Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Works
- Introduction: The Mental Lives of Others
- Chapter 1 ‘If Some People Looked Like Elephants and Others Like Cats’: Wittgenstein on Understanding Others and Forms of Life
- Chapter 2 Making Ourselves Understood: Wittgenstein and Moral Epistemology
- Chapter 3 Who Are ‘We’ for Wittgenstein?
- Chapter 4 Understanding the Lion for Real
- Chapter 5 On Safari with Glock
- Chapter 6 Understanding Other Cultures (Without Mind-Reading)
- Chapter 7 Period and Place: Wittgenstein and Collingwood on Understanding Others
- Chapter 8 One Fell Swoop: Small Red Book Historicism Before and After Davidson
- Chapter 9 If an Artwork Could Speak: Aesthetic Understanding After Wittgenstein
- Chapter 10 Wittgenstein and Communication Technology: In Conversation with Richard Harper
- References
- Index
Chapter 3 - Who Are ‘We’ for Wittgenstein?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2025
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Works
- Introduction: The Mental Lives of Others
- Chapter 1 ‘If Some People Looked Like Elephants and Others Like Cats’: Wittgenstein on Understanding Others and Forms of Life
- Chapter 2 Making Ourselves Understood: Wittgenstein and Moral Epistemology
- Chapter 3 Who Are ‘We’ for Wittgenstein?
- Chapter 4 Understanding the Lion for Real
- Chapter 5 On Safari with Glock
- Chapter 6 Understanding Other Cultures (Without Mind-Reading)
- Chapter 7 Period and Place: Wittgenstein and Collingwood on Understanding Others
- Chapter 8 One Fell Swoop: Small Red Book Historicism Before and After Davidson
- Chapter 9 If an Artwork Could Speak: Aesthetic Understanding After Wittgenstein
- Chapter 10 Wittgenstein and Communication Technology: In Conversation with Richard Harper
- References
- Index
Summary
‘Why can't Panama invest in Panama?’ she complained […] ‘Why do we have to have Asians do it? We’re rich enough. We’ve got one hundred and seven banks in this town alone, don't we? Why can't we use our own drug money to build our own factories and schools and hospitals?’ The ‘we’ was not literal. Louisa was a Zonian, raised in the Canal Zone in the days when by extortionate treaty it was American territory for ever, even if the territory was only ten miles wide and fifty miles long and surrounded by despised Panamanians.
John Le Carré, The Tailor of Panama, 3Prologue
We might, as I am doing now, employ the first-person plural ‘we’ to invite our readers to join us in a collective form of self-consciousness, thereby narrowing, or at least concealing, the distance between author and reader. But one may equally widen the distance by using impersonal pronouns instead. Wittgenstein does both in his writings, but the former approach predominates.
‘If a lion could speak’, Wittgenstein famously states, ‘we [wir] could not understand him’. But who are ‘we’ for Wittgenstein? It is commonplace to assume that he is referring to ‘us humans’ and, by the same token, that ‘a lion’ stands for all non-human animals. This assumption is often found in defences of Wittgenstein's remark such as those by Nancy E. Baker (2012, 63), John Dupré (2002, 232), Rami Gudovitch (2012, 147–48) and Vicki Hearne (1994, 160). Dupré, for example, writes that the thought behind Wittgenstein's remark is that
since lions, and other animals, lead wholly different lives, their hypothetical language could make no sense to us.
Numerous anti-Wittgensteinians share this thought that Wittgenstein's ‘we’ refers to all humans, in contrast to all lions or perhaps even all (other) animals:
Wittgenstein once claimed, ‘If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.’ He seemed to assume that because the lion's consciousness is so different from ours, even if there were a spoken lion language, it would be too alien for us to understand. However, lions and many other animals do indeed communicate in their own ways, and if we make an effort to understand their communications, we can learn much about what they are saying.
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- Wittgenstein on Other MindsStrangers in a Strange Land, pp. 41 - 62Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2025
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