Cogency v2 n2

“A picture held us Captive”: The later Wittgenstein... / S. W. PATTERSON
Despite the fact that the argument here is not a deductive argument, the
pattern-completion task involved here will proceed in much the same way
and, it is reasonable to think, with a similar margin of success. We could
perhaps attempt a similar move with various argument schemes, such as
appeal to authority or argument from sign. 2 It is perhaps the fact that they
provide us with a familiar sort of pattern-completion task that makes us
want to think of them as schemes at all. Like Wittgenstein’s puzzle pieces,
there is a way the reasons fit together that allows us to place the “final piece”,
the conclusion, such that it “fits” too.
The important point for our purposes here is that Wittgenstein, in the
quote above, is denying that this happens with the resolution of the elements
of a picture into to something recognizable, like a face. The phenomenological
aspect of recognition–which we also have when we fit the puzzle
piece into its space, or see that we can do so from its shape and the shape of
the gap in the nearly-completed puzzle–is present, but unlike the case with
the puzzle, the recognition of the picture has, in his view, no grounding in
reason. But then how does this recognition work? As with the understanding
of musical themes, Wittgenstein’s speculation is that the understanding
of a picture works linguistically: “...in the same way I may say “Now I understand
the expression of this face”, and what happened when the understanding
came was that I found the word which seemed to sum it up.”
(Wittgenstein 1960: 167) This statement is fascinating for a number of reasons,
not the least of which is the reversal of roles it envisions in comparison
to the doctrine of the Tractatus. It’s wider significance notwithstanding,
for purposes of this article the chief interest of this statement is that
makes the understanding of pictures dependent upon associating them with
words. To understand a picture, then, is to be able to translate it out of the
realm of image and into the realm of the verbal, into language. While he
may indeed depart from the picture theory of meaning, at no point does
Wittgenstein abandon the thesis, first advanced in the Tractatus, that thinking
happens in the medium of language. It is plausible that his desire to
preserve this thesis in the face of the challenges presented by the intentional
vocabulary (the vocabulary of wishing that, hoping that, expecting
2
A thorough, if possibly not exhaustive, accounting of a great many of these schemes
can be found in Walton, Reed, and Macagno (2008).
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