Wittgenstein’s “Phenomenological Language”; Its Nature, Origin, and Why Did he introduce and Relinquish it

In 1928, Wittgenstein took on a project for a short time which he himself called “phenomenological language”. Discovering some flaws in Tractatus as a whole (including the problem of color-incompatibility), he begin to think of a new symbolism and thereby to remedy the flaws. However, after a while he gave up the project and considered it impossible or at least unnecessary. In this article, we try to answer some important questions in this regard: what was the phenomenological language? Where did it come from? Why did he address it and give it up? And what did he introduce for substitution of the old project? The claim is that Wittgenstein used “phenomenological language” in two senses; first as the mere description of a phenomenon (vs. physical ordinary language) and second as the study of possibilities of meaningfulness. The origin of the first one goes back to views of theoretical physicists. One of the main reasons to launch this project was that Wittgenstein wanted to explain the color-incompatibility problem threatening the truth-functional logic of Tractatus. Wittgenstein was seeking a complementary notation and thought that the solution lied in the “logical investigation of phenomena themselves”. He made some preliminary suggestions (e.g. importing numbers in the form of propositions), but the more he went on, the more he saw the use of terms and concepts of ordinary language as inevitable. Finally, he discarded the project. Instead of “analyzing phenomenon”, he now spoke of “analyzing grammar”, whose goal was to separate what is essential from what is inessential in our language.