Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

Some philosophers have laid down rather severe strictures on whether there can be thought without language. Wittgenstein asserted that ‘the limits of language…mean the limits of my world’. Davidson has argued that ‘a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another’. Dummett has interpreted some pronouncements as meaning that ‘the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological processes of thinking and…the only proper method of analysing thought consists (...) in the analysis of language’. And there is also the position that thought has its own language that might exist even prior to or in the absence of natural language. But here I am going to concentrate on what might be possible in the absence of natural language. I do not know what it would mean to consider thinking in the absence of its own intrinsic language, a language of thought, if the two always co-exist. (shrink)

Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. This paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usage contributes to what one's (...) terms mean, there is little reason not to let its future usage to do so as well. (shrink)