with people, a practice which includes the
ascription of beliefs to them in a great variety of circumstances.
Putnam’s sentence ‘if a seventeenth century person had... entertained the possibility that the skeletal remains found at Whoozie
are a million years old, that person would have been right’ provides not so much a picture supporting our practice, but a sample
of our practice. We do not get beyond the practice to an idea or
picture of human relations or language, forming an important
kind of support for it.
Putnam, we saw, contrasts Wittgenstein’s real views with Malcolm’s reading of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, according to Putnam, accepts that meaning may remain unchanged when
techniques of investigation change. But in what sort of context
might the view ascribed to Wittgenstein appear to be needed?
And what is it doing in such contexts? The apparent need to hold
that meaning remains unchanged in such circumstances arises
because it seems that our ascriptions of beliefs (about water, or
the age of bones, or whatnot) to people in the past can be correct
only if their sentences can mean what ours do; and the verificationist has called that into question. But our response to the
challenge should not be to join in a debate with the verificationist
about when meanings can be the same, or about when people’s
sentences can refer to the same things. Putnam holds that there
are important ideas about sameness of meaning, ideas which
Wittgenstein does not call into question, which support our practices. Against this I am arguing, and putting forward as Wittgenstein’s view, that these practices are not supported by such beliefs
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I—CORA DIAMOND
or pictures. (Compare the practice of taking some of what is said
to us as contradicting what we have said. In this practice, we
make our utterances meet each other, make them stand in suchand-such logical relations. The practice is a fundamental one,
and does not rest on ideas about people being able to hold contradictory beliefs, or any other ideas.)
I am not here making any general claims about the importance
pictures can have in connection with our ways of using words.
There are two particular kinds of case worth noting. First, a conception of human beings as beings with whom communication is
possible, a conception which one might describe as a picture of
human beings as capable of communication, may support
attempts to communicate in circumstances in which there are
grave barriers, like the total incomprehensibility of the language
of the people among whom one has suddenly found oneself. (So
far as Putnam’s claim about the role of pictures in supporting
our practice calls attention to such cases, I should have no objection to it.) And, secondly, there are cases in which a picture may
be important in determining whom we take to be incapable of
communicating. If I believe that people who look very unlike
myself and my compatriots are utterly incapable of speaking my
language, then, even when they utter in my presence sentences of
my language, pronounced just as I and other natives pronounce
such sentences, I may not connect the sounds they make with my
language, may not take them to be saying anything in my language. (Or, if I do understand the sentence, I may look around
in some bewilderment for the person uttering it, not being able
to take as possible the idea that it was uttered by the person
directly in front of me, any more than I should think that it
might have come from the fly sitting on my hand.) A picture of
these foreign people as incapable of communicating may stand
in the way of taking them to be uttering sentences that I or my
compatriots might assert.29 But the possibility of such cases does
not imply that, in the normal case, there is also a picture, but a
picture with an opposite role, a picture of people as capable of
communicating, providing an underpinning for such ordinary
practices as the ascription of beliefs (about water, for example)
to people who lived three hundred years ago.
29. I am indebted to James Conant for general discussion of this case, and for details
of what it is like to be treated as not capable of communication.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
121
XI
Here is a remark of Wittgenstein’s that is relevant.
...the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater
depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding
ourselves on the old level. (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 333.)
The illusory image is, in our present case, that of something lying
beyond the practice of saying such things as that Leibniz believed
about the bones what we now know to be so. We are willing to
ascribe our belief to him, willing to treat the sentence in his
mouth as about the age of the bones, just as we use our words,
including ‘triangle’, in giving the beliefs of a six-year-old child,
whose life with the word ‘triangle’ is very different from ours.
The child does not grasp the geometrical propositions which,
according to Wittgenstein, go to determine the grammar of the
word ‘triangle’. These propositions can be used by us in all sorts
of ways, for example in figuring out such things as what pattern
of triangular tiles might fill a space. Or, again, we can use the
geometry of the triangle in figuring out the height of some distant
object; the child cannot do so. Since the child lacks knowledge
of the proofs which, according to Wittgenstein, contribute to fixing the grammar of ‘triangle’, and since the child is incapable of
doing with the word all those things that depend on some mastery of geometry, it seems to follow that the child who uses the
word ‘triangle’ is using a word with a different grammar, and
hence does not mean what we mean, and hence that his beliefs
about what he calls triangles are not beliefs about triangles in our
sense. (Compare Wittgenstein’s remark from the 1940s, quoted
earlier, that for the person who has not yet got the proof that
there are an infinite number of primes, the proposition saying
that there are has no or only the vaguest meaning. And compare
also Stanley Cavell’s discussion of what it is for such-and-such
sort of object to ‘exist in someone’s world’.30) I am drawing
attention here to the fact that in our practice we do not refuse
to treat the child’s beliefs as beliefs about triangles. But I do not
want to go beyond the fact that in our practice we do ascribe
30. The Claim of Reason (Oxford, 1979), ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language’, pp. 168–190, especially pp. 172–173.
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beliefs about triangles to the child to the idea that what informs
or supports our practice is an idea of meaning as capable of being
the same despite differences in mastery of geometry, or an idea
of the child as someone with whom we can communicate, someone able to mean what we do.
What I have just given as a ‘Wittgensteinian’ account may
seem very close to the Rortyan view to which Putnam objected,
the view that saying of the seventeenth-century sentence that it
was true then is simply paying a compliment to ourselves. For I
have described us as simply taking certain sentences uttered with
apparent assertive force, or as conjectures, and treating them as
expressions of what we would now be saying if we uttered those
sentences. Putnam called the Rortyan view an emotive theory of
truth because the word ‘true’ is treated as a mere compliment;
but what then am I saying, if it is not that we compliment Leibniz
by treating his sentence as expressing our belief ? What are we
doing if not patting people on the back for coming out with
sentences like ones we ourselves use? We are, I suggest, making
connections between activities of thought and talk which are different in certain ways. Those differences could be given great
weight, or less weight. There are various possible ways in which
a concept of sameness of thought, sameness of belief, might be
shaped. The shape we give it, in our ascriptions of belief, is this:
thought or belief that is part of an activity differing from ours in
many of the available techniques may be the same as thought or
belief that is part of our life with words. There is great human
significance in our making connections of thought in that way.
In our practice, we make the notion of something which people
at different times, with different techniques of enquiry, may
believe, may be said to believe, in that we use the same sentence
to state our beliefs and to give theirs. We make the notion of
something with truth-conditions independent of techniques of
investigation, in that we use the same sentence to state our beliefs
and to give those of people living hundreds of years ago. So here
I am rejecting the idea that sameness of truth-conditions should
be thought of as supporting our practice. The picture of sameness
of truth-conditions as supporting our practices of translating is
a philosophical elaboration of the complex facts of our actual
practice; its attractiveness lies in its seeming to go beyond what
we do.
In arguing against Rorty, Putnam appeals to the difference
between a Davidsonian account of translation and a Quinean
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
123
account (NTO, pp. 6–7). A Davidsonian account, applied to the
present case, might have in it: ‘The sentence ‘‘The bones at
Whoozie are a million years old’’ is true in seventeenth-century
English if and only if the bones at Whoozie are a million years
old’. If Rorty does follow Davidson here, he must, so Putnam
argues, distinguish this schema from the Quinean schema that
simply allows the seventeenth-century sentence to be ‘translated’
by our sentence ‘The bones at Whoozie are a million years old’;
and so Rorty must allow that the specification of truth-conditions in the Davidsonian scheme has significant weight. But the
Davidsonian scheme can block our view of what it is for our
understanding of the languages between which we are translating
to enter the translations we give. Consider the familiar case of
‘Snow is white’ and ‘Schnee ist weiss’. There is the life in which
the German sentence is used, and the life in which ‘Snow is white’
is used, and then there is the making of connections between the
German life and the English life. That is, there are many acts, of
various sorts, in which we evince our willingness to treat those
lives as alike, acts like the making of vocabulary lists for children
to learn, acts like the ascription to Germans of beliefs akin to
ours, and so on. The practices in which we forge such connections are not (so I am arguing) supported by pictures of the
relation between understanding and truth-conditions. Rather,
there are branches of the family of language-games of translation
which lend themselves to Davidsonian representation.
It is important that we may wish to call attention to dissimilarities rather than similarities between the life that some group
of people have with some word or words and the life that some
other group of people have with what appears to be a word for
the same thing, say a word for the same place. We may want to
insist that there is no translating between the two groups. Such
a case is presented in Brian Friel’s play Translations (London,
1981): the Irish name ‘Baile Beag’ and the English ‘Ballybeg’ may
be names of the same place, but the language-games in which
they are used have such limited similarity, such grave differences,
that sentences containing the two words may (Friel lets us see)
be treated as not translations of each other.31 And one could say
31. On the issues here, especially on the difference between interpretation and translation, and on different sorts of translation, see also Michael Forster, ‘On the Very
Idea of Denying the Existence of Radically Different Conceptual Schemes’, Inquiry,
41: 133–185 (1998).
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here that the two names are in a sense not names for the same
place after all, because the place Baile Beg does not exist in the
world of the British soldiers (to use the way of speaking I quoted
from Stanley Cavell).32 The issue of translation is here political;
a focus on cases like ‘Snow is white’, or even ‘These bones are a
million years old’ leads attention away from cases in which we
may reasonably refuse to make that connection between human
lives that is made by treating our words as meeting the words of
others. Friel’s play makes explicit the relation between the failure
of human connectedness and the absence of connection of words,
as it does also, and with great comic effect, the relation between
the human connectedness of the Irish peasant with the author of
the Georgics and the connection between the Irish language and
Latin. Putnam says that we have the idea that there are people
out there, in the past, and in other cultures in the present, with
whom we can communicate. Friel’s play presents such communication with people in the past, but shows also what it is like for
there to be people out there with whom there is no real communication; the language of an occupying army is seen in the play as
an instrument not of communication but of occupation.33
Speaking of mathematical conviction, Wittgenstein said that it
might be put in the form ‘I recognize this as analogous to that’;
32. See also Alasdair MacIntyre’s arguments about such pairs of place-names, in
‘Relativism, Power and Philosophy’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 59: 5–22 (1985), especially p. 7.
33. For a summary of controversies about the relation between politics and language
in Friel’s play, see Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture
(Dublin, 1988), Appendix II of Chapter 6 (pp. 154–5). Friel’s play helps make clear
what is the matter with some remarks of John Koethe’s about my reading of Wittgenstein on these issues (in his The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought, Ithaca, 1996,
p. 71). Koethe has claimed that I make the willingness to attribute beliefs like our
own to people distant from ourselves into a mere verbal response to similarities and
differences. The language he uses, of ‘mere verbal response’, seems to miss the depth
and far-reachingness of what we do with words, and also the kind of importance
Wittgenstein saw in the use of words, in the making of connections with words. Such
connections both reveal and help to shape our relations with others. What would it
be to be willing to connect Baile Beag with Ballybeg, or to treat ‘Nablus’ and ‘Shechem’ (say) as if they were ‘simply two names of the same place’, two labels one or
other of which we might put on a roadmap for tourists? I don’t mean the answer to be
obvious: Friel’s play shows us a context in which the willingness to make a connection
constitutes a betrayal of one’s community. What the human significance is of a ‘verbal
response’ has to be seen in the particular case. See also MacIntyre, op. cit., for discussion of ‘simply two names of the same place’, and for a response to the idea that
the tourist use of place-names exemplifies a ‘core’ use, all the rest of what is involved
in the use of such names being a matter of mere contingent associations.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
125
and he added that ‘recognize’ is used there, not as in ‘I recognize
him as Lewy’, but as in ‘I recognize him as superior to myself ’.
It is the indication that one accepts a convention (Lectures on
the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 63). I am arguing here that
accepting a translation is similar: it is a ‘recognition of this as
analogous to that’; and the use of ‘recognize’ is like that in ‘I
recognize him as superior to myself ’. What I have suggested
about Friel’s play, then, is that it may lead us to say: ‘I will not
recognize a sentence about Baile Beg as analogous to a sentence
about Ballybeg’. If there is incommensurability between the languages, it is a matter of refusal to accept conventions allowing
translation.
In ‘The Craving for Objectivity’, Putnam emphasizes that what
makes a translation correct depends on the context and on our
interests.34 That claim can be understood in various ways; so,
although I too might say that what makes a translation correct
depends on the context and on our interests, I am not sure how
far our agreement here goes. Like Putnam, I should reject ideas
of incommensurability based on our being supposedly imprisoned in our own forms of thought or language; I do, however,
leave room for a kind of incommensurability, based on our possibly refusing to ‘recognize this as analogous to that’. Such a view
does not remove objectivity from our practices of translation,
any more than Wittgenstein’s treatment of mathematics removes
objectivity from our practices of proof (but that is another story,
and the analogy between proof and translation cannot be pushed
too far).
If Rorty is recommending that we treat Leibniz’s utterance as
not having a truth value, why should I object? Why should Putnam? For neither Putnam nor I takes our present practices of
translation to be sacrosanct, and Rorty is simply recommending
a change in those practices, so far as they entitle us to say that
Leibniz got right what we now know, so far (that is) as they give
sense to a notion of non-local correctness. The problem is not
that he has recommended a change, but that his case for the
usefulness of the change depends upon his seeing in those present
practices a dependence on suspect features of our philosophical
34. Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990), pp. 120–131, at
p. 122.
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I—CORA DIAMOND
tradition. The case for change is that it would be generally useful
to replace the tradition with something less stultifying. My argument has not been that Wittgenstein requires us to leave our
practices alone, but rather that the practices in question depend
neither on suspect nor on non-suspect conceptions of the possibility of communication or of the possibility of our getting right
how things are.
XII
Let us go back to our narrative of the seventeenth century, and
make some changes in it. We can imagine the history of our
culture having gone very differently from the way it went. In
this new story, the sciences do not develop as they actually did.
Scientific work is discouraged, and then suppressed, and is
treated as inspired by the devil. Various ancient scrolls are discovered, and taken to be divinely inspired. They are believed to
contain in somewhat cryptic form the answer to questions that
we should say are empirical. Procedures are developed and are
taught in universities for finding these hidden answers in the
sacred texts. The texts are used to assign dates to events; to assign
a date to a past event is to assign it a date from 0 to 6000 years
ago: that is their dating system. Using the sacred texts, the bones
found at Whoozie are determined to be 1200 years old.35
Putnam’s remark about our ability to communicate with people in cultures different from our own suggests that he would say
that the people in the culture I have described do have beliefs
about how old the bones are. That is, he would go along with
the way I have ‘translated’ their beliefs just now, when I said that
they took the bones to be 1200 years old. And I think he would
say that their beliefs about the age of the bones are wrong. But
here we should note that, within their life with talk about the age
of things, it would be treated only as a sort of joke to say of
something that it is a million years old. In their grammar there
is no place for the hypothesis that the bones are a million years
old: there is no such serious move in their game. I am not saying
that their language is incommensurable with ours; I am allowing
35. The story was suggested by my reading of R. L. Goodstein’s ‘Language and
Experience’ in Philosophy of Science, eds. Arthur Danto and Sidney Morgenbesser
(New York, 1960), pp. 82–100.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
127
that we might indeed ‘translate’ their sentences into our language, and ascribe to them false beliefs about the age of the
bones. But we should note that we are doing this across a big
difference in grammar. Their life with talk of how old things are
is quite like ours in some ways and very unlike ours in others. If
someone in that culture uttered the sentence ‘Those bones are a
million years old’ we might indeed say ‘She got the age of the
bones right’, but (because the sentence has such a different place
in our life from what it has in theirs) our saying such a thing is
closer to being a compliment we pay to the sentence than is saying the same thing of Leibniz in the original story.
If we say of someone at another time or in another culture
that, in uttering the sentence she got such-and-such right, how
close that comes to being merely a compliment we pay to the
sentence depends on how far life with those words is in that culture from ours. In the case of Leibniz’s speculation about the
bones, we think of him as already within a scientific culture, a
culture in which theories may be tied to each other in the design
of instruments and the development of techniques, and in which
sacred texts are not seen as determining the possibilities within
which what can be recognized as serious speculation takes place.
What makes the sentence an hypothesis at all is that it is connected with the ways hypotheses are formulated and discussed, and
methods for investigating them thought about, looked for, criticized, and so on. And so, if we say of Leibniz that he got the age
of the bones right, our comment itself has more to it than if we
say the same thing of someone who utters the sentence in the
culture that has altogether rejected scientific investigation.
A criticism of Putnam, then, is that the idea of us as having a
picture of people communicating with each other over time and
across cultures can lead attention away from how much or how
little there may be in ascriptions of beliefs, beliefs specified in our
language, to people distant from us.
XIII
Here are my conclusions, including a few comments on the
debate between Rorty and Putnam.
It is worthwhile, I think, to give the opposite emphasis from
Putnam’s to Wittgenstein’s remark (PI §43) about meaning and
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I—CORA DIAMOND
use: that, for a large class of cases, though not for all, in which
we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be explained this way: the
meaning of a word is its use in the language. Putnam emphasizes
that Wittgenstein is not identifying meaning with use. True. But
he is insisting that in a large number of cases we should try thinking of meaning as use. And, if we do that, it will indeed push us
in the direction of verificationism,36 will lead us to take seriously
those differences in use emphasized by verificationists. We should
note that, if a specification of the method of verification is a
contribution to grammar, and if grammar tells us what we are
talking about, then giving a method of verification is a contribution to telling what we are talking about. We can emphasize
these connections in Wittgenstein’s thought without taking him
to be presenting a theory of reference or meaning as determined
by grammar (let alone by verification). What I have called the
verificationist strand in Wittgenstein’s thought is properly seen as
a matter of a philosophical technique, a technique for redirecting
attention; the usefulness of the technique depends on the particular kinds of problem with which we may be confronted.
Wittgenstein is no verificationist. But taking seriously the verificationist element that is present in his philosophical methods is
something that we can do, that Putnam could do, without giving
up on the importance of communication and understanding
between people over time and across cultures that vary in many
ways, including their techniques of investigation. If that verificationist element is allowed for, is the distance between Putnam
and Rorty narrowed? Not, perhaps, by very much. One significant difference between them is that Putnam’s account does and
Rorty’s does not treat as important the human connections that
are recognized in our willingness to translate the sentences of
others as sentences of our language, as expressions of what we
36. Putnam, in ‘Meaning Holism’ (Realism with a Human Face, pp. 278–302, at
p. 301, quotes Warren Goldfarb’s remarks about §43, and expresses agreement with
Goldfarb’s view. Goldfarb wrote ‘Given that invoking use by itself carries little information, I take [Wittgenstein’s] remark in §43 to be, by and large, a denial of the
possibility and the appropriateness of theorizing about meaning’ (‘I Want You to
Bring Me a Slab: Remarks on the Opening Sections of the Philosophical Investigations’, Synthese, 56: 265–282 (1983), at p. 279). My view differs from Goldfarb’s in
that I take the invocation of use in §43 to have significant content, and to be connected with Wittgenstein’s efforts to draw attention to differences in use that we may be
inclined to overlook in philosophy. (I should not disagree with his point that §43
does not provide a definition of meaning.)
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
129
should believe were we to utter the same words. Putnam’s
example of the bones at Whoozie is a particularly telling
example, because the connections we make here between the
speculator and ourselves reflect a shared human interest in understanding the strange things we find in the world with us. But
Putnam’s example takes us further.
I have spoken of our words meeting the words of others: standing in such relations as expressing the same or different beliefs.
Our words meeting the words of others, our words meeting what
is the case: these ‘meetings’ (that is to say, the logic of belief )
are shaped in what we do, our responses to words and gestures.
‘Concepts...’, Wittgenstein said, ‘are the expression of our interest, and direct our interest’ (PI §570). In Putnam’s discussion of
the bones at Whoozie there is expressed clearly and feelingly the
great importance of our interest in ‘people out there’ (NTO, p. 4),
our interest in understanding and communicating, and also our
interest in getting things right. These ideas form part of a conception lying at a great distance from Rorty, from his idea that the
ascription of beliefs to organisms and machines is an activity
the point of which is that it makes possible the explanation and
prediction of behaviour. That activity of ascription of beliefs, as
Rorty conceives it (and as he recommends that we conceive it),
is detached from the idea of our beliefs being made to be true or
false by how things are (except in a derivative sense of ‘make’).
For Putnam, such a view—of the ascription of beliefs to other
people, and of what is meant by beliefs being true—involves a
kind of alienation from our Lebenswelt; for Rorty, that Lebenswelt, with its familiar modes of thought, is something from which
we may do well, even at the cost of paradox, to alienate ourselves
(although we may indeed find a few of its phrases useful for the
sake of rhetorical effectiveness).37 The debate between Rorty and
Putnam is not about solidarity versus truth, but about whether
37. My statement of Rorty’s views is based on his ‘Robert Brandom on Social Practices’, in Truth and Progress, pp. 122–137, especially pp. 128–129 and 132–137; my
statement of a possible reply from Putnam draws from his ‘Why is a Philosopher?’,
in Realism with a Human Face, pp. 104–119, especially p. 118. For a discussion of
Rorty’s claims about the usefulness of dropping talk of the answerability of our
beliefs to anything but other people, see James Conant, ‘Freedom, Cruelty and Truth:
Rorty versus Orwell’ and Rorty’s reply to Conant, in Richard Rorty and His Critics,
ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford, forthcoming); Conant also has a general account of
the debate between Putnam and Rorty in his Introduction to Putnam’s Words and
Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994), pp. xxiv–xxxiii.
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I—CORA DIAMOND
there is (as Putnam thinks) an understanding of solidarity that
does not oppose it to truth, and at the same time does not water
truth down. The debate is also about how to read Wittgenstein,
about what is useful in Wittgenstein, and about whether Wittgenstein’s sort of attention to the kind of beings we are, to our natural history, leads to a naturalism that has no room for
unwatered-down truth. But unwatered-down truth is a question
for another occasion.38
APPENDIX
I have referred to material from Margaret Macdonald’s notes to
Wittgenstein’s lectures during 1935–6. The Appendix contains
relevant excerpts from those notes.39
18th November 1935
If one says that sense data are private, they are often contrasted
with physical objects. Like putting some transparent paper
between him and the object and tracing it in two dimensions.
We are sometimes tempted to think that what we see is a twodimensional picture in this way. We are then tempted to say that
what I see is not really a chair at all, but a sense datum or a
particular view of the chair or some such thing. There may be a
mirror which I do not see when I think I see the chair, so that
what I am really seeing is a mirror image. I might point out that
we are not compelled here to say that we see the same but [could
say] that something seems the same, or that the appearance is
the same, with regard to both the mirror image and the object.
Propositions like ‘This is green’ (when I point to my own sense
datum and utter these words) have been discussed by Russell and
Moore. Nothing prevents me from pointing and saying the
words, but that is about all. But Russell and Moore said that
38. I am very grateful to James Conant and Anthony Woozley for comments and
suggestions about an early version of this essay. I much appreciate having had the
´
opportunity to present the material at the Simposio de Filosofıa: En Torno a la
´
Obra de Hilary Putnam, organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas. In
preparing this version of the essay, I have been helped by Hilary Putnam’s very
illuminating response to it at the conference, and also by the comments of the other
participants. An early and shorter version of the essay, translated by J. A. Robles,
appeared in Dia´noia, 1992.
39. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holder of the material included
here.
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
131
when one said this one was talking to oneself. This seems to be
taken as a proof that there is some sort of object there when I
say ‘This is green’—but not the physical object, which is public.
The form ‘This is so-and-so’ is very well known to us. In certain
situations in which we use the expression it is tautologous but
seems to have very good sense.40
We are tempted to say that, whether we know or not whether
he sees red, he does see it or not, although we have no criterion
for this. Compare with the determining of the velocity of light,
and the means of finding out when the light reached the mirror.
We are inclined to say ‘Either it did reach the mirror in half the
time or it did not, even though we have no means of detecting
this’... This sort of question says nothing; it is a tautology. But
what role does the tautology play? It sounds as if, when you say
‘Either the light reached the mirror in half the time or it did not’,
you were insisting that there were two alternatives. But what is
done is to insist on the use of certain expressions.
We have a particular picture that we think corresponds to our
words; we have a picture of something arriving somewhere at a
certain time, and we say that we know what we mean by saying
that the ray of light arrives at a certain time. But do you know
how to use this picture in the particular case we are discussing?
Light is compared to a sort of Messenger. We are then using a
sort of picture which almost compels us to go on in a certain
way. I cannot talk about light as a ‘Messenger’ without saying that
it makes sense to say that he arrived somewhere at a certain time.
All we have is a lamp, a mirror and a certain sensation of light. But
we think of the experiment in terms of throwing a ball and of a ball
bouncing back again. But actually nothing was thrown and
nothing came back. But the idea of a surface which ‘throws back’
the light is very familiar to us. But, if we go on with this picture,
then to say it makes no sense to ask at what time the light reached
the mirror makes havoc of our thoughts. We have to give up the
picture. To say that it makes no sense to say that the light arrived
at a certain moment involves also that it makes no sense to say
that it arrived at a time between two limits. But, you might say,
we are not dealing with moments but with length of time (man
with a watch); but this makes no difference.
40. The footnoted sentence is an altered version of Margaret Macdonald’s notes.
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I—CORA DIAMOND
After-images. We might say that one thing is favourable to the
notion of sense data: the fact of after-images. One might say: An
after-image is private. I cannot have his after-image. What would
it be like for me to have his after-image?
The question ‘What would it be like for so-and-so to be the
case?’ is always asked relative to the removing of a certain sort
of trouble. If someone said ‘What would it be like for someone
to sit on a chair?’, I should say: What do you mean by asking
this question? What sort of thing do you want explained—what
is your trouble? Ordinarily, we know what it means for someone
to sit on a chair; there is no difficulty about it. He justs sits on a
chair and that is that. Or are you asking me to paint a picture
of someone sitting on a chair? Or are his legs stiff, so that you
do not know what he will do with them when he sits on the chair?
Compare this with asking what it would be like to be expecting
someone from 4 to 4 :30. Is it asking whether there is a peculiar
state of mind lasting from 4 to 4 :30, or whether it is different
activities, or what is it? It usually involves several alternative possibilities, as if, e.g., one could sit on a chair in many different
ways.
If you ask ‘What would it be like to have the same after-image
as someone else?’, one might ask ‘What sort of explanation do
you want?’ We must say what particular trouble we want solved
and what comparison to be made. We must compare this with
the case in which we should normally say that we see ‘the same
so-and-so’. We want to know the use of ‘same’ in, e.g., ‘I see the
same chair’, ‘I see the same colour’ or ‘I see the same after-image’
as he. What is the criterion for this being the same chair as I saw
yesterday? I can have two chairs which look exactly the same,
take them out of your sight and then return them, and, pointing
to one, say ‘Is this the chair on which you sat?’ In these circumstances there would be no answer to this question; it would have
no sense. Compare the case of two rivers which flow into each
other, and one goes on. Which is the one that goes on? If a brook
flows into the Danube, we should be inclined to say it is the
Danube that goes on and not the brook. But suppose two rivers
join and go on with a new name, then we can say: two have
disappeared and one has no source! You can imagine people who
would say in such cases ‘Well, it is either the same river or it is
not, even though we cannot discover this’. This would be nonsense. How are the words ‘It is or it is not’ being used?
HOW OLD ARE THESE BONES?
133
What is the criterion in the case of the after-images? Can we
say ‘I saw the same after-image on two different occasions?’ If I
look at the sun and then look away, I see an after-image, and if
I look at an electric light, I see an after-image of the same sort,
though I usually say they are different [after-images] though
exactly alike. How do we compare two after-images? We could
describe them or paint a picture of them. But, again, people
might say ‘However you compare them, either you have the same
after-image or you have not’. (Should we regard the sameness of
after-images as an unreachable goal which we can approach but
never attain?)—You can say either. The point is that we use the
word ‘same’ in a very different way. To say ‘Either we see the
same thing or we do not’ is to insist on a particular kind of
imagery. It suggests seeing two pictures which are either alike or
not alike. I do not object to this, but you must be careful about
the application, because the cases are very different. You must
give the grammar of a picture as well as of a word or sentence.
You must say how you are going to use the picture.
Compare the case of looking out of the window and seeing a
shower of rain. People would say there must be a certain number
of drops, although we cannot count the number, and we must be
seeing just that number. This looks as if there ought to be an
answer to ‘How many drops are there?’ This is a case where
whatever you say is likely to clash with something else you say.
Compare the case of a primitive arithmetic having ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’,
‘5’, and ‘many’ for anything above 5. You want to say that
‘many’ is an expression of ignorance (but that need not be so).
Suppose someone asks ‘How many hairs has he got on his head?’
You would probably say ‘A lot’, not ‘99’ or any definite number.
We see what makes us say that after-images are ‘essentially
private’ and ‘Only I can know what after-images I have’. We
might think that our grammar shows this, and reveals a difference in the ‘nature’ of physical objects and after-images, but it
doesn’t.
Excerpt from notes, 21st January 1936
(The following material is in parentheses in Margaret Macdonald ’s
typescript, and has her initials at the end, suggesting that the paragraph or some part of it may have been reconstructed by her from
sketchy notes.)
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I—CORA DIAMOND
To put a patch of colour beside the word ‘red’ as an ostensive
definition does not yet compel you to call blood or strawberries
red, etc. This is something that you do afterwards, and you do
in fact do it. To say that you do it because there is an internal
relation of similarity between the things you call red is to give
another rule of grammar for ‘red’; the things which you do in
fact call red you are always going to say are related by the
internal relation of ‘being similar in colour’. And you could use
‘red’ both for blood and for top C and the smell of lavender—
just as you use it now for many different shades of red when you
might not—but if your use becomes too erratic we shall not say
that you are using a ‘word’ in a language at all. The use, e.g.,
must conform to your rules...