Ludwig Wittgenstein · Philosophy
Wittgenstein returns to philosophy and overturns his own first book. Meaning is not a picture and words do not mean by labelling objects; the meaning of a word is its <em>use</em> in the practices of life. Language is a motley of ‘language-games’ woven into ‘forms of life’, with no single hidden essence.
Having written, in the Tractatus, a book he believed had solved philosophy, Wittgenstein gave up the subject entirely. He gave away his inherited fortune, worked as a village schoolteacher in rural Austria, as a gardener at a monastery, and designed a severely modernist house for his sister - convinced there was nothing left for philosophy to do. But in the late 1920s he was drawn back, partly through conversations with members of the Vienna Circle and the mathematician Frank Ramsey, who pressed objections he could not answer. He returned to Cambridge in 1929, and over the following two decades he developed a second philosophy so different from his first that the two can seem the work of different people. The later philosophy, contained chiefly in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), is not a refinement of the Tractatus but its systematic dismantling - a sustained attack on the very assumptions that had made the first book seem necessary.
What changed his mind? At the deepest level, Wittgenstein came to see that the Tractatus had been held captive by a single seductive picture of how language works: the picture that words mean by standing for objects, that a proposition means by picturing a fact, that beneath the surface diversity of language lies one hidden, crystalline logical structure, one essence of the proposition. This picture, he now thought, was not a discovery but a prejudice - a distorting lens through which language had been forced into a shape it does not really have. The later philosophy begins by setting this picture aside and looking, instead, at how language actually works in the countless concrete activities of human life. The result is a revolution: meaning is relocated from a mysterious relation of picturing or naming to the public practices in which words are used, and philosophy is transformed from a quest for hidden logical foundations into a patient therapy that cures us of the confusions our own language creates. The man who had drawn the limits of language from the inside now showed that there were no such fixed limits to draw - only the endless, shifting variety of what we actually do with words.
In place of the picture theory, the later Wittgenstein offers a slogan that captures his new account of meaning: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. To know what a word means is not to know what object it stands for (most words do not stand for objects at all - think of ‘and’, ‘perhaps’, ‘ouch’, ‘hello’, ‘five’, ‘the’), but to know how it is used - the role it plays in the practices and activities of a linguistic community. Wittgenstein offers a powerful image: words are like tools in a toolbox. ‘Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.’ Just as it would be absurd to ask what all tools have in common (some fasten, some cut, some measure, some hold) or to think they all work the same way, it is absurd to think all words work by naming. Words do different jobs; their meaning is the job they do, the use to which they are put.
This relocates meaning entirely. On the old picture, meaning was a static relation between a word and an object, fixed and hidden, to be uncovered by logical analysis. On the new view, meaning is dynamic, public, and woven into action: it lives in the use of words in the ongoing activities of human life, and to grasp a meaning is to master a technique, to know how to go on, to be able to use the word correctly in the practices where it has its home. This is why Wittgenstein insists we should not ask for the meaning as if it were an object to be found, but should look at the use - ‘don’t look for the meaning, look for the use’. Many philosophical confusions, he argues, arise precisely because we take a word out of the everyday practice where it has a clear use, and then, finding no object for it to name, conjure up a mysterious entity for it to stand for, or puzzle over what it ‘really’ means in the abstract. The cure is to bring the word back to the use it actually has in the form of life where it belongs. Meaning is not a thing words possess but a role they play.
Wittgenstein’s key term for the diverse activities in which language is used is the language-game. He introduces it to draw attention to the fact that ‘the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’. A language-game is any of the countless practices in which words are interwoven with action: giving orders and obeying them; describing an object; reporting an event; speculating; forming and testing a hypothesis; making up a story; play-acting; guessing riddles; making a joke; asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. Each of these is a different game, with its own rules and its own point, and the words used in it get their meaning from their role in that game. There is no single thing, ‘language’, with one essence; there is this vast, motley collection of language-games, related by family resemblances, constantly arising and falling away, woven into the fabric of human activity. The term ‘game’ is chosen deliberately to stress that language is rule-governed activity, something we do, learned by training and practice, not a system of names hooked onto objects.
And language-games are not free-floating; they are embedded in what Wittgenstein calls forms of life - the shared patterns of human activity, behaviour, and natural reaction that give language-games their sense and their stability. To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life: the practices of measuring, building, trading, promising, mourning, that the words live within. This is why meaning is not private or arbitrary: it rests on shared practices, common training, agreement not in opinions but in the ways we act and react, in ‘the bedrock’ of our form of life. The upshot is a complete transformation of how we should think about language, meaning, and philosophy. We should stop seeking hidden essences and crystalline logical forms beneath the surface; we should look at the rough ground of actual linguistic practice, at the diverse games woven into our shared life. ‘We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!’ The next lessons follow where this leads: the dissolution of philosophical problems as confusions of language, the famous argument against a private language, and the rule-following considerations that probe the very foundations of meaning.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that the later Wittgenstein rejected the picture theory: meaning is not a label or a picture but the use of a word in practice; language is a motley of ‘language-games’ embedded in ‘forms of life’, and concepts are united by ‘family resemblance’ rather than a common essence. Explain meaning-as-use and lang…
Leads to Augustine of Hippo.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.