In the second part of Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “My attitude to my own words is wholly different from that of others... If I listened to the words issuing from my mouth, then I could say that someone else was speaking out of it” (§§103-104). In this paper, I offer a way of understanding these remarks.

My strategy is to begin with a broader conception of agency and identify the distinctively linguistic variety of it. According to Elizabeth Anscombe, what distinguishes actions that are intentional from actions that are not is that “they are actions to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?' is given application; the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting” (Intention, §5). Whether the question ‘Why?' is given application in a particular case depends on how the agent conceives of what she is doing. After all, “a single action can have many different descriptions” (Intention, §6), and only some of those descriptions are revealing of agency. How might we apply Anscombe's insight to the use of language?

Utterances or inscriptions are clear cases of intentional actions, and the question ‘Why?' is applicable whenever they are performed. But the applicability of a why-question of the form ‘Why did you say that p?' is not enough to vindicate the idea of linguistic agency. The question targets the content of the act as opposed to the words involved in the act. But questions about content are not—at least not immediately—questions about the use of language. If the goal is to vindicate agency that is distinctively linguistic, the descriptions of the uses of language must themselves capture that use. They must indicate that the agent conceives of herself as operating with linguistic signs.

What is it to conceive of oneself as operating with linguistic signs? I answer this question by examining what sort of reasons might plausibly be cited upon answering the ‘Why?' question when that question is posed to the linguistic agent.

References

Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret. Intention. Second Edition. Harvard University Press, 1963.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Fourth edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 1953.