There have been four editions of Philosophical Investigations published by Blackwell. The first and second editions (published in 1953 and 1958, respectively) use identical paginations, the third edition (published in 2001) introduces a new pagination, and the most recent edition (2009) employs still another pagination. Since several remarks in Part I, and all of the remarks in Part II, of the Investigations are unnumbered in the first three editions, the difference in pagination creates a problem, to say the least, for anyone wanting to refer to these remarks, as one invariably does in discussions of aspect-seeing.

We have chosen to follow the practice of more than a half-century and use the pagination of the first two editions when referring to unnumbered remarks from the Investigations. We have also adopted the convention, employed by Stephen Mulhall and others, of adding a letter to indicate the position of a remark on a given page. Thus, “193a” refers to the first remark on page 193, “193b” to the second remark, and so on.

We wanted this volume's citations to be useful, however, independent of which version of the Investigations one happens to have at hand, or which edition predominates in the years to come. We considered the practice of citing multiple editions in the body of the text, much as David Stern does in his Cambridge Introduction to the Investigations.