Philosophical Investigations

Natural language, meaning and use

This leads to the common gloss of Wittgenstein's argument in the Investigations: "Meaning just is use." In other words, we don't define words by reference to things, but by the way they are used. This means there is no need to postulate that there is something called beauty which exists independent of any particular "beautiful object." This may be an accurate description of one line of thought in the book, but it is a somewhat simplistic reading of the book as a whole.

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Certainly the above gloss is correct insofar as it is true that the Investigations deal largely with difficulties of language and meaning. But it is vitally important to see that he did not see them as being, fundamentally, difficulties. Instead, he viewed everything as being, fundamentally, simple. What had happened is that philosophers had obscured this by their misuse of language and their asking of meaningless questions. Wittgenstein attempted in PI to make things clear, and 'show the fly out of the fly bottle'.

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Language games and the meaning of 'game'

A closer examination of one of the most influential sections of the book shows this. As is common in Wittgenstein's later works, he begins by asking the reader to perform a thought experiment. First he asks the reader to come up with a definition of the word "game". While this may at first seem a simple task, he then goes on to lead us through the problems with each of the possible definitions of the word "game". Any definition which focuses on amusement leaves us unsatisfied since the feelings experienced by a world class chess player are very different than those of a circle of children playing Duck Duck Goose. Any definition which focuses on competition will fail to explain the game of catch, or the game of solitaire. And a definition of the word "game" which focuses on rules will fall on similar difficulties. The essential point of this exercise is often missed. Wittgenstein's point is not that it is impossible to define "game", but that we don't have a definition, and we don't need one.

Related Topics:
Thought experiment - Chess - Duck Duck Goose - Solitaire

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Everybody understands what we mean when we talk about playing a game, and we can even clearly identify and correct inaccurate uses of the word. All without reference to any "definition". Wittgenstein argues that 'definitions' are emergent forms from what he termed 'forms of life', which are the culture and society from which they emerged. One thing Wittgenstein stresses very strongly in Investigations are the social aspects of cognition: he went so far as to term Investigations a kind of anthropological exercise. To see how language works, we have to see how it functions in a specific social situation. It is this emphasis on becoming attentive to the social backdrop against which language is rendered intelligible that explains Wittgenstein's ellipitcal comment that "if a lion could speak, we would not understand him."

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Family resemblances

How exactly does this work? Why is it that we are sure a particular activity -- Olympic target shooting -- is a game while a similar activity -- military sharp shooting -- is not? Wittgenstein's explanation is tied up with an important analogy. How do we recognize that two people we know are related to one another? We may see similar height, weight, eye color, hair, nose, mouth, patterns of speech, social or political views, mannerisms, body structure, last names, etc. If we see enough matches we say we've noticed a family resemblance. It is perhaps important to note that this is not always a conscious process -- generally we don't catalog various similarities until we reach a certain threshold, we just intuitively see the resemblances. Wittgenstein suggests that the same may be true of language. Perhaps we are all familiar (i.e. socially) with enough things which are games, and enough things which are not games that we can instantly categorize new activities intuitively.

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This brings us back to Wittgenstein's reliance on indirect communication, and his reliance on thought-experiments. If many philosophers are confused, it is because they aren't able to see the family resemblances. They've made mistakes in understanding the vague intuitive rules language uses (which Wittgenstein calls the rules of the language game), and have thereby tied themselves up in philosophical knots. He suggests that an attempt to untangle these knots requires more than simple deductive arguments which point out the problems with their particular position. Instead Wittgenstein's larger goal seems to be to try to divert them from their philosophical problems long enough to indirectly re-train their intuitive ability to see the family resemblances.

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Private language

Perhaps the most celebrated argument put forward in the Philosophical Investigations is what is called the Private Language Argument (even though it is not, strictly speaking, an argument), in which Wittgenstein asks if it is possible for us to have a language that nobody else can understand. Would such a language make any sense to me? How could I be sure that I had used the correct term to describe a sensation or object? Supposing I have a sensation S and mark it down every time S occurs, how can I subjectively be sure that I am relating the present S to the previous S? Wittgenstein in Investigations raises several objections to the notion of a private language (thus it is impossible to speak of a single 'Private Language Argument', despite this being a commonly-used term). One theme central to them is the notion of language as we know it being a public activity. Another related idea is the observation that when we speak of a word having a meaning, we normally imply some means of verification, i.e. I can be wrong about this bird being a raven, in the sense that others may tell me that it is a crow, but how can I verify that this is the same sensation? Wittgenstein likens this to buying a hundred copies of the same newspaper to check that the first copy was correct.

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As with all work by the 'later' Wittgenstein, what he is trying to do here is not to raise some new, exciting theory that might 'solve' the problems of language. Instead, he is perpetually dragging the philosopher back to the facts of language that (according to Wittgenstein) s/he always knew all the time, but had forgotten in the excitement of thinking that s/he had discovered some new theory. So, therefore, Wittgenstein doesn't attempt to prove that the concept of a private language is false: he attempts to prove that the concept makes no sense (in terms of what we know about how we actually use language). Wittgenstein believed that language (and therefore thought) was a fundamentally social activity, but he did not argue that this was the case. Instead he tried to show that the alternative view (the individualist view of language as argued for, for example, by Chomsky) was meaningless, and could never be coherently enunciated as a real theory.

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The importance of the Private Language Argument can be understood in that the existence of a private language is presumed by many existing philosophical schools of thought (e.g. David Hume's Empiricism). In trying to show this presumption erroneous, Wittgenstein in effect is attempting to reveal a fundamental flaw in the reasoning behind many important philosophical doctrines.

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