I’ve been teaching The Blue Book in my Intro to Philosophy class.  Not an easy sell.  I’ve been trying to get the students to orient on the inceptive question:  “What is the meaning of a word?”  And I am trying to get them to see that when Wittgenstein says he is going to attack that question, that is what he means–attack it.  Not answer it.  Wittgenstein takes the question to be suspect.  Part of his attempt to show that is his attack on what he takes to be the favored answer to the question:  the meaning of a word is a mental image.

Although it required sailing our little skiff onto still deeper water, I worked to get the students to see that the opening sections of the book, from the inceptive question through the red flower example and to the commentary on it, are structured by Frege’s Three Principles (in Foundations).  Frege’s second principle, The Context Principle (Never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation but only in the context of a proposition), is openly transgressed by the inceptive question of The Blue Book.  The favored answer to that question is itself the answer Frege forecasts being given by anyone who violates The Context Principle.  (It is itself an answer that violates Frege’s first principle, Always sharply to separate the logical from the psychological, the objective from the subjective.)  The details of the red flower example capitalize on Frege’s observation that the fact that we cannot form any idea of its content is no reason for denying all meaning to a word.  And so on.

Recognizing the Fregean structure of the opening makes tracking the sometimes nearly trackless discussions of book easier, since the structure extends past the opening deep into the rest of the book.  But that is a topic for another post.