Chapter 1 Wittgenstein’s “-Games”

In my view the key idea of the later Wittgenstein’s revolutionary approach to the philosophy of language is that of language-games. His idea was that lin- guistic meaning is a function of the ways human beings communicate and in- teract by means their embodied participation in highly flexible, open-ended social activities which he labelled language-games. It has been said that he initially conceived of this metaphor for human linguistic activity while passing by a soccer match in Cambridge. Be that as it may, Wittgenstein did develop an understanding of human language which focuses on the give and take of linguistic activity within standard moves and patterns, on the one hand, and creative innovations, on the other. It is with the unique character of this notion that we must begin our explora- tion of Wittgenstein’s understanding of language. In his earlier work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein understood the of linguistic mean- ing as parallel to the tracking of logical equations and the picturing of material . These facts were viewed as constructed out of and described by “atomic and molecular” parts which go together, much like Lego-blocks, to form the facts of the world. In turn, these facts can be described by corresponding atom- ic and molecular propositions that parallel them in a one-to-one manner. This static, exhaustive “picture ” of both reality and language was re- ferred to by , who along with Wittgenstein, subscribed to it, as “.” Once one has understood the world and language in this way, there is nothing left to say or do. Meaningful language has been reduced to mirroring the facts of the material world, with no room left for creative or speculative linguistic efforts. After he summed things up in this manner, the young Wittgenstein retired from philosophy because he believed he had ex- plained it all. Here are his parting words: “I believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems.” (Preface, p. 5) Fortunately, some fifteen years later Wittgenstein came to believe that he had, in , not “answered all the questions” and returned to Cambridge and to philosophy completely revising his about linguistic activity and meaning. In addition to opening up our understanding of language as far more flexible and complex than he had at first thought, the later Wittgenstein of- fered us a highly creative and multi-dimensional theory of linguistic mean- ing. He now focused on “use in context” as the key to understanding language and its vast and open-ended variations. More specifically, he centered in on

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2 Chapter 1 the metaphor of language-games as providing the key perspective for grasping what meaning is and how it works. Before getting started I should mention that there are varying theories about just what it was that led to Wittgenstein’s “turn-about” between his first work, the Tractatus, and his more mature Investigations, published over twenty years later. One very influential perspective is by Stephen Toulmin in his article Lud- wig Wittgenstein in the “Men and Ideas” series in the journal Encounter (July, 1975). I shall share Toulmin’s view briefly here and contrast it to my own, which was published in Philosophy Today (Summer, 2008). Toulmin offers a very insightful account of the rich cultural context of Wittgenstein’s upbringing, especially that of the highly political and aesthetic ­texture of those days in Vienna. He uses this background to suggest that Witt- genstein never really embraced the so-called “” of his day. In short, in Toulmin’s words, “Wittgenstein was never a positivist, nor were there ever ‘two Wittgensteins,’ the earlier one authoring the Tractatus and the later on the au- thor of the Investigations.” (p. 60) Toulmin claims that in the former work Witt- genstein argued not that one cannot speak about what lies beyond “pictures of states of affairs” because such things are “nonsensical,” but rather because such things are what really matter in human life. In other words, Toulmin maintains that after having set forth his version of “logical atomism,” Wittgenstein realized that whatever can be expressed by such a theory is not really important. What is important but cannot be spo- ken, according to Toulmin’s account, are the existential realities of everyday life, such things as , God, and other human values. Thus Wittgenstein ­remarked that once one sees what he has accomplished in his Tractatus one will see how unimportant it all is. His own words were that the value of this work lay in seeing “how little is achieved when these problems are solved.” (p. 5) Thus he left philosophy behind and returned to Vienna and a more regu- lar life. Therefore, according to Toulmin the later Wittgenstein, the author of the Investigations returned to philosophy and Cambridge in 1929 because he had found a way to talk about the things that really matter in life beyond logical and empirical matters. So, on this view, Wittgenstein never really changed his mind about “logical atomism,” he only discovered a way to do what he knew all along it would not do. As I mentioned above, Toulmin claims that Wittgenstein never had a change of mind about his earlier work and therefore there never were “two Wittgensteins.” My view, on the other hand, is that Wittgenstein did alter his view of the nature and value of “logical atomism” after having spent fifteen years working in the “real world” and teaching middle school children. I think he realized