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30TH LACUS[Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States] July 29-August 22003 University of Victoria, Canada

LANGUAGE AS A MIRROR OF THE WORLDReconciling picture theory and language games

Robin Allott.

ABSTRACT

Wittgenstein in the Tractatus focussed on a picture theory oflanguage. He was clear that this meant that language mirroredreality, mirrored the world. The picture theory was an account inessence of the relation between a word and what it referred to inthe external environment, or between a sentence, a propositionor sachverhalt and the event or situation to which it referred. TheTractatus was completed in 1919 and published in 1922. Withinthe space of 11 years after its publication Wittgenstein hadabandoned the picture theory and, in the Blue Book and theBrown Book, sketched out a quite different account of languageas a congeries of language games, and different languages asdifferent sets of language games; words were given theirmeanings by use, by explanation, by training and essentially bysocial interaction. This changed account took its definitive formin the Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in1953. Wittgenstein did not wholly abandon the Tractatus andwould have liked the Tractatus and his later writings to bepublished together, though this was never done before his earlydeath (Hacker 1996). There is a problem how he could havepresented two such different accounts of language with equalconviction. Can they be reconciled? The examination in muchgreater depth of both may solve the problem. Since the Tractatusand the Philosophical Investigations, there have been massiveadvances in different but equally relevant fields: in linguistics, inneurology, in philosophical discussion, in evolutionary theory, inpsychology, in child development. Most recently and relevantly,there has been the discovery of mirror neurons (Rizzolatti & Arbib1998), neurons which are excited by the perception of action andwhich seem to constitute the precursors of motor programs toreproduce the perceived action, that is, a plausible basis forimitation and communication. There has also been greatprogress in the study of the active brain in the production ofspeech, using fMRI, PET, ERP, MEG and there are new ideas onthe motor basis of speech production and speech perception, on

the relation of speech and gesture, on visual and auditoryperception. The paper will suggest that in the light of all thesedevelopments Wittgenstein's two accounts of language can bereconciled within a larger framework, and the philosophy andscience of language can profitably be linked with each other.

INTRODUCTION

The first question the reader may ask is: Why this subject? Whya paper on Language as a Mirror of the World? One might saythat talking about language as a mirror of the world is atraditional topic where not much progress has been made. Itshistory goes back a very long way indeed. The Stoics were thefirst to use the metaphor of the mirror for the functioning oflanguage. They were followed by the scholastics of the MiddleAges who were interested in language as a tool for analysing thestructure of reality. They attached the greatest importance to thequestion of meaning; the task of scientific or speculativegrammar was to discover the principles by which the word, as asign, was related on the one hand to the human intellect and onthe other to the thing it represented. "Speculative" did not meanhypothetical. The word was from the Latin speculum meaning'mirror'; they were looking upon grammar as mirroring reality.1

After this long history, are we likely to make any more progressnowadays in talking about language as a mirror of the world?The idea is out of fashion since the study of language hasbecome so highly professionalised; certainly Chomsky'sUniversal Grammar proposes the biological innateness ofgrammatical aspects of language but this is a long way removedfrom of any idea of syntactic structures as mirroring the world.However, in linguistics more recently there has been in someways a return from grammar to the lexicon, from syntax to afocus on the words from which syntactic formations areprojected. In philosophy essentially the same debate about therelation of thought and language and the world continues in thediscussion of 'internalism' and 'externalism'. On the internalistview, we impose the patterning on our experience, not derive thepatterning from our experience, a matter Chomsky has discussedin a recent book.

Is starting from Wittgenstein likely to be a profitable approach tothe subject of language as a mirror of the world? The popularunderstanding is that Wittgenstein arrived at one view oflanguage in relation to truth and language, and then suddenlyabandoned that and produced a totally different account oflanguage which had nothing to do with his earlier views. Theargument for starting from Wittgenstein is that the issue implicit in

the conflict between the early and the later Wittgenstein is stillalive; the division apparent between the Tractatus and thePhilosophical Investigations still survives in philosophicaldiscussion and indeed was directly tackled by Rorty in hisPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In many different fieldsWittgensteinian ideas still survive and flourish. Wittgenstein isnot an irrelevant starting-point. The reason for considering thissubject now and taking this route via Wittgenstein is that therehave been important developments in other disciplines which cancast a new light on this ancient question, not only the elaborationof theories and research in linguistics but also extensiveresearch into the acquisition of language by children. There hasalso been renewed discussion, by linguists and many othersabout the evolution of language; a considerable literature nowexists where there was little or nothing a few decades ago.Finally, and most importantly, there has been rapid andremarkable progress in neuroscience, by literally looking into thebrain, something which was not possible in the past but is nowroutinely done every day by researchers; there has been growingunderstanding of the way in which the brain organises itself toproduce speech and language. The developments inneuroscience, along with developments in other areas, now makeit possible to give a clearer account of how language can beviewed as a mirror of the world, how we can internalise ourperception of the world and at the same time, through language,externalise the model of the world that is assembling itself in ourbrain.

Wittgenstein's work has been subject to commentary andinterpretation by many authors with many different emphases andexplanations. The usual approach has been that one mustaccept one or other of the two theories; there is a large literatureto this effect. Really what matters is what Wittgenstein himselfsaid; it matters very much to pick out his individual thought, hissudden illuminations, his sudden phrase. Von Wright comparedWittgenstein's method to Lichtenburg's, an accumulation ofaphorisms.2 Rather than proceed by examining the views ofothers on Wittgenstein, the paper looks closely at the actualtexts in the Tractatus and in the Philosophical Investigations(and other sources). It is often difficult to find in Wittgenstein'swritings evidence for the interpretations put on his work byothers; there has been a temptation to simplify and to make thecontrasts starker, perhaps to pick on particular points andexpand them unduly so that a distorted view of what Wittgensteinhad in mind is created. This is another reason for looking closelyat his own words.

The paper starts with the early work, not only the TractatusLogico-Philosophicus (1922)3 but also the Notebooks 1914-164.

In the 1920s he abandoned philosophy and spent six yearsteaching elementary school peasant children in Austria. Hisreturn to Cambridge in 1929 was followed by the first accounts ofhis new approach to language in the Blue Book and Brown Book5(dictated to his students in 1933 and 1934) and then by thecompletion or partial completion of the PhilosophicalInvestigations6 in 1945 (published after his death in 1953). Thepaper looks at each of these in turn and considers how real theconflict is between the early and later theories. It then gives anaccount of developments in other fields which have a relevancefor or can be related to Wittgenstein, in linguistics, in psychologyand the study of child development, in the evolutionary study oflanguage, in philosophical discussion, and finally, and mostimportantly, in neuroscience which has opened a new era in thestudy of language in the brain. The paper concludes by proposingthat language can now be seen as essentially a motor activityintegrated with the general control of all bodily movement, andthat with the neural linking between perception and action, a newreal meaning can be given to the idea of language as a mirror ofthe world.

PICTURE THEORY

The Tractatus was completed in 1919 and published in 1922.Much of the material was drawn from the Notebooks compiledduring the war in 1914-1916, Some of the most essential ideas inthe Notebooks are reproduced without alteration in theTractatus. The other derivation of the Tractatus is from workwhich Wittgenstein had been doing with Russell pre-war on thefoundations of logic, linked to Russell's work on the foundationsof mathematics. The Tractatus went well beyond logic to thenature of language as such. Wittgenstein was preoccupied withfactual language; the central question was: How is languagepossible, how can a man by uttering a sequence of sounds saysomething? Russell and Wittgenstein were looking for anabstract correspondence between language and the world.Whilst the Tractatus started from the previous work on logic, itmoved towards a synthesis of a theory of truth-functions withlanguage as a picture of reality, truth and meaning. At thebeginning of the 20th century philosophers were perhaps onlydimly aware of the central importance of language; the Tractatusinitiated the 'linguistic turn', seen in the philosophy of language,in linguistic philosophy, and indeed in linguistics.

Though not an explicit and coherent theory, what emerged fromthe Tractatus (and the Notebooks) was the idea that languageoffers a picture of the world. By 'picture theory' (not a descriptionin the Tractatus) Wittgenstein meant that language reflects

reality, mirrors the world. The theory is an account of the relationbetween the individual word and what it refers to in the externalenvironment, or between a sentence or a proposition and theevent or situation to which it relates. Wittgenstein rejected thenotion that names are meaningful because of their relationshipwith other names. What fixes sense is that names have anchorsin reality. One name stands for one thing and another for anotherthing and they are connected together so that the whole, like aliving picture, presents the atomic fact.

Von Wright, a close associate of Wittgenstein, records howWittgenstein said he arrived at the picture theory. He was in atrench on the Eastern front in the Great War reading a magazinearticle about an automobile accident. There was a schematicpicture showing the probable sequence of events. He suddenlysaw that the picture served as a proposition, could have beenreplaced by an extended verbal description of the events. Itoccurred to him that the analogy could be reversed. The picturein the magazine had parts related to real world events. Aproposition could be seen as a picture by virtue of a similarcorrespondence between its parts and the world. Theproposition, or sentence, could be related to the real world by thenames, the words, and the structure in which the names wereplaced.7

The following are the rather few extracts8 from the Tractatusand Notebooks which can be directly related to the picture theoryand on which the standard view of the theory has beenconstructed:

In the proposition a world is, as it were, put together experimentally as in the presentationof a motor accident in Paris by dolls and so on.N7 The proposition constructs a world bymeans of a logical scaffolding.N16 The sense of the proposition is what it images.N19 Theproposition is a model of reality. It images a situation by means of a tableau vivant.N26Naming is like pointing.N100 A language which can express everything mirrors certainproperties of the world.N107 The picture is a model of reality.T2.12 The picture is linked toreality, it reaches up to it.T2.1511 Every picture is also a logical picture. The logical picturecan depict the world.T2.1812 The picture agrees with reality or not. It is right or wrong, trueor false.T2.21 The name means the object, the object is its meaning.T3.203 To theconfiguration of the simple signs in the propositional sign corresponds the configuration ofthe objects in the state of affairs.T3.21 The name cannot be analysed further by anydefinition. It is a primitive sign.T3.26 The sign is the part of the symbol perceptible by thesenses.T3.32 Man possesses the capacity of constructing languages in which everysense can be expressed without having any idea how and what each word means.T4.002Logic is not a theory but a reflection of the world.T6.13

It is apparent how large a superstructure has been constructed by otherson a rather narrow base.

The Tractatus was treated as revolut ionary and profoundly influencedphilosophy in England and the United States. Frege, however, on receiving acopy from Wit tgenstein, said that he could make nothing of it . Even thosewho could not fully accept its significance st ill thought there was somethingstriking in it . Elizabeth Anscombe's commented that "much of the Tractatusremains valuable and the book fascinates people like me who do not believe

a lot of it "9. In the struggle for survival between the Tractatus and thePhilosophical Invest igat ions, the spirit of the Tractatus has survivedbetter.10 Philosophical interest in the Tractatus is not yet exhausted.

LANGUAGE GAMES and MEANING AS USE

In 1922 after the publicat ion of the Tractatus Wit tgenstein abandoned hisinterest in philosophy; logically since in the Tractatus he had said that therewas nothing more that could be said. He became a teacher in an elementaryschool in Austria. Bart ley11 gives a detailed account of this period. t rying toget a better understanding of the development of Wit tgenstein's thoughtby examining his life and t imes in the 'lost years' of the decade after the war.Wit tgenstein spent six years teaching peasant children their nat ivelanguage. He adopted an inter-act ional system for advancing thevocabulary and grammatical knowledge of his pupils by having them joinwith him in compiling a dict ionary; the dict ionary was eventually published asa textbook for elementary schools. Bart ley's account seems relevant whenone considers that much of the first part of Invest igat ions deals with howchildren are brought to learn their first language. A harsh teacher,Wit tgenstein left his career as a teacher under something of a cloud. Hespent the remaining 'lost years' as a gardener in a monastery. He returnedto Cambridge in 1929

Within the space of 11 years after the Tractatus, Wit tgenstein abandonedthe picture theory and in the Blue and Brown Books sketched out a quitedifferent account of language as a congeries of language games withdifferent languages as different sets of language games. On this new viewwords were given their meaning by use, by t raining and essent ially by socialinteract ion, not by any special relat ionship otherwise between words andexternal reality. The Blue and Brown Books were a preview for thePhilosophical Invest igat ions. In some respects they offer a more coherentaccount of his thinking than can be drawn from the PhilosophicalInvest igat ions. It was through the Blue Book (dictated to his class inCambridge in 1933) that the concept of the 'language-game', of criteria -roughly, logical good evidence - for the applicat ion of an expression, and of'family resemblance' first entered circulat ion. The Brown Book (dictated toSkinner and Ambrose in 1934) consists of a rather exhaust ing set ofillustrat ions of the language-game method, difficult to read because thepoint of imagining the various situat ions is unclear.

How did he come to the idea of language-games? There are variouspossibilit ies. One is that it stems from his teaching experiences in Austria;no doubt he used 'act ion examples' to explain the meanings of words topupils. Another possibility is in an anecdote recorded by Freeman Dyson.12Wit tgenstein was passing a field where a football game was being played;the thought struck him that in language we play games with words. Thiscould have been the genesis of the central idea in the new philosophy, thenot ion of the language-game. Wit tgenstein had already given an account ofhow he became disillusioned with the picture theory: Sraffa, an Italianeconomist friend, made a Neapolitan gesture, brushing the underneath ofhis chin with an outward sweep of the finger-t ips of one hand. He askedWit tgenstein: "What is the grammar of that?" This, according toWit tgenstein, broke the hold on him of the concept ion that a proposit ionmust literally be a picture of the reality it describes13.

In 1929 he described his new philosophical method as being the transit ion

from the quest ion of t ruth to the quest ion of meaning. With this shift thelinguist ic turn which had begun with the Tractatus was completed. Insteadof language mirroring the logical form of the universe, the apparent structureof reality now was merely the 'shadow of grammar'14. There must behuman agreement of a certain sort for our language-games to work; fromlanguage as a device for construct ion of a model of the world, language isnow seen as a system of communicat ion used by men within the world,relying on certain features of their world and of their 'form of life' -Wit tgenstein's term. At this point the frequent ly overworked metaphor of alanguage-game was introduced to convey the point , that language cannotbe divorced from its wider human context ; an ut terance must be seen as amove in a game. The meaning of a word is no more and no less than theway it is used, in effect a symbolic convent ion within a part icular group orcommunity. Wit tgenstein compared the grammar which determines howwords are used in a sentence to the rules that determine how the piecesare used in the game of chess. A language-game is a linguist ic thought-experiment, a philosophical tool for exploring language atomist ically in thebelief that it will reveal something about the simple nature of language.

How Wit tgenstein approached his new theory is shown in the followingextracts15: Language-games are the forms of language with which a child begins tomake use of words.B17 The study of language-games is the study of the primitive forms oflanguage or primitive languages.B17 Children are taught their native language bylanguage-games.B81 A sentence I will call a complete sign in a language-game; theconstituent signs are words.B82 The sentence is just such a picture which hasn't theslightest similarity with what it represents. Think of words as instruments characterized bytheir use.B67 Think of the use of a hammer, a chisel.P11 We are like people who think thatthe pieces of wood shaped more or less like chess-men or draught pieces and standingon a chess-board make a game, even if nothing has been said as to how they are to beused.B72 Let's not imagine the meaning as an occult connection the mind makes betweena word and a thing, that this connection contains the whole usage of a word as the seedmight be said to contain the tree.B73

Wittgenstein was struck by the difficulty of any direct link between wordsand their objects by the fact that there are not any ostensive definit ions forwords like 'one', 'number', or 'not '. He asks:

What is the meaning of a word? What does the explanation of a word look like?B1 If wehad to name anything which is the life of a sign, we should have to say that it was itsuse.B4 The sign, the sentence, gets its significance from the system of signs, from thelanguage to which it belongs.B5 I want you to remember that words have those meaningswhich we have given them and we give them meanings by explanations.B27 Let us notforget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it as it were by a power independent ofus. A word has a meaning someone has given to it.B28

The eventual product of Wit tgenstein's t ime in Cambridge as professor ofphilosophy was the Philosophical Invest igat ions. The Invest igat ions is not avery sat isfactory work, neither coherent nor orderly in presentat ion,disjointed and difficult to follow. Ayer, in his book on Wit tgenstein, said thatin the Invest igat ions there is "much that I consider to be false". BertrandRussell could see nothing in Wit tgenstein's later writ ings: "I have not foundin Wit tgenstein's Philosophical Invest igat ions anything that seemed to meto be interest ing and I do not understand why a whole school findsimportant wisdom in its pages". The circumstances of its preparat ion andpublicat ion may go some way to explain its failings. Wit tgenstein himselfsaid: "The book is really only an album". He said that he would have like tohave produced a good book but this had not come about: "the t ime haspassed when I could improve it ".

He starts by saying that he had been forced to recognize that there were

'grave mistakes' in the Tractatus though he does not make clear exact lywhat these were; it is known that he did not wholly abandon the Tractatus;he would have liked to have the Tractatus and the PhilosophicalInvest igat ions published together, though this was never done before hisearly death. On re-reading the Tractatus before he completed theInvest igat ions he said: "It suddenly seemed to me that I should publishthose old thoughts and the new ones together so that the lat ter could beseen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background ofmy old way of thinking" (PI Preface) "He once told me that he thought thatin the Tractatus he had presented a perfected account of the view that isthe only alternat ive to the viewpoint of his later work".16

Some verbat im extracts from the Invest igat ions should help one tounderstand the new approach. Surprisingly, there is lit t le which addssignificant ly to what was said in the Blue and Brown Books. He included afuller discussion of St. August ine's account of how children learn theirlanguage:

A child uses primitive forms when it learns to talk. Here the teaching of language is notexplanation but training.P5 An important part of the training will consist in the teacher'spointing to the object and at the same uttering a word.P6 We can think of the wholeprocess of using words as one of those games by which children learn their nativelanguage. I shall call the whole consisting of language and the actions into which it iswoven a language-game.P7 The term language-game is meant to bring into prominencethe fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity or the life-form.P23 Themeaning of a word is explained by the explanation of its meaning i.e. if you want tounderstand the use of the word 'meaning', look for what are called explanations ofmeaning.P560 Consider the proceedings we call games. I mean board-games, ball-games, Olympic Games, and so on.P66 What is common to them all? The result of theexamination is that we see a complicated network of similarities and fdissimilaritiesoverlapping and criss-crossing.P66 I can think of no better expression to characterizethese similarities than 'family resemblances'.P67 The question what is a word really isanalogous to what is a piece in chess.P108

Wittgenstein recognized that the idea of language-games was open tocrit icism. He said:

Someone might object against me: 'You take the easy way out. You talkabout all sorts of language-games but have nowhere said what theessence of a language-game and hence of language is. What is common toall these act ivit ies, what makes them into language or parts oflanguage'.P65

One can doubt whether refusing to define what is common to games andsimply saying that games have a "family resemblance" takes one very muchfurther.

A final assessment of the Invest igat ions need not be as severe as BertrandRussell's. There are unsat isfactory features in it ; interpretat ion andcommentaries have obscured the extent to which the ideas are notpresented coherent ly and systemat ically. Monk comments in his biographyof Wit tgenstein that if the Philosophical Invest igat ions is read in the spirit ofwant ing to know what Wit tgenstein has to say, it very quickly will becomeboring, not because it is intellectually difficult but because it will bepract ically impossible to gather what Wit tgenstein is saying; in t ruth, Monkcont inues, Wit tgenstein is not saying anything, he is present ing a techniquefor the unravelling of confusions. Elizabeth Anscombe not long ago wrote: "Ionce heard someone ask Wit tgenstein what it all came to, what, so tospeak, was the upshot of the philosophy he was teaching in the 1930s. Hedid not answer. I am disposed to think that there was not an answer he

did not answer. I am disposed to think that there was not an answer hecould give, that namely he did not think out a total posit ion as in writ ing hisfirst book, that rather he was constant ly enquiring. There were some thingshe was pret ty sure of but much was in a state of enquiry. I deprecateattempts to expound Wit tgenstein's thought as a finished thing".17

Despite the crit icisms, the fact remains that the book has been widelyinfluent ial, has provided a subject of intense study for many philosophydepartments over the years. The slogans of 'language-games' and 'meaningas use' cont inue to appear in many different contexts. Books and art icleshave been writ ten exploit ing the not ion that there must be differentlanguage-games for different disciplines: a language-game of morality, alanguage-game of the law, a language-game of almost any subject .

RECONCILING PICTURE THEORY, LANGUAGE-GAMES and MEANINGAS USE?

Superficially, there is a direct conflict between the early and the laterWit tgenstein. One should dist inguish Wit tgenstein's own view of the conflictfrom the conflict as seen by commentators. Is there substant ial conflict?There is a problem of how Wit tgenstein could have presented two suchdifferent accounts of language with equal convict ion. Can they bereconciled? The evidence from Wit tgenstein himself is not clear-cut. If onelooks closely at the wording Wit tgenstein used in the Tractatus and in thelater work, the sharpness of the dist inct ion between the two approaches isdiminished. There are elements of 'meaning as use' in the Tractatus; therea r e elements of language as a picturing of reality in the PhilosophicalInvest igat ions.

'Meaning as use' in the Tractatus and the Notebooks:

The conventions of our language are extraordinarily complicated.N70 Colloquiallanguage is a part of human organism and not less complicated than it.T4.002 Themeanings of primitive signs can be explained by elucidations. Elucidations arepropositions which contain the primitive signs. They can therefore only be understoodwhen the meanings of these signs are known.T3.263 In order to recognize the symbol inthe sign, we must consider the significant use.T3.326 The meanings of the simple signs,words, must be explained to us if we are to understand them.T4.026

'Picture theory' in the Invest igat ions and the Blue and Brown Books:

The word falls, one is tempted to say, into a mould of my mind long prepared for it.B170The meaning of a sign (roughly that which is of importance about the sign) is an image.B5What is the relation between name and the thing named? This relation may consist amongmany other things in the fact that hearing the name calls before our mind the picture ofwhat is named.P37 What really comes before our mind when we understand a word? Isn'tit something like a picture? Can't it be a picture?P139 If we compare a proposition to apicture, we must think whether we are comparing it to a portrait or to a genre picture andboth comparisons have point.P522 What is the content of the experience of imaging? Theanswer is a picture or a description.Pii149 But if a sentence can strike me like a paintingin words, and the very individual word in a sentence as like a picture, then it is no suchmarvel that the word used in isolation and without purpose can seem to carry a particularmeaning itself.Pii183

Wittgenstein seems to have confessed to a cont inuing puzzlement aboutthe nature of words: Naming appears as a queer connection of a word with an object.We may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind. as it were a baptism ofan object.P38 We imagine that a feeling enables us to perceive as it were a connectingmechanism between the look of the word and the sound we utter. It's as if we could graspthe whole use of a word in a flash.P197 What is the primitive reaction with which thelanguage game begins? How do people get to use these words? The primitive reactionmay have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word. Pii185 If the

formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we be interested not ingrammar but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar.Pii195

In these last extracts Wit tgenstein, without explicit ly recognising it , wasspeculat ing about the evolut ionary origin of language. There appearedsome natural appropriateness of the word for its meaning, going beyond anyview of language as totally convent ional.

It seems right to conclude that, for Wit tgenstein, the conflict betweenpicture theory, meaning as use and language-games was not nearly assharp as others have suggested. Authors present ing Wit tgenstein's viewshave seemed to want to make the division between the early and the lateWit tgenstein far more dramat ic and final. "With the collapse of themetaphysics of logical atomism the picture theory of the proposit ion fell tooand with it the thesis of isomorphism between language and reality. Thewhole concept ion of the proposit ion and of the relat ion between theproposit ion and what it describes was undermined"18 (Hacker)."Wit tgenstein's new philosophy entailed the reject ion of some of thefundamental thoughts of the Tractatus, the abandonment of the picture oflanguage"19 (von Wright). Kenny has remarked that Wit tgenstein will beshown to have over-est imated in later life the distance which separated thepicture theory of meaning from the discussion of meaning in thePhilosophical Invest igat ions.20 Perhaps the author of the Invest igat ionshimself in the early sect ions did not fully understand the Tractatus; "whatwas offered there were almost 'st raw men, certainly crude caricatures of theposit ions of the Tractatus"21 (Bart ley).

This leaves the quest ion where the idea of 'language-games' can be fit tedin. What good reason is there to believe that language-games tell usanything about actual language? Wit tgenstein himself made no verydetermined effort to analyse the idea; he said that he had wanted to showby means of language-games the vague way in which we use language andproposit ional sentences. If one looks more closely at Wit tgenstein's usualexamples: football and chess, the essence of the games is not that they aremerely sets of arbit rary, abstract rules agreed between the players. Therules of the games have no meaning without the material base required forthe game: in football, the ball, the goalposts, the marked-out pitch, the liveplayers to kick the ball. In chess, the dist inct pieces and the board arematerial things, the players are material things without which the game ofchess cannot exist . The rules interact with, reflect the reality which formsthe material base of the game. Maybe somewhat along these lines the earlyand the late philosophies could be reconciled. If Wit tgenstein had had moret ime and the necessary philosophical energy, he might himself have arrivedat a coherent total account. He might have been able, to rephrase his ownwords, eventually to produce a "good book".

DEVELOPMENTS SINCE WITTGENSTEIN

Since the Tractatus and the Philosophical Invest igat ions there have beenmajor advances in different but relevant fields, in philosophical discussion, inevolut ionary theory, in psychology and child development and mostimportant ly in the neurosciences. Most recent ly there has been thediscovery of mirror neurons, that is, neurons which are excited by thepercept ion of act ion and which also seem to const itute the neuralprecursors of motor programs reproducing the perceived act ion, that is,providing a plausible basis for imitat ion and communicat ion. There has alsobeen progress in the study of the act ive brain in the product ion of speech,

new ideas on the motor basis of speech and language, on the relat ion ofspeech and gesture and on the relat ion of visual and auditory percept ion. Inthis paper I propose to consider, necessarily briefly, some of the discussionsand advances which appear to bear on the central theme, that is, therelat ion of language and reality - the underlying issue raised byWit tgenstein's work.

Philosophy

Hacker's study of Wit tgenstein emphasizes as a central problem or clusterof problems associated with intent ionality, whether and in what waylanguage is connected with reality. The intent ionality of thought and speechalike is puzzling; the temptat ion is to at tempt to explain the intent ionality ofspeech in terms of a semant ic, that is, a meaning-endowing, connect ionbetween the signs of language and reality. Davidson suggests thatlanguage is anchored to reality by original condit ioning; a word one has beencondit ioned to hold applicable in the presence of snakes will refer to snakes.Of course, he accepts that very many words are not learnt in this way but itis those which are which anchor language to the world. Hacker commentsthat original condit ioning is t raining, not teaching; ostensive definit ions donot connect language with reality. Rather a word is explained by referenceto an opt ional sample; explanat ions of word-meaning, whether verbal orostensive, remain within language. Neither condit ioning nor explaining word-meaning anchors language to reality; language is not semant ically anchoredto reality at all. It is human pract ices that give words their meanings.22 ThusHacker is fully commit ted to the later Wit tgensteinian view of languagewhere meaning is use. Kenny takes up the theme that instead of languagemirroring the logical form of the universe, the apparent structure of reality ismerely the shadow of grammar; the structure of language cannot beexternally just ified; any kind of explanat ion of language presupposes analready exist ing language. The isomorphism between the world andlanguage survives in the Philosophical Invest igat ions but with its polereversed from the earlier philosophy: that is, the structure of language is st illisomorphic with the structure of reality but this is not because languagemirrors the logical form of the universe. Rather, grammar imposes itspatterning on our view of reality23.

The most sustained at tack on the idea of language as a mirror of the worldwas by Rorty in his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He fullyaccepts the Wit tgensteinian not ion of language as a tool, rather than as amirror; the picture which holds t radit ional philosophy capt ive is that of themind as a great mirror containing various representat ions, some accurate,some not and capable of being studied by pure non-empirical methods. "Itwas such claims as these which Wit tgenstein mocked in the PhilosophicalInvest igat ions and it is by following Wit tgenstein's lead that analyt icphilosophy has progressed towards the post-posit ivist ic stance it present lyoccupies"24. To think of language as a picture of the world is, he says, notuseful in explaining how language is learned or understood; one shouldhammer away at the holist ic point that words take their meanings fromother words rather than by their representat ive character. "We must get thevisual, and in part icular the mirroring, metaphors out of our speechaltogether. We have to understand speech not only as not the externalizingof inner representat ions but as not a representat ion at all. The whole-hearted behaviorism,, naturalism, and physicalism I have been commendinghelp us to avoid the self-decept ion of thinking that we possess a deep,hidden, metaphysically significant nature which makes us "irreducibly"different from inkwells or atoms. We should free ourselves from the not ion

that philosophy can explain what science leaves unexplained. Our post-Kant ian sense that epistemology or some successor subject is at the centreof philosophy is a reflect ion of the fact the professional philosopher's self-image depends upon his professional preoccupat ion with the image of themirror of nature"25.

Rorty's view, which is essent ially the view of the later Wit tgenstein, is thatepistemology has to be abandoned as the central subject of philosophy. Infact , following the early Wit tgenstein, there is nothing more to be said intradit ional philosophy. If philosophy survives at all, it will only be asconversat ion between philosophers, not as a fundamental pursuit of t ruth orunderstanding of the world. This then is the very large consequence ofadherence to the meaning as use theory of the later Wit tgenstein. Thequest ion is: Is there reason why Rorty's view can not be valid? Do otherdevelopments, part icularly in the study of language in the brain, make hisphilosophical conclusions untenable?

Linguist ics

Until comparat ively recent ly, language has been essent ially a matter forlinguists, with all the mult itudinous complexit ies of the subject , the historicaldevelopment of language, the theoret ical developments in phonology, insyntax and semant ics, in pragmatics and sociolinguist ics, manifested in aplethora of grammars, syntact ic theories, and semant ic theories togetherwith the overriding complexit ies deriving from the vast number of differentactual languages to be studied, different lexicons, different grammaticalsystems. Nowadays there is concern with language in other disciplines. Inlinguist ics proper, there has been the major development of syntact ic theoryassociated with Chomsky, but also involving many other linguists. All thesedevelopments have in the process made linguist ics an impenetrable junglefor non-linguists. In evolut ionary biology there has been a widening study oflanguage, given impetus by the New York Academy of Sciences conferenceon language origin in 1975. The view is emerging that the language capacityis the product of the evolut ion of the human brain; language is not a purelycultural and convent ional construct . The study of language which for thelast half-century had taken an abstract , purely linguist ic approach has nowbeen joined by the applicat ion of the increasingly powerful techniques ofneuroscience to the funct ioning of language in the brain.

At the t ime when Wit tgenstein's ideas were emerging, eventually to takeform in the Tractatus and the Philosophical Invest igat ions, linguist ics was atthe early modern stage. Saussure's Cours de linguist ique générale, seen asthe foundat ion of modern linguist ics, was published in 1915 with its centralthesis as the arbit rariness of the sign, language as convent ion, a sociallyconstructed system. There is no evidence that Wit tgenstein knew anythingabout Saussure; the Cours was not well known in English-speakingcountries for years after 1915. Nor is there evidence that Wit tgenstein knewmuch about current discussion in linguist ics otherwise; he makes noment ion of Saussure or of Bloomfield whose Language was published in1933; in it Bloomfield also makes no ment ion of Saussure, though this is lesssurprising when one knows that the 1933 book was a revised issue of abook first published in 1913. There is an interest ing parallelism betweenSaussure's Cours and the Philosophical Invest igat ions. Both were compiledfrom students' notes and both were published posthumously, bothundoubtedly incomplete and not fully systemat ic. In the Cours, as in thePhilosophical Invest igat ions, there are loose ends, not t ied into a consistent,overall theory. For example, the Cours had lit t le to say on the important

topic of semant ics. Whilst words are convent ional, Saussure accepted thatlinguist ic signs are realit ies with their seat in the brain: "If we could embracethe sum of word-images stored in the minds of all individuals, we couldident ify the social bond that const itutes language"26.

The most characterist ic feature of modern linguist ics is structuralism, that is,regarding language as a system of relat ions, or more precisely a set of inter-related systems, the elements of which, sounds, words etc. have no validityindependent ly of their relat ions of equivalence and contrast which holdbetween them, essent ially quest ions of syntax. The lack of a reasonablysat isfactory theory of semant ics remains. Chomsky's first impact onbehavioural science was his not ion that sentence-structure can be studiedindependent ly of meaning. The new linguist ic science of sentence structurewas to become more abstract , leaving behind meaning to study the purelaws of syntax. However, in a quite recent theoret ical development,Chomsky has signalled a move back to the lexicon, to the importance of therole of the individual words. This not to say that syntax is any lessimportant. The new theory, minimalism, is conceived as involving afundamental re-orientat ion of grammatical theory with many differencesbetween the minimalist programme and the theoret ical insights oft radit ional brt ransformat ional-generat ivism; the fundamental not ions andconstructs are different. The implicat ion of the theory is that syntax isprojected from the lexicon.27 28

This has understandably led to a new concern with philosophical aspects oflanguage for linguist ics. Chomsky out lined his account of the relat ion oflanguage and philosophy in Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988)and most recent ly in New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind(2000). The 1988 book was based on lectures he gave in Managua; there hewas asked about different theories of meaning and replied that there wereno very good theories of meaning: "in fact most of the theory of meaning iscalled syntax"; but he recognised that there was a good deal more to thetheory of meaning: for example, quest ions about the relat ion of meaning touse and to verificat ion, about the way words come to refer to things and soon, "but about these topics I think there is very lit t le to say of a construct ivenature"29. In the recent book Chomsky tackles some of these philosophicalquest ions at considerable length after acknowledging that the earliestformulat ion of generat ive grammar was influenced by Wit tgenstein, Aust inand others. On current debates in philosophy between externalism andinternalism, he says: "we are asked to consider whether meanings are in thehead or are externally determined. The convent ional answer today is thatthey are externally determined by two kinds of factors, features of the realworld and norms of communicat ion. A standard externalist argument is thatunless the external world determines the contents of the thought of anagent, it is an ut ter mystery how the agent 's thoughts can be publiclyavailable to another"30. Philosophers, he says, frequent ly claim thatlanguage is to represent reality but this is not the fundamental funct ion.The key funct ions of language are to enable humans to form thoughts andcommunicate. Chomsky makes it clear that he thinks of himself as aninternalist , which means restrict ing ourselves to studying the innermechanisms which contribute to thought and expression; the approach isconcerned with mental aspects of the world and includes the study of realobjects in the natural world, specifically the brain, its states and funct ions.This moves the study of the mind towards eventual integrat ion with biologyand the natural sciences31, a more promising approach than philosophicalexplorat ions of language and mind. Linguist ics is to be seen as the scienceof mind/brain. The boundary between linguist ics and natural sciences will

shift or disappear and in part icular there will be a new relat ionship oflinguist ics and brain-science.

Psychology

In psychology, speech and language have generated a large experimentalliterature, not surprisingly given the importance of language in thefunct ioning of the human mind and in society. Most psychologists (andlinguists) do not believe that, for children, learning a first language isanything like the controlled and directed process involved in acquiring asecond language in adults or learning any other skill. Chomsky says thatlanguage acquisit ion proceeds on course even without any concern on thepart of the human parents; the precision of phonet ic detail a child acquirescannot possibly be the result of t raining; the speed and precision ofvocabulary growth has to be explained by a biological endowment forlanguage; the child somehow has the concepts available before experiencewith language and basically learns labels fro already exist ing concepts. ForJackendoff also, the effort lessness of vocabulary acquisit ion is a humanadaptat ion, the capacity for vocabulary being independent of that forgrammatical adaptat ion. Imitat ion seems to be involved in first languagelearning but it seems clear that imitat ion does not operate in any deliberateway through training children to acquire words, grammatical rules andspeech sounds. At best it seems a matter of unconscious imitat ion butthere remain many obscurit ies about how children extract from the streamof speech sound the 'right ' words and the 'right ' grammatical rules. Itremains unclear how imitat ion makes possible the linking of word meaningand word sound or the acquisit ion of the complexit ies of the grammaticalsystem.

Brain-scanning32

At the t ime when Wit tgenstein was putt ing together the material whichwent to form the Philosophical Invest igat ions, important advances werealready taking place in understanding the funct ioning of the brain in relat ionto language. Tradit ionally, informat ion about language and the brain hadcome from lesion studies and the pathology of aphasia, the different formswhich aphasia could take, different iat ion between aphasias affect inggrammar and aphasias affect ing meaning; these were seen as correlatedtopographically with Broca's and Wernicke's areas in the cortex. At thesame t ime Penfield33 was invest igat ing the language funct ion of the brainby direct electrical st imulat ion of the brain surface. Brain surgery for pat ientssuffering from epilepsy was directed towards ident ifying and removing theepilept ic focus; before any surgery took place it was necessary to markwhich parts of the cort ical surface were essent ial for language and this wasdone by not ing where speech interrupt ions or distort ions were caused whenpart icular points were st imulated. Whilst this technique is st ill used and hasthrown light on language funct ion more generally, invest igat ion of languagein the brain has made immense strides with the development of non-invasive new technologies which make it possible to see direct ly what ishappening in the brain of conscious, normal subjects when part icularaspects of language are elicited. These new brain-scanning techniques -PET , fMRI, ERP, TMS, MEG34 - have been used to study which neuronalareas are excited by part icular categories of words or types of sentence,exploring lexicon and syntax. Interest ingly, Wit tgenstein himself to an extentant icipated or at least saw the desirability of advance in invest igat ion of thebrain in relat ion to language: "What comes before our mind when weunderstand a word? Isn't it only because of our too slight acquaintance with

what goes on in the brain and the nervous system. If we had a moreaccurate knowledge of these things, we should see what connect ions wereestablished by the training and then we should be able to say when welooked into his brain: 'Now he has read this word. Now the readingconnect ion has been set up.'"35

With the development of the new brain-scanning techniques, this isprecisely what researchers are doing. The old concept of two languagecentres (Broca's and Wernicke's) processing all words alike has beenreplaced by a model according to which words are organised as discretedistributed neuron ensembles that differ in their cort ical topographies. Whenhumans process words of different kinds, the cort ical areas which becomeact ive depend on differences in the meanings of the words. In the braindifferent categories of words, content words, funct ion words, vision words,act ion words, concrete words, abstract words, animate words, inanimatewords, are associated with topographically different patterns ofexcitat ion36. The brain appears to be categorizing words in ways similar tothe standard analyses of the lexicon. There have been similar findings inrelat ion to syntax. Fromkin summarized results of experimental work usingERPs; response to syntact ically well-formed but semant ically anomaloussentences produced patterns of brain act ivity dist inct in t ime and indistribut ion from patterns elicited by syntact ically deviant sentences;different types of syntact ic deviance produced different ERP patterns. Theadvance of brain scanning techniques has meant that more and more isbeing learnt about the way in which the brain deals with meaning andgrammar.

Beyond the use of brain-scanning to study response to words andsentences, brain-scanning is also of importance for studying cerebral motoract ion. It has been discovered that the execut ion of an act ion, a bodilymovement, is preceded by a motor image, a pattern of brain excitat ionsimilar to that observed during the execut ion of the act ion; the samepattern is also observed when the act ion is mentally simulated - onlyimagined - and not executed. This must also be the case for the motoract ivity required to produce a speech ut terance; there must be a motorimage, a pattern of neural excitat ion prior to an ut terance resembling thebrain act ivity observed with the making, or imagining, of the ut terance.

Mirror neurons37

The discovery in the last few years of mirror neurons has been an importantevent in neuroscience. The first mirror neurons to be found were visuomotorneurons which respond both when a part icular act ion is performed by asubject and when the subject perceives the same act ion performed byanother. In effect the visuomotor neurons respond both to the percept ion ofan act ion and to the planning and execut ion of the act ion. It is suggestedthat the matching system represented by these mirror neurons couldprovide a neuronal basis for a process of act ion understanding, that isunderstanding the gestures of others. Other categories of mirror neuronshave been discovered since. Perhaps the most interest ing for language arethe neurons which are seen to link tongue movement and heard speech.The listener understands the speaker when neural centres for his or herown art iculatory gestures are act ivated. These mirror neurons seem torepresent the link between sender and receiver Liberman postulated in hismotor theory of speech percept ion38; for the first t ime it has been shownthat listening produces act ivat ion for specific phonemes in speech motorcentres. The phoneme recognit ion mechanism could be involved in

phonet ically understanding others' speech because the speaker and thelistener share the same art iculatory motor repertoire. Other research hasshown that many object-related act ions can be recognised by their soundthrough mult ifunct ional mirror neurons in the premotor cortex whichdischarge when a specific act ion is performed, when the subject hears asound associated with the act ion and also when it observes the act ion. Theexistence of these audiovisual neurons suggest how the meanings ofact ions could be linked to spoken language.

There has been a good deal of speculat ion about the larger significance ofmirror neurons. It has been suggested that the discovery of mirror neuronsmay provide a neurobiological basis for the evolut ionary emergence oflanguage, assuming a cont inuity between original gesture and language.This was the proposal in Rizzolat t i and Arbib's paper "Language within ourgrasp" (1998). They suggested that mirror neurons might be the foundat ionfor the development of symbolic and linguist ic processing. The not ion thatevolut ion could yield a language system on top of the act ion system, in theirview, becomes much more probable. The human capacity to communicatebeyond that of other primates would have depended on the progressiveevolut ion of the mirror neuron system.

There remain quest ions about the plausibility of the link between mirrorneurons and language origins. Much of the speculat ion is based on thefinding of the mirror neurons in the monkey homolog of Broca's area, inhumans for a long t ime supposed to be the language centre with theconfirmat ion that mirror neurons also are found in the human Broca's area.However, there are divergent views about the role of Broca's area inlanguage; it is now generally thought that it has no exclusive role in theprocessing of language39. The other main argument against the largesignificance of mirror neurons is that advanced by Hurford in a counter-paper ent it led "Language beyond our grasp: What mirror neurons can, andcannot, do for language evolut ion". He says that whilst mirror neurons haveimportant implicat ions for the evolut ion of language, suggest ing pre-exist ingbrain structure which could provide the basis for language, mirror neuronscannot by their very nature provide a basis for the central structural relat ionof human language, the arbit rary Saussurean sign. In the representat ion of asound sequence for 'apple' or 't ree',the relat ion between the word and themeaning is arbit rary; there is nothing in the pronunciat ion of the word whichin any way resembles the denoted concept.

Motor control and the Motor theory of language

The previous sect ions have described two important areas of neuroscienceresearch with direct relevance for the funct ioning of language in the brain.To these have to be added research on the central field of brain research,the planning and execut ion of act ion, the cerebral motor control system.Here an out line is emerging of the way in which the brain plans and controlsthe execut ion of all types of bodily act ion. Speech is an eminent ly motoract ivity and the potent ial relevance of advances in motor control research isobvious; speech and language, like all forms of skilled act ion, depend uponinteract ion and co-ordinat ion between motor act ivity and perceptualact ivity. The development of new technology allowing direct inspect ion ofbrain funct ioning, coupled with mirror neurons as providing a link betweenpercept ion and act ion and with the deeper understanding of the brainsystems for motor control mean that neurology is becoming able to give amuch more concrete content to its concern with language. It is thecontent ion that these advances in neuroscience validate the motor theory

of speech and language (well beyond the earlier motor theory of speechpercept ion).

The motor theory of language40 is that there is a direct relat ion betweenthe funct ioning of speech and motor control generally, with languagedepending on pre-exist ing motor primit ives together with the operat ion ofmotor equivalence. The structures of language (phonological, lexical andsyntact ic) were derived from and modelled on the pre-exist ing complexneural systems which had evolved for the control of body movement, Motorcontrol at the neural level requires pre-set elementary units of act ion (motorprimit ives) which can be integrated into more extended patterns of bodilyact ion - neural motor programs. Speech is essent ially a motor act ivity (astream of art iculatory gestures). Language made use of the elementary pre-set units of motor act ion to produce equivalent phonological units(phonemic categories). The neural programs for individual words wereconstructed from the elementary units in the same way as motor programsfor bodily act ion. The syntact ic processes and structures of language weremodelled on the 'motor syntax'. With the advance in neurological research, itbecomes possible to integrate the motor theory of language withneurological research on motor control, part icularly drawing on recentresearch on motor programs, motor imagery, motor primit ives and motorequivalence.

Along with the concept of motor primit ives funct ioning in the product ion ofspeech sounds, motor equivalence41 is of central importance in the motortheory of language. Research into motor equivalence demonstrates thatthe structure of a motor program for a given act ion using one set of musclesand joints for its execut ion can be transferred for execut ion by a quitedifferent set of muscles and joints. The simplest illustrat ion of this is that asignature can be executed equally well by the right hand or the left hand,even by the foot. Brain scanning has shown that the same cort ical neuronsfunct ion to produce the act ion in which subjects were asked to write theirnames first with their hand and then with their toe. Motor equivalence canoperate from gesture to speech or speech to gesture. It also seems likelythat it can operate between other modalit ies - or precisely between motorprograms for other modalit ies and motor programs for speech. Motorequivalence is demonstrated most remarkably in the relat ion betweenspeech and gesture. Speech and gesture arise as interact ing elements of asingle system. Every art iculatory gesture can be redirected (through motorequivalence) to produce an equivalent movement (equivalent gesture) ofthe hand and arm. Every gesture structured by a perceived object or act ioncan be redirected to produce an equivalent art iculatory gesture - asequence of speech sounds forming a word. Motor equivalence can funct ionbetween speech and visual percept ion and between visual percept ion andmotor act ion because visual percept ion is also a motor act ivity, with motorprograms and motor primit ives for vision; vision is a highly motoric act ivity.The pract ical realisat ion of the motor theory of language and speech in thelight of these recent advances in neuroscience is that : Elementary speechsounds are the motor equivalents of motor primit ives for bodily movementIndividual speech sounds are motor primit ives Elementary movements of thearm (in gesture or act ion) are the motor equivalents of speech soundsWords formed from the primit ive speech-sound elements are motorprograms Act ion-words are the motor equivalents of the act ions Vision-words are the motor equivalents of perceived objects Before we produce asentence there is a motor image of the sentence A sentence is a high-levelmotor program or act ion plan.

CONCLUSION

How does this bear on "Language as a Mirror or of the World'? What really isthe proposit ion underlying the phrase? What was the real problem theStoics, the scholast ics, and the Wit tgenstein of the Tractatus werewrest ling with? How could language mirror the world? How could words andthe arrangements into which they are placed "mirror the world? What is theworld to be mirrored? What is mirroring? What a mirror does is reflect .'There' is the mirror and over against it is the percept ible, touchable reality.The mirror does not duplicate this reality - it throws back a pattern of lightwhich is patterned by the reality in front of the mirror. There is a matching ofshape between the visible shape of the reality and the visible shape of thepattern of light thrown back from the mirror.

How then can language, speech, the collect ion of words and their orderingreflect in this sense, match the patterning of the external percept ible realitywhich language confronts? It can only be by the patterning of the words,and the patterning of the ordering of the words. But what is this patterning?Words in an ut terance are strings of sounds; words arranged in sequenceare extended strings of sounds. Or if there is a writ ten expression, thewords are strings of let ters, of visual shapes which are taken to representsuccessions of speech sounds. If language is to mirror the world, it must bein the sequences of speech sounds forming the words, in the structures ofthe words placed in confrontat ion with part iculate aspects of the perceivedexternal non-linguist ic reality and in the ordering of the sequences of words,the ways in which the words are combined to reflect events and situat ions.

Perhaps this is what Wit tgenstein was really struggling with. He asked atone point how we get the words, how we come to use them, how we get toacquire them, where do they come from? The proposit ion to which thepresentat ion in this paper leads is that we can get the words through amirroring process (perhaps involving but not exclusively mirror neurons)where the structure of what we see can generate the structure of thesounds we make, where the thing or the act ion can generate a wordadequate to the meaning, to the structure of the thing or act ion, thestructure of the act ion or the motor structure of the visible or audible ortangible object . The possibility of this mirroring taking place comes from theintermediat ion of the cerebral motor system. Everything in the funct ioningbrain eventually links to and derives from the motor system, from the motorprograms, the assemblies of neurons which const itute the motor programsand can be converted from motor to sensory or sensory to motor. Thecommon underlying structuring of the brain is in the motor patterns, themotor programs that are created and externalized, the reflect ion frompercept ion to act ion or back from act ion to percept ion of which theisomorphism between gesture and ut terance is a prime example.

What Wit tgenstein and all the others were wrest ling with, unknowinglyseeking to combat, was the orthodoxy that language is totally arbit rary, hasno actual relat ionship with our act ions, our percept ions or our feelings, thatlanguage is a totally chance product which has, as Wit tgenstein put it , a"mysterious" connect ion with what it refers to. The real struggle, thoughWit tgenstein never put it in this way, is against the Saussurean idea of thesign as at best a convent ional structure, something humans findthemselves with, something they agree to use to mean "this or that".There's no reason for the word; it just happens to be here; we just happento use this or that word for this or that thing or act ion or feeling.

The proposit ion then to which this paper has led is that the capacity oflanguage to mirror reality, to reflect the perceived world in which we findourselves, derives from the structuring of the human brain and specificallyfrom the way in which the human brain plans and executes act ion, the totalmotor control system. By way of the motor system, the words mirror theobjects or act ions which they refer to. The act ions we make or perceive, theobjects we perceive or handle, the feelings we observe in others or inourselves generate words appropriate to them. Primit ive language, or ratherprimit ive words, were generated by all forms of percept ion; the syntax weuse was modelled on the syntax of our act ion and of the act ion of othersthat we observe.

And how and why did humans, and only humans, acquire this remarkablepower to mirror reality through the sounds the human makes? That is thequest ion of the origin of language in human evolut ion which Wit tgenstein ineffect touches on at one point . Why can other primates not speak? Theanswer is: because human brains are different; the wiring is different; thetongue and the art iculatory organs are connected to the central motorsystem in a different way from other animals, there has been 'cerebralreorganizat ion' (Jan Wind's42 phrase) to make language possible. Why itoccurred is a matter for speculat ion. Plausibly it might have been associatedin some way with the change in the human mode of life, the shift tobipedalism and upright posture, a redistribut ion of neuronal connect ions tothe tongue and larynx made possible by the ending of the grasping funct ionof the foot with a balancing increase in the neural connect ions of the hand.

NOTES

1 Lyons 1968 14-15 2 von Wright in Malcolm 1958 15 3 The Tractatus was published in 1922 in a version with the German andEnglish texts printed on facing pages. Bertrand Russell's Introduct ion (whichWit tgenstein did not much like) said: "Mr. Wit tgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whether or not it prove to give the ult imate t ruth on thematters with which it deals, certainly deserves, by its breadth and scope andprofundity, to be considered an important event in the philosophical world".This contrasts sharply with Russell's dismissive comments much later onthe Philosophical Invest igat ions. 4 The manuscript Notebooks were first published, in 1961, long after theTractatus and the Philosophical Invest igat ions. The notebooks for the years1914-16 were accidentally saved from the destruct ion of other earlywrit ings. The translat ion of the German text is by Elizabeth Anscombe andthe edit ing by her and von Wright. 5 Wit tgenstein dictated the "Blue Book" (though he did not call it that) to hisclass in Cambridge during the session 1933-34. The "Brown Book" wasdictated to Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose during 1934-5. He sent acopy of the duplicated notes in the Blue Book to Bertrand Russell with alet ter saying: "if you don't read them it doesn't matter at all". When the Blueand Brown Books were published in 1960, with an introduct ion by RushRhees, the t it le page read "Preliminary Studies for the 'PhilosophicalInvest igat ions' generally known as The Blue and Brown Books". 6 Part I of the Philosophical Invest igat ions was complete by 1945; part II waswrit ten between 1947 and 1949. In the published version (1953, 3rd edit ion2001) the editors, Anscombe and Rhees, say that if Wit tgenstein hadpublished the work himself, he would have suppressed a good deal of thelat ter pages of Part I.

7 von Wright in Malcolm 1958 7-8 8 extracts as e.g., N7, p. 7 of the English version of the Notebooks, or T2.12,item 2.12 of the English version of the Tractatus.. 9 Anscombe 1995 402 10 Hacker 1996 1 11 Bart ley 1985 [1973] 12 Freeman Dyson in Malcolm 65 13 von Wright 15-16 Monk 260-261 14 Vesey Foreword xv 15 extracts as e.g.: B17 Blue and Brown Books p.17 : P5 para.5 inPhilosophical Invest igat ions Part I sect ion 5 : Pii195 PhilosophicalInvest igat ions Part II p.195 16 Malcolm 69 17 Anscombe 406 18 Hacker 79 19 von Wright in Malcolm 14 20 Kenny in Vesey ed. 4 21 Bart ley 16 22 See Hacker's discussion of Davidson's views in Philosophy 1998 73:286539-552 23 Kenny in Vesey ed. 12 24 Rorty 12 25 Rorty 392-3 26 Saussure 1966 15 27 Hornstein: "A central aim of the Minimalist program is to show that thegrammatical levels DS [Deep Structure] and SS [Surface Structure] do notexist" (62-3), "if Minimalism is roughly correct , then the earlier GB analyseswill have to be abandoned and radically rethought" (200); "the core idea isthat lexical elements are extracted from the lexicon and packaged intophrase markers already laden with their morphological features" (69) 28 Hale and Keyser eds. 1993: "the implicat ions of the theory that syntax isprojected from the lexicon" (53); Chomsky 2000 Foreword by Neil Smith "theMinimalist Program ... a radical at tempt to rethink the foundat ions of thediscipline ... abandoning much of the descript ive machinery of earlier versionsof generat ive grammar ... a search for new explanat ions" (xi) 29 Chomsky 1988 p.192-3; Chomsky 2000 10 " The minimalist programseeks to show that everything that has been accounted for in terms ofthese levels [Deep Structure and Surface Structure] has been misdescribed"30 Chomsky 2000 132, 148 31 Chomsky 2000 6 32 For general background Raichle 1994 33 Penfield & Roberts Speech and Brain Mechanisms 1959 OUP 34 PET posit ron emission tomography fMRI funct ional magnet ic resonanceimaging ERPs event related potent ials MEG magnetoencephalography TMStrans-cranial magnet ic st imulat ion 35 Wit tgenstein P158 36 Pulvermüller 1999; Pulvermüller et al. 1999 37 Extensive research by Rizzolat t i and colleagues at the University ofParma: Kohler et al. 2002; Rizzolat t i and Arbib 1998; Fadiga et al. 2002 38 Liberman et al. 1967 Theory revised Liberman & Matt ingly 1985 39 Deacon The Symbolic Species 342 "Language areas [Broca, Wernicke]are simply not the repositories of linguist ic skill and knowledge they wereonce thought to be ... do not support any simple localisat ion of languagefunct ion" 40 Allot t 1992; Motor theory of Language 1989 41 Berthoz Le Sens du Mouvement "Motor equivalence refers to a simple

and remarkable property of the brain that enables the same movement tobe made using very different effectors. For example, I can write the let ter Awith my hand, or my foot, or my mouth. I can even draw a let ter A whilewalking on the beach. This property ... is considered to be proof that thebrain encodes a motor structure (morphokinesis) very generally which thenenables it to express the structure or to execute it using very differentcombinat ions of muscles."(pp.226-7 in English t ranslat ion The Brain's Senseof Movement 2000 Harvard UP). Subjects wrote their signature with theirdominant index finger and ipsilateral big toe. fMRI showed that movementparameters for this movement are stored in secondary sensorimotorcort ices of the dominant hand. These areas can be accessed by the footand are therefore funct ionally independent from the primary representat ionof the effector. (Rijnt ies et al. 1999) 42 Jan Wind's view(Harnad et al. eds. 1976:628) that cerebral reorganisat ionwas decisive for the origin of speech-like communicat ion with the ability toform cross-modal associat ions and increased memory

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