The Blue and Brown Books

They are notes Wittgenstein dictated to a small group of students at Cambridge, the Blue Book in the 1933-34 academic year and the Brown Book in 1934-35. The Blue Book was circulated in typescript copies, and the Brown Book was a more continuous, partly redrafted text. Neither was prepared by him for publication. They were published together in 1958, edited by Rush Rhees, who also supplied a preface. Because they are teaching materials rather than finished works, their wording is often provisional, and scholars treat them as evidence of the development of his thought, not as definitive statements.

The Tractatus held that propositions picture facts and that language has a single hidden logical form. In these notes Wittgenstein rejects that picture, turning instead to the variety of ways words are used in different practices. He introduces the language-game as a device for describing simple, complete uses of language and for exposing the confusions that arise when philosophers extract words from such contexts. Many themes of the Investigations, including family resemblance and rule-following, appear here in embryonic form. Scholars debate how continuous the notes are with the later book, and some stress passages that the Investigations later revised or dropped.

In the Blue Book he diagnoses a philosophical habit of assuming that whenever we use a general term, there must be something common to all the things it covers, and he thinks this assumption leads us astray. He suggests instead that many general terms apply through overlapping similarities, and he warns against the tendency to look contemptuously at particular cases. This diagnosis anticipates the discussion of family resemblance in the Investigations. Readers should note that he is describing a temptation in philosophizing and not issuing a ban on generalization in science or ordinary life.

Wittgenstein argues that we are tempted to picture understanding or meaning something as a mental event accompanying our words, but that this picture does not survive examination of how we actually use such expressions. Using examples of reading, expecting, and following orders, he shows that criteria for understanding lie in what a person does and can go on to do. This line of thought connects to his later discussion of private language. Critics have asked whether it amounts to behaviorism, a charge he rejects, and the notes themselves do not settle how far he is denying the inner.

The Brown Book is organized around invented language-games of increasing complexity, beginning with a builder's simple calls and extending to games involving colors, numbers, and the use of names. By describing these primitive languages, Wittgenstein tries to show how complex features of ordinary language, such as naming, ostension, and the use of rules, arise from simpler practices. The Brown Book also contains material he later reworked in the opening sections of the Investigations. Its style is more constructive than the Blue Book's, and it is often read as an early draft of the Investigations' method.

A frequent misreading treats them as the definitive statement of Wittgenstein's late philosophy, so that a quotation from them is taken to carry the weight of a passage from the Investigations. They are earlier, provisional dictations, and some of their claims were later modified or abandoned. Another misreading takes meaning as use to mean that a word means whatever speakers happen to do with it. The notes emphasize that use is governed by rules and practices that can be described, and that mistakes are possible. Reading them alongside the Investigations and the editors' notes guards against both errors.