Explanation in the Philosophical Investigations

Akash Mehta
3/19/19

The first section of the Philosophical Investigations presents a simple procedure by

which a shopkeeper processes a written note. Towards the end of the section, the interlocutor
jumps in to ask how the shopkeeper knows how to carry out the various steps of the procedure.
We imagine the interlocutor here as eagerly rolling up her sleeves and getting ready to ‘do
philosophy’—to take nothing for granted, to question everything, to uncover what’s really going
on beneath the appearances of things. But Wittgenstein replies curtly: “Well, I assume that he
acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.” This is not the kind of
response the interlocutor was expecting, and it clearly doesn’t answer her question—in fact, it
refuses to so much as engage with it. She tries to ask another philosophical question, but to
similar results.
This dynamic, in which the reader works up an interest in a philosophical problem only
for Wittgenstein to abruptly stop, cutting off a line of questioning, occurs throughout the
Investigations and makes for some of the most frustrating moments of the book. Section 25, for
example, begins by remarking that “it is sometimes said: animals do not talk because they lack
the mental abilities. And this means: ‘They do not think, and that is why they do not talk.’” Here
the reader prepares for a discussion of the relation of speech to cognition, or an investigation into
whether animals do in fact think, or some other interesting philosophical problem. Instead,
Wittgenstein offers this: “But—they simply do not talk.”
This essay seeks to shed light on why Wittgenstein so often refuses to pursue lines of
philosophical thinking. In particular I will attempt to show how philosophical thinking, as
Wittgenstein diagnoses it, tends to take the form of a search for explanations that will never end.
The search is doomed from the start, not because the world is inexplicable but because of the
kind of explanation we think we need, when we do philosophy. But if we consider how
explanations are actually used in everyday life, our sense of that need will dissolve; we’ll realize
we embarked on our search only because our eyes were closed to where we already were.

In Section 29, the two voices are considering how to teach the definitions of words like
“colour” and “length”. In response to a particular proposal for how to do so, Wittgenstein asks,
“but does one have to take the words… in just this way?” The interlocutor responds, “Well, we’ll
just have to explain them.” Wittgenstein’s retort:

“Explain, then, by means of other words! And what about the last explanation in this
chain? (Don’t say: “There isn’t a ‘last’ explanation.” That is just as if you were to say:
“There isn’t a last house in this road; one can always build an additional one.”)

Here Wittgenstein makes two implications that at first glance seem contradictory. The
first is that every explanation will stand in need of another explanation. As he asks in Section 84,
“Can’t we imagine a rule regulating the application of a rule; and a doubt which it removes —
and so on?” No procedure or explanation is fully free of ambiguity, he suggests, and thus every

1 of 4
explanation always admits of another.1 And yet at the same time, he preemptively admonishes
the interlocutor for suggesting that there isn’t a last explanation. Didn’t we just get through
saying he thinks every explanation needs another, that there is no end to them?
The interlocutor voices this same confusion in Section 87. Wittgenstein begins the
section by making the by now familiar claim that if a word is misunderstood, any explanation
clearing up that misunderstanding might itself be misunderstood. “But then how does an
explanation help me to understand,” the interlocutor responds, “if, after all, it is not the final one?
In that case the explanation is never completed, so I still don’t understand what he means, and
never shall!” (Note the panic creeping into the interlocutor’s voice.) Wittgenstein notes how the
interlocutor talks “as though an explanation, as it were, hung in the air unless supported by
another one. Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but
none stands in need of another—unless we require it to avoid a misunderstanding.”
Thus while it will indeed always be possible to seek and provide further explanations, we
will only do so in certain cases. If in the course of everyday life you misunderstand how I use a
word and I clarify that misunderstanding by means of an explanation, my explanation will have
served its purpose; it is only if there are additional misunderstandings that I need to give
additional explanations. This makes clearer Wittgenstein’s analogy to the last house on a road;
like houses, explanations are not things we discover in the world but things we create for specific
purposes in specific circumstances. However strong we build the foundations of a house, we can
always imagine an earthquake strong enough to destroy it; however comprehensive an
explanation we build, we can always imagine a way in which one might misunderstand it. What
this means is not that our houses or explanations are inadequate, but rather that we
misunderstand their purpose if we demand indestructibility or finality from them.
But for Wittgenstein’s ‘therapy’ to be effective, it must do more than simply chastise us
for wanting things we can’t have. It must help us see where the desire comes from in a way that
helps us to stop feeling it.2 Consider, in this light, the boxed comment between Sections 139 and
140:

“I see a picture; it represents an old man walking up a steep path leaning on a stick.—
How? Might it not have looked just the same if he had been sliding downhill in that
position? Perhaps a Martian would describe the picture so. I don’t need to explain why
we don’t describe it so.”

Here Wittgenstein presents a question that might strike us: why do we see the man as
walking up rather than sliding down? One could easily imagine the interlocutor getting worked
up about this question, proceeding to ask why we see any picture in one way when we might
have in another, not finding an explanation that rules out all misinterpretations, and ending up
doubting the faculty of perception itself. Wittgenstein forestalls this familiar sequence of
philosophical questions by what we might be tempted to call an implicit explanation: it looks like
1 Whether he proves this is another question—and whether he needs to yet another. Although I’m not
certain, I think he doesn’t try to prove it but only to give enough examples (for example those of sections
85 and 86) until his readers see it. This is quite consistent with the rest of my argument; Wittgenstein does
not explain why no explanation will be final, but rather shows it.
2 Interestingly, this maps on to psychoanalysis, which treats patients by showing them the roots of their
neuroses, much more than to cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches patients to identify irrational
thoughts and then simply stop thinking (‘interrupt’) them. Perhaps this is not so surprising; Wittgenstein
was, after all, born in Vienna!

2 of 4
the man is walking upwards rather than sliding downwards because we live on Earth, where
walking rather sliding is the normal mode of motion.
This doesn’t tell us what it is about Earth that gives rise to our seeing the picture this way
rather than another. That would be, of course, a perfectly sensible question to ask—perhaps even
an important one, say if we were designing a Mars rover and were interested in the differences
between likely modes of transport on the two planets’ surfaces. But we would hardly think of it
as a philosophical question, and if for some reason couldn’t find the answer, nothing about our
ordinary way of life would be undermined. (Just as if we couldn’t design a house strong enough
to withstand Martian gravity, our houses here on Earth would remain quite sturdy!) Instead we’d
consider it a scientific question—as Wittgenstein puts it in Section 126, an attempt to make “new
discoveries or inventions”—asked in service of a particular goal.
Thus even the phrase “implicit explanation” misleads us here. Wittgenstein doesn’t
explain why we see the picture as we do, but only divests the question of its philosophical
trappings. All he does is put before us a case in which the picture is interpreted differently, and
suddenly we no longer feel that anything philosophically weighty is at issue. Much like a good
Freudian psychoanalyst, Wittgenstein doesn’t provide anything new; he simply “marshall[s]
recollections” (Section 127). Once we recollect that we wouldn’t be surprised if a Martian
interpreted the picture otherwise than we do, we do the work for ourselves (or rather, see that
there isn’t any to do). This is why Wittgenstein can say “philosophy just puts everything before
us, and neither explains nor deduces anything”; an explanation is something one constructs (like
a house), something one adds to the world, whereas philosophy only shifts our perspective on
what already is—it “leaves everything as it is” (Section 124) and only “chang[es our] way of
looking at things” (Section 144).
But while the temptation to demand philosophical explanation was relatively easy to
resist in this example, it can be extremely difficult in others. When we’re in the grip of a
philosophical problem, it can seem impossible to let go of our demand for a final explanation;
and if we’ve been convinced that there isn’t one, it can seem that we’ve uncovered a profound
and fatal error underlying our normal ways of life. Different problems will of course grip
different readers with varying intensity, but consider Section 185’s example of continuing a
numerical series. People who enjoy mathematics often say they find comfort in its lack of
ambiguity, and thus may be particularly alarmed by Wittgenstein’s demonstration that even the
function “+2” could be interpreted in multiple self-consistent ways. After the interlocutor tries
and fails to come up with a set of criteria by which our normal interpretation is the only correct
one (i.e. a final explanation), she uneasily questions whether algebra does what we thought it did:
“but are the steps then not determined by the algebraic formula?”
Wittgenstein’s response proceeds along much the same lines as what we’ve seen in other
examples. He tries to direct the interlocutor’s attention to the circumstances in which we’d say
the formula ‘determines’ the steps and reminds her the other cases in which we’re comfortable
using the word ‘determine’ despite the potential existence of abnormal cases (e.g. a machine’s
movements when a part breaks). Recollecting these normal usages is meant to show us that
alternative possible interpretations of arithmetic rules don’t undermine arithmetic as we practice
it, but only demonstrate that it is, in fact, a ‘practice’. Arithmetic is learned and practiced as a
custom in the context of particular circumstances, just as we’ve seen with understanding words
and interpreting pictures.
And yet the interlocutor—and perhaps the reader alongside her—is still captured by the
conviction that mathematics must either be unambiguous or faulty. She circles back to repeating

3 of 4
questions Wittgenstein has already rejected, as if she’ll eventually wear him down and force an
answer out of him. This inability to stop asking questions, this insistence that there must be a
deeper explanation, is precisely what Wittgenstein views as the pathology of philosophy. “The
real discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizing when I want to,” he writes
in Section 133, “the one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by
questions which bring itself into question.” If we keep asking questions whose answers give rise
to only more questions, we will eventually start to question our capacity to answer anything at
all. (Just as in Section 79, when the interlocutor’s attempts to explain how names refer to people
fail, she begins to panically doubt whether they do: “Should it be said that I’m using a word
whose meaning I don’t know, and so am talking nonsense?”) We feel utterly lost, as if we
embarked on a vacation but then got lost and now despair that we might ever find our way back.
Wittgenstein wants us to open our eyes and see that it was just a nightmare: we are already
home, in our house at the end of the road.

4 of 4