Philosophical Remarks

Wittgenstein did not prepare it for publication. Rush Rhees selected and arranged material from manuscripts written in 1929-30 and published it in German in 1964. The English translation by Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White followed in 1975. Because the editor chose the selection and the order, the book is a reconstruction of a period of rapid change in his thinking, not a text he shaped himself. Scholars interested in the exact development of his ideas often consult the manuscripts directly, and readers should treat arrangement and section divisions as editorial.

In these remarks Wittgenstein says that the sense of a proposition is bound up with the method of its verification, a thesis that resembles positions advanced by members of the Vienna Circle, with whom he was in contact through Friedrich Waismann and Moritz Schlick. Scholars disagree on how far this is genuine verificationism, since he is working within his own phenomenological framework rather than defending a general criterion of meaningfulness. He also dropped the emphasis in later work. The book is therefore a snapshot of a short-lived stage, not a lasting doctrine.

A key problem is that the statement that a patch is both red and green is excluded, yet this exclusion does not seem to be a matter of formal logic as the Tractatus required. Wittgenstein sees this as pressure on the idea that elementary propositions are logically independent. His attempt to handle the difficulty leads toward the notion that propositions belong to systems with their own grammar. The discussion is often cited as one of the reasons he abandoned the Tractatus's picture of logical form.

Wittgenstein argues that mathematical propositions about the infinite should be understood in terms of rules and procedures and not as descriptions of completed infinite totalities. He criticizes the set-theoretic conception, opposing talk of the infinite as a collection, and gives attention to the meaning of mathematical statements in terms of their proof or decision procedures. These remarks anticipate themes in his later Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Mathematicians and philosophers such as Michael Dummett have discussed their affinities with intuitionism, though Wittgenstein does not endorse a formal program.

It retains some Tractarian vocabulary and aims while undermining others, so it is neither early nor late Wittgenstein. The idea of a single, uniform logical form is weakened, but the later language-games and the notion of meaning as use are not yet developed. This makes the book useful for those arguing about whether his development was gradual or abrupt. Hacker's and Hintikka's accounts of the middle period reach different conclusions about its significance.

A common mistake is to treat it as Wittgenstein's settled verificationism or to cite it as the position of the Investigations. It is neither: the verificationist remarks belong to a brief phase, and the book is a collection of notes that include discarded lines of thought. Another mistake is to read it as a mere minor stage. It contains important discussions of colour exclusion, infinity, and grammar that influenced his later work. Careful readers keep the date and editorial history in view.