Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Language-Games and Meaning as Use

Who Wittgenstein was, and the break from his first book

Ludwig Wittgenstein died of cancer in Cambridge in 1951, where he had returned for his final years. Philosophical Investigations came out two years later, in 1953.

Part I of the book, 693 numbered sections, had already been ready for print in 1946: it would not reach print for another seven years. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces a direct debt from Wittgenstein’s close attention to the grammar of use to Oxford’s postwar school of ordinary language, a central strand of analytic philosophy.

From the Tractatus to Philosophical Investigations: the picture that cracks

The Tractatus was published in German in 1921. It argued that a proposition is a logical picture of the reality it describes: the picture theory, as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it, makes a proposition’s sense depend on representing some empirical state of affairs. Taken literally, that rule turns against the book itself: the Tractatus’s own propositions about language in general represent no particular fact, so by its own rule they should come out meaningless. According to the same source, this was one of the pressures that pushed Wittgenstein to rework his position.

Philosophical Investigations opens by attacking the very idea, held in the Tractatus, that words work by naming objects and that sentences are combinations of names. In place of that old naming theory, Wittgenstein proposes watching language-games, the real practices in which language gets used.

Language-games and meaning as use

A language-game, in Wittgenstein’s sense, is a practice where words and actions weave together under their own rules, tied to a purpose shared by the speakers.

Practical example: a builder and an assistant communicate using only four words — block, pillar, slab, beam — each tied to a precise gesture within the work they are doing together; that is all it takes for the language to function.

In that example «slab» points to the gesture required at that exact moment in the job: the meaning is the role the word plays in the activity the two men share. For Wittgenstein, in many cases, a word’s sense is measured by looking at how it is put to work in everyday speech.

Wittgenstein and language: family resemblance

One question is left open: why does «game» cover chess, solitaire and catch without any trait shared by all of them? Wittgenstein answers with family resemblance: a web of similarities that cross from one case to the next, different each time, never the same across the whole series.

It is a different kind of answer from one that hunts for an essence common to every case, the way Plato’s theory of Forms does: here the threads cross without ever running through the same single point.

The private language argument

The private language argument occupies sections 244 to 271 of Philosophical Investigations. It concerns an imagined language whose words would name only inner sensations known solely to the speaker: for Wittgenstein, a language like that lacks rules, and so lacks meaning.

The crux, as the Private Language entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, is that for a private sensation there is no objective standard able to settle whether it matches the one before, beyond how it strikes the person feeling it in that moment. Privately christening a sign for a sensation is not enough: giving something meaning requires a shareable technique of use, and a lone gesture cannot create one. If the link between sign and sensation was not already correct from the start, leaning on memory alone cannot make it correct afterward. Both the Ludwig Wittgenstein entry and the Private Language entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy close on the same point: a language intelligible in principle only to its own speaker fails the test of being a real language.