1Let me start by expressing my deepest gratitude to the authors who contributed to this book symposium with insightful comments and thoughts, and to the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy for hosting this discussion. I feel honored that my Cambridge Element was chosen as a suitable subject for a book symposium and I will do my best to respond to the many perceptive, farseeing, and stimulating comments that Lars Hertzberg, Luigi Perissinotto, Elena Valeri, and Meredith Williams graciously provided.
2Lars Hertzberg suggests that the role of Wittgenstein’s invocation of forms of life as presented in my work can be characterized as “gesturing towards the contingent”: that is, towards recognizing “the role common ways of acting have for our shared language.” The notion of forms of life, just like that of language games, is a gesture in that it does not demand delving into what a form of life actually is and points to the contingent in that the investigation into our ways of judging and categorizing uncovers that there are no a priori restrictions on the shape that such epistemic practices can take. I feel very much in agreement with this characterization, and I also like Hertzberg’s note on how through this notion Wittgenstein avoids the pitfalls of both empiricism (with its unsuccessful appeal to “specific experiences”) and rationalism (with its similarly unsuccessful appeal to rule-following as preordained).
3However, I have something to add regarding the idea of contingency. This is connected with Wittgenstein’s non-traditional notion of foundations, amounting, for Hertzberg, to “that which has no foundation” (as opposed to “that which provides a foundation”). Leaning towards the acknowledgment of the fully contingent nature of our linguistic practices and forms of life, Hertzberg observes that talking of “logic and its applications” (as I do in p. 20) suggests that logic, in some sense, precedes or regulates our linguistic practices. The point is that “the notion of language having a hierarchical structure [which Hertzberg sees operating in my view here] is at odds with a conception of language as seen in the light of the concept of forms of life.” I agree that language is embedded in our practices and logic is implicit in our use of words and rules, rather than hierarchically superior to it, which gives me the opportunity to refine my own account: Wittgenstein’s investigation of the relationship between logic and its applications is precisely a clarification of its embeddedness in how we reason, judge, classify, and so forth. I see indeed a dialectical and mutual relationship between the two, but I do not follow Hertzberg all the way down towards a full contingentism. Indeed, I think that Wittgenstein also acknowledges and holds onto the distinction between logic and applications, not in the sense of a hierarchical subordination of the latter to the former, but in the sense of a distinction in kind between the two. The riverbed metaphor in On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1975: §96-8) illustrates the point:
It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.
The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.
But if someone were to say “So logic too is an empirical science” he would be wrong. Yet this is right: the same proposition may get treated at one time as something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing.
4I fear that the emphasis on contingency, while justified for the purpose of pointing out the reciprocal dependence between language and forms of life, logic and applications, or rules and practices, risks masking the relevance of this distinction.
5Another concept that Hertzberg’s piece helps put under focus is that of agreement. Particularly illuminating is his proposal of calling agreement in language or forms of life alignment, or being in tune, to mark its difference from agreement in opinion. The distinction is to be found in the Investigations (Wittgenstein 2009: §241):
So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false? – What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.
6The distinction makes sense of cases in which two individuals or two parties disagree in their views, their behaviors, or their goals, but still share a background of ways of living that shows in their common language. For instance, Hertzberg suggests, take the game of baseball: the pitcher and the batter are playing against each other and performing actions that have opposite goals, but still, their actions are aligned in that they take part in the same game and follow the same rules. To push the example a little further, I would add that the game itself is grounded in the alignment of the players’ practices, their common knowledge and understanding of the rules, their mutual implicit agreement in following such rules, their awareness that, in a sense, “this is just a game,” that they might also play a variant of the game, that there are procedures through which the interpretation of a rule can be questioned, and also procedures through which rules themselves can be altered. The players’ alignment in what we may call the language of the game grounds their agreement and also their disagreement in opinions.
7This example brings us back to the concept of foundations, showing that the idea of foundations suggested in Wittgenstein’s work is both “that which has no foundations” and “that which provides a foundation,” if what is meant by this is the grounding role of alignment with respect to agreement in opinion. In other words, I am on board in rejecting a foundationalist interpretation of Wittgenstein, but I do not endorse a fully contingentist interpretation either.
8Proceeding to Luigi Perissinotto’s commentary – One point that he makes seems to me particularly on-target and requires some more elaboration on my part. He observes that while in my view the notion of forms of life is methodological, I also claim that there is a development in Wittgenstein’s approach, which starts with remarks that emphasize the cultural aspect of forms of life and the possibility of different human forms of life, and ends with remarks that emphasize instead features that are common to all human beings. The former kind of investigation also seems more empirically oriented, and the latter leans towards a form of transcendentalism. This description, which I propose in 4.3, seems to betray a substantive rather than methodological view of Wittgenstein’s notion, or at least seems to be in tension with a methodological reading.
9In response, I want to make two points, one exegetical and one theoretical. From the point of view of exegesis, it is a fact that there is this shift in Wittgenstein’s employment of this notion. That is, he tends to use it more in certain contexts than in others in earlier and later remarks, pointing at different ways of living at the beginning and to common human features later. Perissinotto’s worry, though, remains apparently valid: this exegetical reading indeed seems to license the hypothesis that Wittgenstein was proposing a substantial view of forms of life, one in which he was explaining what a form of life is, and he slowly changed his mind precisely about what a form of life substantially is. This seems to contradict the methodological view. However – and this is the theoretical point – one can still hold onto the idea that the notion is methodological, if one identifies a development of Wittgenstein’s views about philosophy itself: depending on how he intended his own work and the nature of philosophy he used the tool differently, but the instrumental nature of the notion remains throughout time. And there is reason to think that he did slightly change his views about philosophy and about his methods (in the plural: see Investigations, §133). For instance, like he did in the Brown Book (Wittgenstein 1969) at the beginning of the Investigations he imagined elementary language games and then progressively complexified them in order to highlight the essential interconnectedness of language and practices (I believe this is connected with the “developmental” use of the notion of foundations singled out by Hertzberg in his commentary). However, later he does not seem to be interested in a systematic study based on this method anymore (indeed, this was the project of the Brown Book that he abandoned in 1936). In other words, his metaphilosophy seems to shift a bit, even within his so-called later period. Parallelly, the notion of forms of life is used differently in different phases of Wittgenstein’s work. Recall the reconstruction I propose in 4.3: in the first phase, Wittgenstein uses it to point out that language games make sense only as part of a form of life (this is the “anthropological view” of 1936-1937). In the second phase (approximately 1938-1944) he uses this notion to discuss rules and agreement emphasizing, again, that we need to look at forms of life in order to better understand what we mean when we appeal to these concepts. In this phase Wittgenstein deepens his awareness of the kind of work he is doing, as manifested in a remark written in 1940:
If we use the ethnological approach does that mean we are saying philosophy is ethnology? No it only means we are taking up our position far outside, in order to see the things more objectively. (Wittgenstein 1998: 45)
10In the third phase (after World War II), Wittgenstein uses this notion to point at “the given.” As Perissinotto also emphasizes, referring to “the given” amounts to an exhortation for philosophers to get rid of their fascination with the scientific way of explaining phenomena, and understand that this is the level where explanations stop. To go back to the apparent tension between the idea that there is a development in Wittgenstein’s use of this notion and the idea that it is a methodological tool, the point is that Wittgenstein progressively refined his view of philosophy and his use of this tool reflects such development. He always avoids a substantive notion (the explanation of what a form of life is) and limits himself to showing the embeddedness of language games in our practices, which is where we need to look if we want to better understand our meanings.
11This theme is connected with the last question that Perissinotto asks: if the notion of forms of life is a methodological tool, what is the purpose of such tool? I believe its purpose lies in aiding our understanding of our concepts and of language overall, which has to do with seeing what we have in front of us in a more detailed, nuanced, and correct way. “What we have in front of us” are our concepts or meanings, the way we use words, and how the way our use of words is interlaced with what we do with them. The metaphilosophy that emerges here keeps together a clarificatory aspect – philosophy as conceptual clarification – and a therapeutic aspect – philosophy as a cure against the temptation of explanation.
12This helps me reply to Elena Valeri’s and Meredith Williams’ comments about the nature of methodology. Valeri puts the issue in the framework of existent views about Wittgenstein: both those that I describe in section 3 of the book and those that focus in particular on the continuity between the early and later Wittgenstein and the idea of philosophy as therapy. Her first question therefore is as follows: Do I believe that the existent readings, that I classify according to the natural vs. cultural, singular vs. plural, and empirical vs. transcendental axes of debate, are prevalently substantive in kind? The short answer to this is yes, although there are nuances, and there are other readings besides mine that tend to advocate, implicitly or explicitly, for a methodological view. I include among those Morris (2007) (who follows the later Gordon Baker), Lagerspetz (2020), in part Stern (2004), and Hertzberg (2011), who indeed in the present symposium expresses agreement on this aspect of my work. Valeri’s second question is harder to answer, as I intentionally decided not to take position on the issue in the monograph. The question is whether the methodological vs. substantial distinction has anything to do with the standard vs. “New Wittgenstein” (or neo-Wittgensteinian) reading, according to which throughout his whole work Wittgenstein’s primary goal is a therapeutic one (Crary & Read 2000). This was (and partly still is) a huge debate in the Wittgensteinian scholarship, that, as often happens, gave rise to different trends and labels. The danger with this kind of strongly “labelled” discussion is that it often oversimplifies and overlooks details for the sake of defending a clear position. This is what I want to avoid by not inserting myself into either of the two camps. I agree with Valeri that, in very general terms, neo-Wittgensteinian and therapeutic readers are more on the methodological side, and standard readers more on the substantive side, but neither is necessarily so. On the one hand, “methodological” is definitely more than therapeutic. Therapy is but one aim of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and he puts its methods to use with this and other goals in mind, including clarification. The two are obviously connected but do not coincide. On the other hand, on the standard reading as described by Valeri, conceptual clarification is the primary goal, but one might further ask what conceptual clarification is and what it accomplishes. In my view, clarification is a matter of deepening our understanding rather than of adding to our body of knowledge. When Wittgenstein directs our attention to forms of life, he does not do so in order to obtain more information about (for instance) how human beings behave in communities; rather, he invites us to make finer distinctions in our concepts, to consider the contexts in which we use certain words, to grasp the “point” of certain situations in which an expression is typically used, and to consider what matters in our making sense of things. In this sense, philosophy, as Valeri says – and I agree on that (see Boncompagni 2012) – is the exercise of our capacity to see what is before our eyes, where seeing is a form of understanding, and what is under our eyes is our life with words.
13Another set of comments from Valeri addresses the issue of the continuity/discontinuity between the early and later Wittgenstein, pointing out that some remarks from the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1961) show connections with the later notion of forms of life. In 6.372 for instance, Wittgenstein distinguishes between “the ancients” who recognize that explanations have a clear terminus and “the modern system” that assumes illusorily that everything can be explained. I agree with Valeri that what Wittgenstein says here resonates with his later remarks on the “given” and the end of explanations. Another point of convergence between the early and later Wittgenstein, in her view, is on the use of the expression “form” to designate logical form in the Tractatus and forms of life in the Investigations. In both cases, she observes Wittgenstein is concerned with what cannot be analyzed further. Valeri is in good company in addressing this similarity: Juliet Floyd has worked along similar lines. However, one element of discontinuity here is that in checking Rush Rhees’s provisional translation of the first part of the Investigations in 1939, Wittgenstein saw as more appropriate for Lebensformen the expression “ways of living of human beings,” rather than the maybe more intuitive “forms of life” (Boncompagni 2022: 16). If the employment of “form” were an explicit choice, given the attention he dedicated to translations, he would have probably suggested “forms of life.”
14More convincing (to my ears) is the similarity between this passage from the Tractatus, 4.002, and Wittgenstein’s later views: “Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.” I do agree on there being a strong continuity here that also shows in his insistence on the use of symbols in the Tractatus, which is often overlooked. Notably, just like in the passage just quoted, in the first remark of part II of the Investigations Wittgenstein talks of “this complicated form of life,” and the discussion is connected to the comparison between a human and an animal form of life (he is observing that we talk of “hope” for human beings, but not for dogs, except in elementary cases). So, overall, I feel in agreement with Valeri on some continuities between the Tractatus and the Investigations, but I am not sure this is so relevant for our understanding of the notion of forms of life.
15I would like to use this reference to the connection between language and the human organism to bring into the conversation the last commentator, Meredith Williams, who argues that with the notion of forms of life “Wittgenstein is primarily concerned with the problem of the unity of animality and our language game.” I would like to start with her positive proposal, that is, her (substantive) account of forms of life. In her view, to understand what a form of life is amounts to understanding what is “indispensable to the realization of language games.” Three elements emerge as fundamental: representational structure, techniques and procedures to use words and rules, and the early acquisition of science. On the first point, she highlights that Wittgenstein goes deeper than simply postulating a correlation between word and object, because such correlation needs background conditions and these background conditions have to do with our practices with words, which in turn are attuned to our bodies being the way they are. On the second point, she claims that the place we need to look at for understanding rule following is “the context in which one learned or was trained into the use of the rule,” which again involves bodily activities as well as cultural goals. The third point, concerning what she calls “initiate language learning,” is for me the most interesting. Examining the first remarks of the Investigations and the criticism of ostensive definitions, up to the introduction of the notion of forms of life in PI §19 and §23, she claims that what is needed to understand reference and meaning is the consideration of a “mature” language game in which language is interwoven with actions – that is, what is needed is the notion of forms of life. When children learn to speak, they do so by means of a “triangulation.” The elements of triangulation are the child, the parent, and the object that the child and parent are looking at when the latter says what the object is. When children learn, Williams claims, they are not learning to attach a name to an object: they are learning what that object is. There is an entire primary ontology of ordinary objects and properties – apple, ball, red, pain, hunger, trucks, etc. – that is transmitted and learned here. When we talk about these objects and properties, it is not a matter of mediation by representation: we talk of them directly. This directness of ordinary language is, in Williams’ view, “the given,” and this is not second nature: our first, animal, nature is intrinsically linguistic, and it shows the unity of the animal and the cultural that is at the core of the notion of forms of life. (Using different words, Hertzberg also underlines that the biology/culture issue in the interpretation of forms of life is “spurious.”)
16I find this description of the acquisition of a primary ontology through ordinary language genuinely illuminating, and I do think this is the direction towards which Wittgenstein invites us to look. However, and to reiterate once again the methodological point, I do not think that Wittgenstein is, himself, engaged in the explanation of what a form of life is. Williams’ criticism allows me to clarify this one more time. Williams tends to think that in my view the notion of forms of life is a blind pointer that in itself has no meaning, just like an indexical word. I am not claiming that “forms of life” lacks meaning, or that “methodological” equates to “meaningless”: I am claiming that Wittgenstein was not interested in explaining what its meaning was, for two reasons. The first is that the meaning was well-known, and there was no need to make it explicit. The second is that the explanation of what a form of life is by no means essential to the accomplishment of its purpose (and might, in fact, result in just diverting attention from its purpose): showing us where to look, namely, at the interconnectedness between the meaning of our words and what we actually do with them in the contexts in which we use them.
17There are other themes that the four, generous, commentaries helpfully highlight and that unfortunately I do not have the space to address. However, I hope I have answered the main questions and concerns, and I am deeply grateful to all four commentators for the possibility of reflecting further on these topics.