The Varied Dimensions of Understanding According to Wittgenstein

What does it actually mean to understand something? At first glance, the answer seems obvious – you either get it or you don’t. But Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, saw this question as far more layered. In his landmark work Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein dismantled the common assumption that understanding is a single, unified mental event happening privately inside the mind. Instead, he revealed it as something plural, contextual, and irreducibly public – existing in the space between people, not just within any one person’s head.

The traditional view Wittgenstein challenged 🔗

Before Wittgenstein, the dominant philosophical tradition – rooted largely in Descartes – treated the mind as a private theatre. Understanding a sentence, on this view, meant that something clicked in your inner mental space: an image appeared, a feeling of recognition arose, or an interpretation formed. The mind and the world were two separate realms, and understanding was a bridge built entirely on the inside.

Wittgenstein found this picture fundamentally misleading. As he urged, the mind has both a first-person aspect (known from the “inside” as a subject) and a third-person aspect (observable from the “outside” as a social participant). Treating understanding as exclusively an inner phenomenon ignores half of what makes it what it is. His critique, developed across hundreds of carefully crafted remarks in the Philosophical Investigations, proposed something radical: understanding is not a mental state you possess in isolation – it is something you demonstrate through participation in shared practices.

Two kinds of understanding 🔗

Wittgenstein’s analysis draws a careful distinction between two dimensions of understanding: one that is specific and non-paraphrasable, and one that is general and transferable. These are not competing definitions – they are complementary aspects of the same phenomenon.

Understanding a specific sentence 🔗

There are moments when a particular sentence strikes you with a force that cannot be fully captured by any paraphrase or substitution. Consider the moment when someone reads a line of poetry and something in it lands – not because they have decoded its grammar, but because the whole thing arrives as a meaningful unit that resists being broken apart and reassembled without loss. Wittgenstein recognised this kind of understanding as genuine and philosophically significant.

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein noted that “understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme of music than one may think.” Just as grasping a musical phrase involves responding to it as an integrated whole – not merely analysing its notes – understanding a sentence can involve a kind of direct, holistic comprehension that cannot be fully replaced by an explanation. This is the irreducibly specific kind of understanding: unique, immediate, and not interchangeable with any paraphrase.

Crucially, this does not mean the understanding is merely subjective or private. It means the understanding is non-decomposable in a particular instance – but it still arises within a shared linguistic context.

Understanding a language in general 🔗

The second kind of understanding operates at a broader level. When we say someone “understands English,” we are not pointing to any single sentence or moment of comprehension. We mean they have a general competence – the ability to participate in a vast range of linguistic exchanges. As Wittgenstein put it, “to understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.” This kind of understanding is general and interchangeable: someone who understands a language can substitute one expression for another, rephrase ideas, and navigate the rules of usage across countless different contexts.

This general understanding is not locked inside the individual. It is a skill, and skills are demonstrated publicly. The competent language-user is one who can do things with words – give orders, ask questions, make reports, tell stories – and do so in ways that others recognise as correct or incorrect. Understanding, at this level, is inseparable from participation in communal practice.

Language-games and the social basis of meaning 🔗

To explain how meaning and understanding arise through use, Wittgenstein developed his concept of language-games – a term he used to highlight that speaking is always embedded in an activity, a form of life. As Wikipedia’s entry on language-games explains, Wittgenstein argued that a word or sentence has meaning only as a result of the rules of the particular “game” being played. The word “Water!” can be an order, a warning, or an answer to a question – its meaning depends entirely on the context in which it is used.

This is not a trivial point. It means that understanding cannot be extracted from context and placed into a sealed mental container. The Wittgenstein Project’s introduction to the Philosophical Investigations notes that for Wittgenstein, language’s intelligibility does not derive from abstract logical rules but from the practical and diverse ways in which signs are used – from what he called “grammatical” use, grounded in everyday forms of life. Understanding is always understanding within a practice, not prior to it.

The private language argument and its implications for understanding 🔗

Wittgenstein’s challenge to private, inner-only understanding reaches its sharpest point in what philosophers call the private language argument. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wittgenstein argued that for an utterance to be meaningful, it must in principle be possible to subject it to public standards and criteria of correctness. A so-called “private language” – one in which words refer only to what the speaker alone can know, such as purely private sensations – cannot be a genuine rule-governed language at all, because there is no way to distinguish between using a word correctly and merely thinking one is using it correctly.

The implications for understanding are significant. As Ian Tully explains at 1000-Word Philosophy, Wittgenstein’s view locates the criteria for correct word use in the patterns of agreement within a linguistic community. Understanding, therefore, cannot be a purely private achievement. A person demonstrates understanding not by having the right inner experience, but by using language in ways the community recognises as correct.

This does not eliminate the first-person dimension of understanding – Wittgenstein acknowledged that we each know the mind from the inside. But the “inside” is not sealed off from the “outside.” The way we come to understand anything is through public interaction, correction, and participation. Through interaction with others, a child comes to understand that words like “pain” apply both to oneself and to others – their meaning is never purely self-referential.

Understanding is not a mental process with a duration 🔗

One of Wittgenstein’s most subtle contributions is his questioning of whether understanding is the kind of thing that happens at a specific moment and lasts for a measurable duration. In a detailed study published in Philosophical Investigations journal (2019), philosopher Lin examines how Wittgenstein draws attention to the awkwardness of questions like “When exactly did you understand?” or “How long have you understood this?” Consider Wittgenstein’s example of person B watching A write out a number series and suddenly exclaiming “Now I understand!” What is that sudden understanding? Wittgenstein identifies several different circumstances that can license this expression – the formula comes to mind, the pattern of differences becomes clear, a realisation dawns, or the person simply continues the series correctly. No single inner event is the understanding. Understanding is not a flash of consciousness but something more like a capacity, revealed over time through what one goes on to do.

This point is tied to Wittgenstein’s broader insistence, noted in SparkNotes’ summary of the Philosophical Investigations, that words like “understanding,” “meaning,” and “thinking” do not simply name inner mental processes. The assumption that they do – that there must be an inner state corresponding to each such word – is precisely the kind of confusion Wittgenstein wanted to dissolve.

Inner and outer: a distinction without a wall 🔗

Wittgenstein did not deny that human beings have inner experiences. His point was that the distinction between “inner” and “outer” does not create two isolated realms. As Philopedia’s overview of the Philosophical Investigations notes, Wittgenstein examined how our talk of inner states depends on public criteria and practices. The word “pain” does not get its meaning from a purely private sensation – it gets its meaning from the way it is used in shared human life, including the characteristic circumstances under which it is expressed and the reactions it provokes in others.

This means that the internal aspect of understanding – the sense that something has clicked – is genuine, but it is not self-sufficient. It is always embedded in external practices, in the language-games that give it shape and criterion. The two aspects of understanding, internal and external, do not stand in opposition. They constitute each other.

Why Wittgenstein’s account still matters 🔗

Wittgenstein’s analysis of understanding challenges a picture of the mind that remains deeply influential – the idea that comprehension is fundamentally a private, mental achievement that then gets expressed in outward behaviour. By showing that understanding has irreducibly public dimensions, he redirected attention to the practices, communities, and forms of life within which language and thought are always already embedded.

As Oxford Academic’s volume on Wittgenstein and philosophy of mind notes, his contributions to questions about the mind are considered among the most significant in the history of philosophy – and yet, many of his insights remain underappreciated or misread. His account of understanding does not flatten the richness of our inner lives. It situates that richness within the shared world of human activity, where alone it can be recognised, communicated, and confirmed.

In short, Wittgenstein asks us to stop looking inside the skull for the seat of understanding, and to look instead at what people do together with language – at the games they play, the rules they follow, and the forms of life they share.

What do you think? If understanding is always embedded in public practices and shared language-games, what does this mean for the experience of feeling that you alone have truly grasped something others have missed? And does Wittgenstein’s account leave enough room for the deeply personal, sometimes wordless sense of comprehension that we all occasionally feel?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Philosophical-Investigations
2. https://science.jrank.org/pages/10720/Philosophy-Mind-Ludwig-Wittgenstein.html
3. https://www.dbu.edu/mitchell/modern-resources/wittgensteinoverview.html
4. https://iep.utm.edu/kripkes-wittgenstein/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
6. https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Blog:Introduction_to_Wittgenstein%E2%80%99s_Philosophical_Investigations
7. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/
8. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/07/14/wittgensteins-private-language-argument/
9. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phin.12237
10. https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/wittgenstein/section3/
11. https://philopedia.org/works/philosophical-investigations/
12. https://academic.oup.com/book/35347