DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9205.2010.01426.

x
Philosophical Investigations 34:1 January 2011
ISSN 0190-0536

Pictures in Wittgensteins Later Philosophy phin_1426 55..76

David Egan, Oriel College

I. Introduction

The first sentence of the Philosophical Investigations that Wittgenstein gives

us in his own voice identifies a particular picture of the essence of human
language (PI 1) in a passage from Augustines Confessions. While com-
mentators have had a great deal to say about the so-called Augustinian
picture of language, remarkably little has been done to investigate the use
of picture as it appears not just here, but in many places throughout the
Investigations and elsewhere in Wittgensteins later work.1 Philosophers
often use picture as a kind of casual shorthand to give a rough sketch of
a philosophical position or theoretical framework. However,Wittgensteins
use of the term is more deliberate and pervasive. The aim of this paper is
to shed light on Wittgensteins distinctive methodology by scrutinising his
use of pictures as an important part of his critical apparatus.
An initial worry might seem to risk preventing this discussion from even
getting started: what reason have we to think that there is any unity to
Wittgensteins use of pictures at all? There are certainly good grounds for
this worry:Wittgenstein clearly uses the term picture in a wide variety of
contexts and with varying degrees of precision. A useful first step will be
to draw up a rough classification of some of these uses. However, just
because Wittgenstein does not use picture in a rigidly defined sense does
not mean that we should not find something of philosophical significance
in its deployment, any more than we should give up on drawing important
lessons from Wittgensteins use of language-game just because he puts
the term to a diversity of uses (cf. PI 7). What I hope will emerge from
the ensuing discussion is a family of uses of the term picture, many of
which are related in subtle ways, such that considering the whole can

1. The one exception is Wittgensteins Lectures on Religious Belief, where pictures feature
prominently and puzzlingly, and a number of commentators have picked up on this fact. I
will also consider the Lectures, but as a means of sorting out what Wittgenstein is doing with
pictures in general.

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USA.
56 Philosophical Investigations
illuminate each instance. My survey will have to be selective: much more
can be said on this topic, and if this paper helps spur further work, it will
have achieved one of its principal aims.
To begin with, then, I will sketch a rough classification of the uses
Wittgenstein makes of pictures in his later work (section 2). That classi-
fication will distinguish between the term used in a literal sense and in a
more distinctively philosophical sense. I will consider Wittgensteins use of
literal pictures (section 3) as a way of shedding light on what I think he
is doing in using the term in this more philosophical sense (section 4),
before considering by way of conclusion how these pictures fit into
Wittgensteins broader philosophical project (section 5).

II. A Rough Classification

First, then, a rough classification of five uses of picture in Wittgensteins

later work.These five categories do not cover all the uses of picture, and
many instances confound a rigid classification. These distinctions, then,
serve as a preliminary survey and are not meant to bear much argumen-
tative weight.
(1) Literal pictures: Sometimes when Wittgenstein talks about pictures he
really just means pictures: the sorts of things you can draw on paper
and that have lines and sometimes colours. E.g. PI 53, 62, 70f, 86,
194, 368, 398, 515, 518, 522, 523, 526, 539, as well as the boxer
example on p. 14 and the old man on the steep path on p. 60. In
addition, we find pictures inserted throughout Wittgensteins later
work, which he uses in various ways.
(2) Mental pictures: Wittgenstein frequently tries to get a handle on prob-
lematic conceptions of the mental by conceiving of pictures in the
head. A prominent moral here (for reasons to be discussed shortly) is
that even though pictures may float before the mind on certain occa-
sions, they cannot do the work Wittgensteins interlocutor often hopes
they will do. E.g. PI 6, 37, 73, 139141, 294, 367, 635, 648, 651.
(3) Conceptual pictures: My main quarry in this paper is the kind of picture
that cannot literally be drawn on a piece of paper (as Wittgenstein
notes at PI 141, mental pictures could just as well exist as models
outside the head). Wittgenstein often talks about our manner of
conceiving of something as a picture. He does so in many different
ways; here I give three prominent subcategories.
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 David Egan 57
(a) Pseudo-theses:The Augustinian picture is the most prominent case of
a sentence or small number of sentences which seem to make a
definite philosophical claim, but which Wittgenstein argues are empty
or false (sorting out whether and how they count as empty or false is
a major concern of this paper). E.g. PI 1, 59, 136, 352.
(b) Illustrated turns of speech (PI 295): Turns of phrase or forms of
expression that are not themselves philosophical claims but which
incline us to consider a matter in a particular way. E.g. PI 295, 348,
658, Z 274. Cf. also MS 121, 15v, where Wittgenstein explicitly
equates a picture (ein Bild) with a form of expression (eine Ausdrck-
sweise).
(c) Conceptions: Not necessarily thoughts that can be given verbal expres-
sion, either as pseudo-theses or turns of speech, but ways of conceiv-
ing of a matter. E.g. PI 144, 305, 337, 397, 422427, 490, 573,
604607.These conceptions can be either of a quite particular matter,
or they can be global in scope. In On Certainty, we find occasional
reference to a world-picture (OC 95, 162, 167).

While Wittgensteins reasons for invoking pictures of types (1) and (2)
may be difficult to discern, the use of picture in those instances is itself
unproblematic. The varieties of type (3) present a further question,
however: why call these things pictures at all? Why not just talk about
positions or conceptions or forms of expression? What does Wittgenstein
accomplish in calling them pictures?
I can offer both positive and negative reasons for talking about pictures
in these instances, both of which I will explore in more detail shortly.The
positive reason is that Wittgenstein wants to draw our attention to certain
connections between the pictures of type (3) and those of types (1) and
(2). These connections are by no means straightforward or uniform, but
the discussion that follows should draw out some prominent strands. The
negative reason is that these pictures have a distinctive logical role for
Wittgenstein that a term like position or even conception would fail
to capture. Pictures of type (3), I will argue, are not definite positions or
claims for which we can supply arguments or justifications, but neither are
they wholly independent of the argumentative apparatus.Terms like posi-
tion or conception might mislead us as to their nature. Because they are
not subject to affirmation or refutation in the way that substantive claims
are, engaging with them critically requires a novel set of critical tools. Part
of the distinctiveness of Wittgensteins later work is that it frequently
constitutes this kind of novel engagement.
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58 Philosophical Investigations
III. Literal Pictures

Before delving into pictures of type (3), I want to explore three central
strands in Wittgensteins invocations of pictures of types (1) and (2), which
will help us make sense of Wittgensteins aims in invoking pictures in the
non-literal sense of type (3). The first strand concerns the application of a
picture and how a picture cannot dictate its own application to us. The
second considers Wittgensteins interest in aspect perception and what that
tells us about pictures. The third considers the role of pictures more
broadly, in terms of the roles they play in our lives and how we should not
overgeneralise an overly simple conception of depiction.

Picture and application

The first strand, about the application of a picture, closely follows Wit-
tgensteins more famous discussion of the application of rules. On the one
hand, it seems a picture can always be applied in various ways, and on the
other hand, we tend not to be in doubt as to how to apply the pictures
we encounter.We find both of these thoughts in the second boxed remark
between 139 and 140:
I see a picture; it represents an old man walking up a steep path leaning
on a stick. How? Might it not have looked just the same if he had
been sliding downhill in that position? Perhaps a Martian would
describe the picture so. I dont need to explain why we dont describe
it so (PI, 60).
The picture on its own seems open to more than one interpretation,
and Wittgenstein describes reading a picture in a particular way as an
application of the picture, or a method of projection. No further
attempt to disambiguate the picture has any guarantee of succeeding, since
any disambiguation is also open to more than one application. Suppose we
were to draw an arrow pointing up the hill. Not only could we equally
read that arrow as pointing back down the hill (cf. PI 85), but we need
not read the arrow as signifying the direction of the mans movement at
all. In cases of genuine doubt, instruction or interpretation can help clarify
the application of a picture, but they can no more remove the possibility
of ambiguity in an absolute sense than the picture itself. The point here is
not that the picture is inescapably ambiguous, but that neither the picture
itself nor further instruction or interpretation can irresistibly dictate the
pictures application. That we, for the most part, apply the same picture
similarly, is not because we are under the compulsion of an ineluctably
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 David Egan 59
univocal rule that points from picture to application, but rather because
we have a shared sense of what pictures are, what they tend to depict, how
people communicate with them, and so on. The idea of climbing a
mountain is familiar to us, as is using a stick to help in the climb, as is the
human practice of depicting such scenes from human life. Sliding back-
wards down a hill while holding a stick is alien to us, and so it takes an
effort to see the picture in this way. Wittgensteins Martian might not
apply the picture similarly because it might not share with us the basic
forms of life that are the basis for our agreement about how a picture is
applied.2
This point becomes crucial when Wittgenstein considers the notion of
mental pictures and their connection to meaning and understanding.
Could my understanding of a word be connected to a mental picture of
the meaning of that word, so that the criterion for my having understood
is that the right picture comes before my mind? One problem with this
view is that it assumes the picture in my mind can dictate its own
application. Wittgenstein elsewhere describes such a picture as a super-
picture3: With a picture, it still depends on the method of projection,
whereas here it seems that you get rid of the projecting relation, and are
absolutely certain that this is [the] thought of that (LRB, 67). Mental
pictures can be as clear and unambiguous as the pictures that we encoun-
ter outside our heads, but no more: the aspiration for a super-picture is not
just that it be clear enough for all practical purposes, but that it be
superlatively clear, with no room for doubt or variance.
At PI 139, Wittgenstein asks how a mental picture of a cube might
reflect an understanding of the word cube. Cubes are prisms, so a picture
of a cube is equally a picture of a prism: the same picture could equally
well be projected so that it connects with the word prism. At best,
Wittgenstein says, the picture of a cube did suggest a certain use to us
suggest that we associate the picture with the word cube but it was

2. I do not want to suggest here that forms of life provide the glue to bind picture to
application that instruction or interpretation lack. Wittgensteins point is neither that forms
of life ground our practices of picture application and rule-following, nor that these
practices are groundless, but rather that we are wrong to seek absolute grounds here in the
first place. It is only given certain forms of life that our particular practices with pictures
make any sense, and so claiming to seek grounds external to those forms of life is an
incoherent gesture.
3. Wittgenstein often uses super- as a prefix to denote the kind of superlative rigidity
that we do not find in life but often seek in philosophy. Cf., e.g. PI 97, pp. 192, 197, 389.

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60 Philosophical Investigations
also possible for me to use it differently. For the picture not only to
suggest a particular use but to compel it, we want the picture to contain
instructions for its own application. But any such instructions must be
applied along with the picture that contains them, so they cannot be the
link that joins the picture to its application. The attraction to pictures in
the mental realm is the thought that they might serve as super-pictures,
but what is true for pictures on paper is equally true for mental pictures:
isnt it obvious here that it is absolutely inessential that this picture be in
his imagination, rather than in front of him as a drawing or model; or
again, as something that he himself constructs as a model? (PI 141).The
mental cannot magically supply a super-connection between picture and
application that cannot exist outside the head.
Wittgensteins concern that we not construe pictures as super-pictures
is not that we might apply the picture wrongly seeing the old man on
the stick as climbing the hill when we should see him as sliding down
backwards but that we might expect pictures to be able to do more
work for us than they do. Applying a picture is a human practice embed-
ded in human forms of life, so what a picture tells us cannot be inde-
pendent of these forms of life. Treating a picture as a super-picture whose
application comes of its own accord makes us neglect the often important
and revealing question of how and why we apply pictures in the way that
we do.
These observations about pictures tie in to some of Wittgensteins
methodological concerns. In philosophy more generally,Wittgenstein finds
that we often allow our way of conceiving of a matter to dictate to us the
sorts of questions we should ask and the lines of investigation we should
pursue, when in fact the interesting philosophical work lies in exploring
our way of conceiving of the matter in the first place.

In the first place, our language describes a picture. What is to be done

with the picture, how it is to be used, is still obscure. Quite clearly,
however, it must be explored if we want to understand the sense of our
words. But the picture seems to spare us this work: it already points to
a particular use. This is how it takes us in (PPF, vii, 55).

Similarly, in PI 422427,Wittgenstein repeatedly urges us to consider

the application of pictures that seem innocuous to us. Like with the
mental pictures discussed above, conceptual pictures seem to spare us
work, but in fact they can lead us to skip the step in our thinking that is
most crucial. This is how philosophers should salute each other: Take
your time! (CV, 91).
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 David Egan 61
Aspect perception
Wittgenstein becomes keenly interested in the phenomenon of aspect
perception in his post-Investigations writings on the philosophy of psy-
chology. The paradigmatic example is the duck-rabbit: when we change
aspect from seeing a picture-duck to a picture-rabbit, nothing has changed
and yet everything has changed. What changes is nothing in the picture
itself nor in anything that could coherently be described as our visual
impression of the picture (PPF, xi, 131). Rather, what changes is our
overall way of relating to the picture, making sense of it.Wittgenstein here
occasionally speaks of the physiognomy of an aspect of a picture (PPF,
xi, 238), as if a picture does not merely represent but can also express
character and emotion.
Two aspects of a picture are mutually exclusive: we cannot simulta-
neously see the duck-rabbit as a duck and as a rabbit. Someone who is not
aware of the duck-aspect of the duck-rabbit will relate to that picture just
as she would relate to a picture of a rabbit. If she sees the duck-rabbit
surrounded by other pictures of rabbits, she will be inclined to see it as a
picture-rabbit. One way of shifting the aspect would be to remove the
duck-rabbit from this context and to surround it instead with pictures of
ducks (PPF, xi, 125). Once she becomes aware of the other aspect, she
can shift between the two aspects at will, even though she cannot consider
them both at the same time.
As we will see shortly, Gordon Baker finds an important analogy
between these observations about pictures and the sorts of philosophical
pictures that are the main concern of this paper. In his view,Wittgensteins
aim is to present us with objects of comparison that shift the aspect with
which we view a matter, allowing us to see as contingent and changeable
what we had previously taken for fixed and necessary. For Baker, Witt-
gensteins discussion of aspect perception provides a potent allegory for his
philosophical method.

Non-representational pictures
So far, the operative question has been what a picture represents: the
duck-rabbit could represent a duck or a rabbit, the picture of the old man
on the stick could be read as representing an uphill climb or a downward
slide.The broader point to consider with pictures is not only that they can
be taken to represent different things, but that pictures have roles far
beyond those that such talk of representation might most immediately
bring to mind. The ways we apply pictures are diverse we use them as
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62 Philosophical Investigations
instructions, as advertisements, we amuse ourselves with cartoons and
enrich ourselves in museums, we use them as evidence, as reminders, as
forget-me-nots, as supplements to stories or as stories on their own, and
so on which is to say that they play various roles in what Wittgenstein
occasionally calls our forms of life. That we can interact with pictures in
the way that we do depends on our having these forms of life. We are
used to pictures and photographs representing people not to scale, and
even without colour, and we are familiar with the practice of keeping
small photographs of loved ones in our wallets. Someone unfamiliar with
these practices but familiar with a race of miniature humans might instead
see a wallet-sized photo as a representation of a tiny person rather than a
shrunken-down version of a regular human (cf. PG, 42, and also PPF, xi,
198). That we see a wallet-sized photograph as representing this person
depends on our having these forms of life and operating smoothly with
them.
These considerations are hardly divorced from what has come before.
In his discussion of aspect perception, we saw that Wittgenstein talks about
the physiognomy of a picture and is well attuned to the various roles a
picture might play. Stephen Mulhall (1990, 2001) argues that Wittgen-
steins discussion of aspect perception is not ultimately an exploration of
peculiar cases like the duck-rabbit, but rather of the universal phenom-
enon of continuous aspect perception: we relate to pictures, as we relate to
things in the world, in terms of the fleshed-out living significance they
take on in their relations with other aspects of our lives.
In the Lectures on Religious Belief, Wittgenstein uses the example of
Michelangelos depiction of God creating Adam. Making sense of such
a picture is not just a matter of getting the method of projection right,
in the sense of seeing God reaching out and touching Adam, rather than
the other way around. We also need to understand that this picture is
meant allegorically and not as an accurate representation of a historical
event: If we ever saw this [in real life], we certainly wouldnt think this
the Deity. The picture has to be used in an entirely different way if we
are to call the man in that queer blanket God, and so on (LRB, 63).
Furthermore, Michelangelos depiction is not some sort of second-best
alternative, as if he were showing us an allegory rather than what actually
happened. For many intents and purposes, Michelangelos picture is as
good a picture of God creating Adam as we could hope for. The
depiction does not fall short of the facts, it just depicts in a manner that
is different from, for instance, a historical painting. We find a similar
point at PI 368:
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 David Egan 63
I describe a room to someone, and then get him to paint an impression-
istic picture from this description to show that he has understood it.
Now he paints the chairs which I described as green, dark red, where I
said yellow, he paints blue. That is the impression which he got of
that room. And now I say: Quite right! Thats what it looks like.
I take it that the Quite right! suggests that this picture does not have
a metaphorical relationship to the description of the room, so that we can
translate from the impressionistic picture back to the description without
losing anything.The impressionistic picture shows us something about the
room that is irreducible to a more literal description. And indeed, pictures
often work in this way: whether and how they represent is a complicated
matter.
These observations stand as a warning against taking philosophical
pictures as straightforwardly or exclusively representational. The forms of
expression included in type (3)(b) are often perfectly innocent (is it wrong
to say an idea came into my head?), but making sense of the role that
they play is often a very complex affair. Misconstruing this role as more or
less descriptive of actual states and processes often leads to the blossoming
of philosophical theories to explain how these states and processes work.
These remarks about how pictures have roles that extend beyond a limited
conception of representation correspond to Wittgensteins remarks that
language-games have roles that extend beyond the descriptive.4

IV. Philosophical Pictures

I sketched three varieties of conceptual pictures under type (3) above,

which have obvious differences but also important similarities. As Wit-
tgenstein uses them, these pictures can be simple turns of speech that do
not necessarily have any philosophical motive (as in (3)(b)); they can
explicitly serve as the basis upon which philosophical theorising begins (as
in (3)(a)), or they may sit somewhere in between (as in (3)(c)). In all three
cases, the pictures are something that lie deep within us and seem to come
before deliberate reflection. The things that Wittgenstein calls pictures
tend to be the basis for reflection rather than the result of reflection. His
concern with them is that they frequently escape critical notice because
they lie so deep and do not simply shape the answers we give to

4. Cf. PI 23, although this point is central to the opening sections of the Investigations in
general.

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64 Philosophical Investigations
philosophical questions, but are the source of the confusions that give rise
to the questions in the first place (they constitute The decisive movement
in the conjuring trick (PI 308) ).5
How we are to make sense of these pictures within the context of
Wittgensteins work, and how our understanding of his work might need
to shift in order to accommodate his talk of pictures, is far from clear and
has not received a great deal of attention in the secondary literature. One
of the main (although not the only) commentators to draw significantly
on pictures is Gordon Baker, and I will begin by reviewing his reading
before drawing on the Lectures on Religious Belief to provide my own
alternative.

Bakers pictures
In the 1990s, Gordon Baker began developing a novel way of reading
Wittgenstein that draws significantly on the notion that pictures do not
themselves give us false claims to refute, but are rather pre-theoretical
frameworks that often lack perspicuity. Baker (1991, 2004) treats pictures
as forms or norms of representation that operate, not at the first-order
level of depicting regions of our grammar, but at the second-order level of
depicting how we conceive of the structure of our grammar. These
pictures are not in themselves descriptive, and so neither describe nor
misdescribe anything. Being caught in a picture is a matter of mistaking
the picture for an accurate first-order description of grammar, and so not
allowing for alternatives.6 Wittgenstein uses pictures, Baker claims, as
objects of comparison: by presenting us with an alternative picture (e.g.
Baker takes PI 43 to be offering meaning as use as an alternative picture to
the Augustinian picture introduced in PI 1),Wittgenstein is not trying to
give us a more accurate depiction of anything, but is trying rather to shift
the aspect under which we conceive of a matter, and so to free us from
the feeling of necessity that we can attach to certain pictures. We see
similar arguments to the effect that pictures are objects of comparison and
that Wittgensteins aim is to free us from the grip certain pictures have on
us in Kuusela (2006, 2008) and Hutchinson and Read (2008).

5. Goldfarb (1983) writes about Wittgensteins engagement with protopictures (280)

and the proto-philosophical level (Goldfarb 1997, 78) as central to his method, describing
this level as the way of looking at things that we tend to adopt at the start, without
noticing that a step has been taken, which then functions to establish what questions are to
be asked and answered by philosophical theorizing (78).
6. Note the resemblance here to the earlier discussion of super-pictures, which compel a
particular interpretation.

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 David Egan 65
One immediate advantage of this reading is that it helps us to cash out
the significance of using pictures to describe the various items classified
under type (3). Contrast Bakers reading to that of Eugen Fischer (2006),
who treats pictures as paradigms or thought-schemas that philosophers
take to be representative of a wider range of cases and to which they
accord a significance they would otherwise not have. Fischers analysis
suggests that pictures are essentially unexamined assumptions and are
problematic by virtue of leading to unwarranted generalisations. On its
own, Fischer claims, a picture may be an innocent truism and indeed
could be a useful object of comparison for heuristic purposes but the
tendency to apply this truism more broadly than is warranted may lead us
to make substantive claims whose rootedness in this paradigm makes them
seem intuitively compelling and thus leaves them unquestioned. On this
analysis, then, bad philosophical pictures differ from false propositions only
in being held implicitly and more deeply. In contrast, Bakers reading
makes pictures out to be of a different kind from propositions or assump-
tions, and treating them requires a different methodology and vocabulary
(hence picture instead of assumption) than that employed in more
traditional forms of criticism.
However, reading Wittgenstein as interested in no more than shifting
aspects in order to release the grip that pictures have on us, has two
features that strike me as problematic. The first is that Wittgenstein does
not simply talk about pictures in terms of the hold they have on us, but
quite plainly talks about pictures being bad (PI 136) and even false
(PI 604, Z 20, 111, OC 249). Baker (2004, 268) is not blind to the
fact that Wittgenstein often takes pictures themselves to be a problem: A
picture may be both empty and pernicious this seeming paradox
is fundamental to Wittgensteins conception of pictures.7 How Baker
himself resolves this seeming paradox is less than clear, however. His
most immediate evidence for calling a picture pernicious is Wittgensteins
description of the Augustinian picture of language as surrounding the
working of language with a haze which makes clear vision impossible (PI
5). A picture might perniciously obscure our vision and yet still be
empty of content, but it is hard to see how it can be both empty and
false.
Furthermore, if Wittgensteins sole aim with pictures is to release the
grip they have on us an attribution that might not stick to Baker quite

7. Baker uses bold for his own emphases in the text to distinguish them from Wittgen-
steins italicised emphases in quotations.

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66 Philosophical Investigations
so simply, but Hutchinson and Read (2008, 149150) seem committed to
this view is that, if this were so, the sole measure of the perniciousness
of a picture would seem to be the strength of the grip it has on us. This
view leads to some bizarre results: is the human body the best picture of
the human soul (PPF, iv, 25) only in the sense that this picture has less
of a grip on us than other pictures? Surely, Wittgenstein does not simply
want to free us from the grip of pictures but also wants to show us how
some pictures are less susceptible to misapplication than others, that some,
indeed, come closer to the truth of things than others.
As I will argue in more detail shortly, I think the empty and perni-
cious view arises from a false dichotomy: either pictures have some sort
of propositional content, or they are empty. I think Baker is right to claim
that pictures do not have propositional content in any straightforward
sense nor even in the sense of representing unspoken but definite
assumptions, as on Fischers view but wrong to think that pictures must
therefore be described as empty.
The second problematic feature of Bakers reading is that he is
unclear what exactly he means by the aspect of a picture in this
conceptual sense. Wittgensteins discussion of aspect-shifting deals with
different applications of the same picture. The lines that make up the
duck-rabbit are the same with the picture-duck and the picture-rabbit:
what shifts is our application of the picture. The conceptual analogue
would be to apply the same picture in different ways: to take the claim
that a man has a soul, for instance (cf. PI 422), to be a theological
truth, or as an expression of the attitude we take towards others as
living beings, rather than as automata. But Bakers signal example of a
shift in aspect is the shift from the Augustinian picture of language to
the picture that meaning is use. Is Wittgenstein shifting the aspect of
the same picture here, or is he offering us an alternative picture? Bakers
work seems ambiguous on this point.
This criticism raises some difficulties for Bakers reading difficulties I
aim to address in due course but it is far from withering. In particular,
I think Baker is right to see pictures as distinct from deeply held assump-
tions or unexamined beliefs. Thinking that what a picture tells us is
perfectly clear is to make the same mistake as thinking that a picture
ineluctably dictates its application to us. Nor is it as innocent as thinking
that the picture of the old man on the stick is perfectly clear. The sorts of
pictures that motivate philosophical reflection or confusion are not
straightforward depictions of facts, but are closer to Michelangelos depic-
tion of God creating Adam: the picture is immediately compelling, but
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 David Egan 67
cashing out its significance is a matter fraught with difficulty.8 Under-
standing a philosophical picture is difficult work, and accepting or reject-
ing a picture is not simply a matter of persuasion. Pictures take hold of us
at a level deeper than reasoned acceptance or rejection, and in this way the
experience is less one of persuasion and more one of conversion. No
surprise, then, that pictures feature so prominently in Wittgensteins dis-
cussion of religious belief.

Religious pictures
We find frequent reference to pictures in the Lectures on Religious Belief: the
belief in a Last Judgment, the belief that God created man, certain ideas
about death, or the idea of Gods eye seeing everything. Part of the point
here (and sorting out exactly what the point is, is difficult, not just for the
usual reasons that Wittgenstein is difficult, but also for the philological
reason that we have to piece together Wittgensteins expressed views from
a series of students notes) is that these sorts of beliefs are not factual
beliefs on a level with the belief that Dushanbe is the capital of Tajikistan,
or that the dining hall will be serving a pasta dish tomorrow.Wittgenstein
insists that the belief in a Last Judgment is not a prediction about the
future and that any such belief based on prediction or foresight would
not be a religious belief at all (LRB, 56) and that it is far from clear
whether a believer and an atheist disagree about the same thing at all
when they express belief or disbelief in a Last Judgment. For a religious
person, Wittgenstein says, the belief in a Last Judgment will show, not by
reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief, but rather by
regulating for all in his life. This is a very much stronger fact foregoing
pleasures, always appealing to this picture (LRB, 54).
Religious beliefs are obviously a special case of pictures, but these
passages illuminate the other kinds of philosophical pictures cited above
in two important ways. First, a picture is not justified in the way that
ordinary beliefs might be, by appealing to justifications or grounds for
belief.The dialectic in which we encounter the Augustinian picture is not
one in which Wittgensteins interlocutor tries to give reasons for holding
this picture, but rather one in which Wittgenstein struggles to dislodge the
interlocutors feeling that she must hold this picture. Second, a picture
applies pervasively. Unlike a religious belief, a picture of language or the

8. Cf. PI 295, where Wittgenstein compares a picture of type (3)(b) to an allegorical

painting.

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68 Philosophical Investigations
mind may not regulate for all in someones life, but as the Investigations
show in detail, the ways in which we conceive of language and mind are
intimately interlinked and deeply inform our reasoning on a very broad
range of subjects. Describing the picture of thought coming into the head,
Wittgenstein writes, he does not believe it; he lives it (RPP I 278), and
emphasises the human behaviour that is wrapped up with such a picture.

Mythic pictures
In these respects, pictures are more like the philosophical bedrock Wit-
tgenstein alludes to in PI 217 than ordinary beliefs or assumptions, even
deeply held ones. As I understand it, Wittgensteins invocation of bedrock
is meant partly as a rejection of a justificatory foundationalism, according
to which propositions are justified by other, more fundamental proposi-
tions, and at the base of our justificatory practices is a bedrock of
irresistible propositions whose certainty compels us independent of any
further basis. For Wittgenstein, propositions and justifications only go so
deep, and their intelligibility relies on our sharing certain forms of life,
certain practices, and, indeed, certain pictures. In Culture and Value, Witt-
genstein remarks: It is true that we can compare a picture that is firmly
rooted in us to a superstition, but it is equally true that we always
eventually have to reach some firm ground, either a picture or something
else, so that a picture which is at the root of all our thinking is to be
respected and not treated as a superstition (CV, 83). A picture, then, is not
a proposition that can be debated over, justified, agreed with or disagreed
with, at least not in the normal sense of these words. Pictures are more like
organising myths, which orient our thinking in a broad sense.
In describing pictures as myths, I deliberately follow Cavell (1979,
364f ), who distinguishes myth from metaphor. Metaphors are in principle
replaceable and can be expressed in other words, but Wittgensteinian
pictures, like myths, are not stand-ins for a more direct, literal expression
of the same thing but are rather the most direct way of expressing what
it is they express.9 Cavell sees such mythologies at work in particular in
our ways of thinking about privacy and the inner and the outer. He speaks
of the myth of the body as a veil, concealing the inner life of a person
from the view of others. According to this myth, we are essentially hidden
from one another, so that at best we can infer what is going on inside
another person indirectly, through the way this inner life manifests itself in

9. We find a similar view discussed with great subtlety in Diamond (2005).

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 David Egan 69
bodily behaviour. Wittgenstein himself calls this myth a picture: I cant
know what is going on in him is, above all, a picture. It is the convincing
expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction.
They are not obvious (PPF, xi, 326). The conviction itself the picture
or myth that shapes our thinking about our relation to others is not
itself subject to rational review, but rather shapes the way we subject other
matters to rational review.
Like myths, the work we must do with pictures is not so much to
evaluate them in terms of their truth or falsity, but to understand what
they mean, how they are applied and how we ought to apply them. Recall
PFF, vii, 55: our pictures, Wittgenstein tells us, must be explored if we
want to understand the sense of what we are saying. But the picture seems
to spare us this work: it already points to a particular use. This is how it
takes us in. Myths are not immune to evaluative assessment: we can
perfectly well claim that one myth is pernicious, another illuminating,
another beautiful, and another misleading. However, we must recognise
that such assessment is itself guided by other pictures, so that our critical
assessment does not take place from a position of neutral arbitration.
Wittgensteins later work is not just critical of others but is also self-
critical. The Investigations do not offer a straight exposition of the correct
point of view, but are full of double-backs, questions, allegories, and
tentative suggestions, because such a straight exposition is fundamentally
opposed to its methodological orientation.
Here, I seem to be edging close to Baker, raising the question of
whether my reading is subject to the same criticisms I made of him.
How does all this relativistic-sounding talk account for the fact that
Wittgenstein plainly describes certain pictures as false? To maintain the
analogy with myths, we might consider two ways that we could con-
sider myths false. Wittgenstein, I think, does not mean these pictures are
false in the weak sense that the myths we find in the Book of Genesis
are false; that, pace creationism, the world was not, in fact, created by an
anthropomorphic deity in seven days in the not-so-distant past. We
might say that this weak sense misapplies the myths of the Bible by
assuming they are literally descriptive and misunderstanding the role
they have in our lives, as if they would cease to have any power over
us if they were historically inaccurate. Rather, Wittgenstein finds prob-
lematic pictures false in the strong sense that Nietzsche finds much
Biblical mythology false. Mythically false, as Cavell describes Wittgen-
steins attitudes to such false pictures: Not just untrue but destructive of
truth (Cavell 1979, 365).
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70 Philosophical Investigations
How can Wittgensteins pictures be destructive of truth? Consider Z
111:
We are not at all prepared for the task of describing the use of, e.g. the
word to think (And why should we be? What is such a description
useful for?)
And the nave idea that one forms of it does not correspond to reality
at all. We expect a smooth contour and what we get to see is ragged.
Here it might really be said that we have constructed a false picture.
Note that the false picture here is not the same as the nave idea one
forms as a description of the use of to think. We find a similar contrast
between pictures and ideas in PI 1, where the picture of the essence of
human language contains the roots of a more specific idea about the
nature of meaning. The picture at issue in Z 111 is not a specific set of
refutable ideas about how we use a certain word, but rather the expec-
tation of what such ideas must look like. It is not simply that people
caught in this picture want to grasp the concept to think and expect that
such a concept will have smooth contours, but rather they will not
consider the concept grasped until they have found a satisfactory descrip-
tion that has smooth contours. The expectation of smoothness is the telos
of the investigation, such that abandoning this picture means abandoning
the investigation.
Propositions can be false in one sense: if p is true, then ~p is false.
Pictures are not true or false in this sense. Concepts have smooth
contours might seem like a false proposition, but we have to consider its
role in the investigation.This is not an assertion that either Wittgenstein or
his interlocutor engages with directly, but rather the demand that guides
the investigation. Wittgenstein does not treat it as a false statement that
needs refuting, but as a false picture that blinds us the very phenomena we
are investigating. In the sections leading up to the passage cited above,
Wittgenstein explores a diverse range of examples where we might be
prepared to talk about thinking and concludes: Thinking, a widely
ramified concept. A concept that comprises many manifestations of life.
The phenomena of thinking are widely scattered (Z 110). As long as we
hold to the picture that leads us to expect smooth contours, we will turn
away from examining the details that show otherwise. The picture is not
just false, but destructive of truth, because it makes us resist making the
examinations we ought to make. In investigating and probing philosophi-
cal pictures, Wittgenstein is interested in what it is in philosophy that
resists such an examination of details, something he claims we have yet
to come to understand (PI 52).
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 David Egan 71
Empty pictures?
The challenge I put to Bakers reading is that he claims that pictures are
empty, raising the question of how something empty can also be false.
In treating pictures as organising myths, I do not claim that they have a
straightforward and refutable propositional content, but nor do I want to
claim that they are empty. I suspect the claim of emptiness relies on a false
dichotomy, according to which a picture with propositional content and
an empty picture are the only two alternatives. Rather, I would suggest
that one upshot of taking on board Wittgensteins understanding of
language and his use of pictures is central to putting this understanding
across is to undermine the view that all, or most, sentences must stand
for propositions that have a definite content. The religious pictures I
considered above do not have propositional content in any straightforward
sense, but nor are they empty. Pictures influence the way we think and live
in profound and subtle ways, and they can do so in ways that are
pernicious and ways that are helpful. It is not simply adherence to pictures
that is a problem although I do agree that the self-critical orientation of
the Investigations resists adhering uncritically to any picture (then again,
which philosopher does recommend uncritical adherence to anything?)
but adherence to the wrong pictures.Wittgenstein is clearly not neutral as
to whether we consider meaning as a naming relation or whether we
consider it in terms of use: the former picture blinds us to much that is
important about the phenomenon of language, and the latter helps us to
see it.
Baker considers pictures empty in the sense that they are not subject to
straightforward refutation. I think this is true Wittgenstein is not inter-
ested in a proof (if such a thing were possible) that words do not name
objects but if we look closely at the dialectic by which he engages with
his interlocutor, we see the interlocutor not defending an empty claim, so
much as progressively emptying her claims in order to hold on to the
picture that guides them. By briefly sketching some of the moves in the
opening sections of the Investigations, I hope to give some outline of this
dialectic.
The picture of the essence of human language10 that Wittgenstein
gives us in PI 1 is this: the individual words in language name objects

10. Note the significance (as Baker does) of calling it a picture of the essence of human
language. It gives us a picture of whats essential to language, what makes human language
language, the features without which human language would not be language. These

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72 Philosophical Investigations
sentences are combinations of such names. Far from being a basis
immune to counter-example, we might object, this picture is obviously
wrong. Not all words name objects, and Wittgenstein says as much: you
are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like table, chair, loaf, and of
peoples names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and
properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take
care of itself (PI 1). But in telling us what we are thinking primarily
of in adopting this picture, Wittgenstein is not exposing an error so much
as exploring the nature of this picture, what motivates it, what lines of
thought it encourages. To assume that object must denote physical
objects like tables, chairs, and loaves is already to apply the picture, and
Wittgenstein does not want to do so at this point. A defender of the
Augustinian picture might well take prepositions and conjunctions to be
names for particular kinds of objects another application of the picture,
which would be immune to the complaint that not all words name
physical objects but would certainly open up puzzles and problems of its
own.
Here we begin to see how false pictures trend toward emptiness. We
hold on to the initial picture only by broadening our conception of what
an object is or what names are.Wittgenstein warns us that broadening
this conception too far risks emptying the picture we want to hold on to:
If we say,Every word in the language signifies something, we have so far
said nothing whatever; unless we explain exactly what distinction we wish
to make (PI 13). To say that words signify something or name
objects remains unclear until we specify what sorts of somethings or
objects we mean and what possibilities we intend to exclude in this
specification. He likens this claim to the claim that all tools modify
something: Thus a hammer modifies the position of a nail, a saw the
shape of a board, and so on. And what is modified by a rule, a glue-pot,
and nails? Our knowledge of a things length, the temperature of the
glue, and the solidity of a box. Would anything be gained by this
assimilation of expressions? (PI 14).
What motivates the interlocutors tenacity in holding on to the picture
as it is gradually emptied of content? Surely not the assurance that this

features, then, lie beyond empirical investigation: they are not features that it turns out that
language has, but rather features language could not help but have. In that sense, counter-
examples should not be able to refute this picture, since a counter-example of a form of
language that does not share the essential features of language would not count as an
example of language. This picture purports to give us the basis for any theory of language,
not the elements of a particular theory.

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 David Egan 73
progressively empty claim remains the basis for a plausible or rich theory
of language. What matters to the interlocutor here, I claim, is the notion
of a naming relation as the essence of language. Holding to this picture
seems essential if language is to be about anything, if what we can say in
language can pertain in any meaningful way to the world. Counter-
examples aside, the interlocutor cannot shake the sense that language
would simply be unable to function if some sort of naming relation were
not essential to it. In this respect, it is not the truth or falsity of particular
claims about how language works that concern Wittgenstein and his
interlocutor, but a struggle over how we are even to begin conceiving of
the phenomenon that interests us. By pushing on this picture,Wittgenstein
is not trying to refute the picture but helping his interlocutor see how
little work the picture is actually doing for her. The emptier a picture
seems, the easier it is to let go of it. Pushed to its conclusion, the picture
may fail to express any definite thesis, but its emptiness does not prevent
the picture from a definite role in the interlocutors thinking. Treating it
requires not refutation but conversion. Cavells (1976, 71) characterisation
of the Investigations as having the form of a confession seems particularly
apt in this context.

V. Conclusion

Let me sum up briefly, before offering some closing thoughts. In this

paper, I have drawn attention to the pervasive use of pictures in Wittgen-
steins criticism and suggested that while Wittgenstein does not use
picture in a technical sense, the term does do argumentative work, and
that we can get a sense of what work it does by looking at what
Wittgenstein says about literal pictures. I have argued that, for Wittgen-
stein, pictures are like organising myths, or conceptual bedrock, which play
a substantial role in philosophical reasoning (they are not empty) but also
are not the sorts of things for which Wittgenstein or his interlocutors can
provide arguments or counter-arguments of the traditional sort (they resist
being labelled with a definite propositional content). His aim, then, is not
so much to refute bad pictures, as to lead us away from them in a process
that I have suggested is more like conversion.
All this may well be true, but it does not settle the question of how
important pictures are for Wittgenstein. Surely, we can grant that some
philosophical confusion arises because we misapply misleading pictures,
but does that mean that all philosophical error arises in this way? Baker
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74 Philosophical Investigations
(2004, 263) offers pictures as one of three elements in a Provisional
Typology of Remarks in the Philosophical Investigations, alongside formu-
lations of grammatical rules and extremely general facts of nature that
explain the importance of certain concepts (such as the suggestion at PI
142 that we would not have much use for our concept of weight if
objects kept changing their weight). Bakers caution is that we not confuse
types here, and in particular not take Wittgenstein to be providing a rule
where he is, in fact, offering a picture.
I might add, however, that Wittgenstein describes the Investigations in
the preface as consisting of sketches of landscapes, as really just an
album. In other words, what Wittgenstein has assembled is primarily if
not uniquely a collection of pictures.
My aim here is not to assert that Wittgenstein has a philosophy of
pictures, so much as to stress the importance of pictures in Wittgensteins
thought: first of all, as an element of his later philosophy that has received
far less attention than grammar and rules; second, as being central to his
methodological reflections; and third, considered alongside other things
Wittgenstein says about pictures, lending to a particular way of thinking
about his methodology. Wittgenstein is different from other philosophers,
not just in the way he approaches problems, but in what he considers to
be problems. For Wittgenstein, philosophy is not primarily a body of
doctrine, where the goal is to advance the correct doctrine and find fault
in the false doctrines of others, but rather an activity (the allusion comes
from TLP 4.112, but I believe it holds true of Wittgensteins later
thought) as broad and multifaceted as the activity of thinking and living
in general. In drawing attention to the ways in which we operate with
pictures, Wittgenstein is not trying to correct our pursuit of that activity
in the way that a coach might correct the swing of a tennis player, but
rather inviting us to rethink what this activity is, to question our assump-
tions about what we are doing and why. How we apply pictures
is intimately caught up in our forms of life and our understanding of
these forms of life. A criticism based on the misapplication of pictures
is a criticism that draws attention to confusions in our own self-
understanding. Such confusions require a form of criticism that goes
deeper than the pointing out of error, and I claim that Wittgensteins use
of pictures is meant to aspire to this deeper level.11

11. In working on this paper, I have benefitted greatly from conversations with and
feedback from Stephen Mulhall, Gabriel Citron, P. M. S. Hacker and Denis McManus.

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 David Egan 75
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