- What kind of understanding are we seeking here? It will be useful to remind ourselves that he wants "to bring words back from their metaphysical use to their everyday use" (1953, no.116).

- We want, so to speak, to feel so 'at home' in the 'landscape' of uses of our language, that we know our 'way about' inside them without a map.

The everydayness of his methods: 'instructive', 'attention directing' talk:

- In other words, what Wittgenstein wants to draw to our attention in his remarks, is that to gain the practical kind of understanding he seeks, we can in fact make use of some of the very same methods we use in gaining that practical kind of understanding in the first place. Thus, in his remarks, to draw our attention to how people in fact draw each other's attention to things, he can use the self-same methods as they themselves use!

- This, then, gives us a first clue to Wittgenstein's methods. For, although they are as many and as various as those we use in life itself, they are all related in that they work in just the same way as our 'instructive', 'directive', and 'organizational' forms of talk in everyday life work. For example, we 'give commands' ("Do this," "Don't do that"); we 'point things out' to people ("Look at this!"); 'remind' them ("Think what happened last time"); 'change their perspective' ("Look at it like this"); 'place' or 'give order' to their experience ("You were very cool... or: you acted like a madman); 'organize' their behavior ("First, take a right, then... ask again..."); and so on.

- All these instructive forms of talk 'move' us, in practice, to do something we would not otherwise do: in 'gesturing' or 'pointing' toward something in our circumstances, they cause us to relate ourselves to our circumstances in a different way - as if we are continually being 'educated' into new ways.

- Indeed, as one of his methods, he asks how we were first taught our words. For, among other things, such a consideration brings to our attention the original circumstances of the teaching, where "one thing that is immensely important in teaching is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions" (1966, p.2), that emphasize the "characteristic part [they play in].. a large group of activities... the occasions on which they are said..." (1966, p.2).

- It is the gestural function of these instructive forms of talk that is their key feature, that gives them their life: for they 'point beyond' themselves to features in the momentary context of their utterance.

- Wittgenstein uses these 'instructive' or 'educative' forms, then, in drawing our attention to what is there, in the circumstances of our talk, before our eyes, that we fail to see. Where his remarks draw our attention to what is, in fact, already known to us.

- He calls them "reminders:" For, "something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it [cf. Augustine], is something we need to remind ourselves of" (1953, no.89).

Further methods:

- This then gives us some further clues to some of his other methods. Indeed, there is a set of three methods and the goal they seem at which they seem to be aimed, which we can see as working in sequence:

- 1) First, his remarks can work to arrest or interrupt (or 'deconstruct') the spontaneous, unself-conscious flow of our ongoing activity, and to give "prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook" (1953, no.132).

- Thus his talk is full of such expressions as "Think of...," "Imagine...," "It is like...," "So one might say...," "Suppose...," and so on, in which he confronts us with a concrete scene or vignette featuring a particular aspect of human conduct. Where these are all designed "to draw someone's attention to the fact that he [or she] is capable of imagining [something]... and his acceptance of the [new] picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at thing" (1953, no.144).

- Thus, in provoking us to bring new responses to our words and actions into play, he shows us further possibilities in a circumstance that previously we had overlooked. Alone, however, such a move could be more confusing than clarifying.
 

- 2) This suggests to us a second method that is often of importance: By the careful use of selected images, similes, analogies, metaphors, or 'pictures', he also suggests new ways of talking that not only orient us toward sensing otherwise unnoticed distinctions and relations for the first time, but which also suggest new connections and relations with the rest of our proceedings.

- Indeed, the idea of language-games falls into this category: "Language-games are the forms of language with which a child first begins to make use of words... If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language use the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent" (1965, p.17).
 

- 3) This brings us to a third, and perhaps most important of his methods, making comparisons: 3) By the use of various kinds of objects of comparison, e.g., other possible ways of talking, other "language games" both actual and invented, etc., he tries "to throw light on the facts of our language by way of not only similarities, but also dissimilarities" (1953, no.130). For, by noticing how what occurs differs in a distinctive way from what we otherwise would expect, such comparisons can work, he notes, to establish "an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one of many possible orders; not the order" (1953, no.132).

- The importance of the use of comparisons - often the comparison, or the bringing into living contact, of different scenes (see note 15) - cannot be overemphasized.

- Such dialogical juxtapositions work in a living way to create a circumstance in which differences are realized and articulated: here, we use our words like this; there, we use them like that. That is, in providing new occasions for the realizing of new differences, they create a new 'movement' of thought, a new 'gesture'.

- Indeed, if we turn to some remarks of his on how we understand the theme in a piece of music, we find him likening the music's movement to human speech and other gestural movements" "... the theme... is a new part of our language; it becomes incorporated into it; we learn a new gesture" (1980b, p.52). But: "Doesn't the theme point outside itself?," he asks. "Yes, it does! But that means: - it makes an impression on me which is connected with things in its surroundings - e.g., with our language and its intonations; and hence with the whole filed of our language-games" (1981, no.175).

- In other words, such dialogical juxtapositions bring to life new gestures, new ways of pointing beyond our immediate circumstances to bring to light new connections and relations between and within them. Indeed, as we cross boundaries and 'move' from functioning within one language game to an other, we can experience the changed commitments, urges, wants, desires, and temptations, as well as the ways of handling, looking, and evaluating, associated with each.
 

- 4) Where the point of all these methods, and the slow and painstaking exploration of the landscape of our uses of language they engender, is expressed in his notion of a "perspicuous representation (Ger: übersichlichte Darstellung):" "A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of our use of words. - Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'" (1953, no.122).

- If we are 'to find our way about' inside our own linguistically shaped forms of life, we need to grasp the 'landscape' of their internal relations, or their 'grammatical geographies', so to speak.

- But to achieve such a synoptic sense of its immense complexities, as well as curing ourselves of the many temptations to see it as much more simple than it in fact is, we also have to explore its grammatical geography close up, in detail, without end.
 

Reference: Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.00