Wittgenstein, Phenomenology and What It Makes Sense to Say

Abstract

In January of 1929, after returning to Cambridge, and to full time philosophical research, Wittgenstein wrote extensively about color. Among the questions he discusses are, Why can't one see blue and green in the same place? How many primary colors are there? Can one measure the amount of red present in a reddish-yellow in virtue of which it is redder than another reddishyellow? In what sense can one speak of the distance between colors, as when one says that one shade of orange is closer to yellow than another? Wittgenstein's interest in these and related issues is puzzling to say the least. Why should any philosopher be interested in this kind of problem about color, let alone Wittgenstein, who, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, had boldly announced a conception of philosophy purified not only of psychological, but of all empirical admixture? Philosophy, claimed Wittgenstein in TLP, is not a science or body of knowledge made up of true theses. There are no philosophical propositions. Philosophy is an activity of clarification; it consists of elucidations.2 The problems of philosophy are not questions about some region of nature or other, at whatever level of generality we care to choose. They arise, rather, from our failure to understand the logical structure of our own language.3 Philosophical problems, the young Wittgenstein would have it, are confusions about how to use the symbols of our familiar language correctly, and do not point to any sort of ignorance of matters of fact. From this conception of philosophy it follows that the methods of inquiry appropriate to the sciences are inappropriate to philosophy. Wittgenstein's conception here is at odds with the view of his erstwhile teacher Bertrand Russell, who had argued for the application of the scientific method to philosophy.4 Wittgenstein's