Episode #231 ... The Late Work of Wittgenstein - Language Games
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis on there as well. I hope you love the show today.

So there's a tactic that's become pretty popular in what some people would call the debate space of the internet these days. There's a trick someone will do where at the very beginning of the conversation, they'll ask the other person to define the exact thing that they're going to be talking about that day. It'll sound kind of like this. Just to start out today, can you please give me your definition of God? Can you give me a definition of abortion or insurrection or justice, whatever it is that day?

And then the other person will usually take the bait. They try to give their take on it. Maybe they'll say an insurrection is when a group of people try to overthrow some form of authority out there. Then the other person will say back to that, well, based on your definition, is a prison riot an insurrection then? That's people overthrowing an authority. If a union fires a manager that's harassing employees, is that an insurrection?

How about if my two kids both kick me in the shins at the exact same time? Is that an insurrection? I mean, if you can't even define what it is we're supposed to be talking about today, are you even qualified to be here? All the while, this person's usually winning points with the crowd that's watching the debate. I mean, if the other side can't get to the essence of what we're talking about, then what are we even talking about?

This scene, actually, isn't too far away from something a lot of you'll be familiar with from the history of philosophy. There's a guy that used to do something like this, although he did it in good faith and was trying to avoid rhetoric while he did it. His name was Socrates. Remember, he'd go out into the public square with people shopping and walking around, and he'd ask them to give him a definition of something like justice. When they gave him this definition, he'd rip it apart, point out all the limitations in it, point out how there's examples of justice that clearly fall outside of the rational protocol you've just set up there.

Would you like to try again with another definition of justice, perhaps? And again, he did all this because he thought this was necessary to get closer to an understanding of the essences that must be at the root of all these things. But what if all this is not what it seems? What if this is not people misunderstanding definitions and trying to get to better ones, but people playing two very different language games at the same time?

In fact, what if most of the problems philosophers seem to have, puzzles that have stumped them for centuries when it comes to knowledge or metaphysics, what if even how common it is these days for people to be talking past each other in political or religious conversations and debates, what if all this is actually just a misunderstanding about the way that language works?

By the end of this episode, we'll understand Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work, where he explains the final case he ever made for language in his life, and why he thinks what we're talking about here isn't too crazy of an alternative story. Should be said, when Wittgenstein sets out to critique basically every human before him that has ever looked at language, he's not doing this stuff trying to be mean to anyone. Remember, this is his later work.

And that's because in his earlier work, when he was writing his book The Tractatus, he fell into the exact same trap that he thinks many others are falling into as he's writing his later work. Here's where he's coming from. Most theories of language at some point ask the question, where do words get their meaning from? How is any word that we say or write down on a piece of paper meaningful at all? It's kind of crazy that it is if you think about it.

And if we ever want to answer that question from the debate master from the beginning of this episode, if we want perfect definitions of things, it's going to be helpful to know where these definitions come from. Wittgenstein's last book called Philosophical Investigations, published after his death, opens with him talking about what he calls the Augustinian theory of language, a reference to St. Augustine and his work.

Now this theory is a very common way of thinking about language that he thinks has polluted the way that most people think about how words work. It goes like this. Say that somebody writes a sentence. Wittgenstein uses the example of a shopkeeper in the book. So let's say John has five red apples. That's our sentence. Augustine would refer to the words on display there.

as essentially just stating a list of names. Meaning a sentence is quite literally a list of the names of various things that can be pointed to out in the universe somewhere. John can be pointed to, the number five, the color red, and apples can all be pointed to as well. And to Wittgenstein, explaining how Augustine's thinking about all this, every word here stands for some object out there,

And the implication is that when we communicate with each other using words, it works by what he calls "ostensive definition." It's a fancy term that just means a word points to something. That words get their definitions and meanings because they correspond to something that really exists that can be pointed to. Now, if you want to extend this to talk about the essence of something like an apple, you know, the common trait that makes all very different looking apples still all apples,

Well, that's still a matter of exploration. To Augustine, we can probably still do the work and ultimately discover the essences of these things if we try hard enough. But the bigger point here is: if this theory is true,

You can imagine the scene you could paint of the origins of how language as a human activity may have gotten off the ground in the first place. Language is created when someone goes out, finds an apple, points at it, and then everyone agrees let's call this an apple. Quick, quick, go write that down in the dictionary. Wittgenstein thinks this image is a picture that holds us captive, he says in the book, when it comes to our understanding of language. One of the big problems with it for him, and

And this will extend to other theories of language that resemble this approach from Augustine, which is a lot of them. One glaring problem is that these theories are usually looking for some hidden essence to each and every word, or some insight that an individual person can point to and arrive at that explains what the meaning or the definition of the word is. Now it'd be wonderful if the world were like this, if we wanted to give the debate master a perfect definition. But for Wittgenstein, words don't have some essence that can be figured out if we just think about them really hard.

Language is always, for him, a complex community activity that is constantly going on. Meaning, no one person just points to something in the world and gives it a name. And what he'll argue is that what these theories tend to neglect is just how important the function of a word is when it's used in a community setting. That the meaning of any word always requires a grammar or a set of community-generated rules and practices underneath that give it context.

And these are rules that we've been heavily trained on by all the interaction we've had with other people in the linguistic community we're speaking in. Put another way, we can't just point to a red fire truck, tell a newborn baby that's trying to learn the language that this is red, and expect that the baby will know exactly what we're talking about. Because if you were to do that, that baby would have no way of knowing whether red is a color, is red the truck itself, is red the sound the fire truck's making,

Does the word red represent all forms of transportation? Is that what they're talking about? And hundreds of other examples. For that baby, to ever figure out what we're specifically talking about, it will need a deeper context that is informed by the linguistic community it lives in. Wittgenstein's drawing attention here to an important place that the meanings of our words are coming from. Again, it's a community-generated, pre-theoretical set of rules and practices. These are not written down anywhere.

And these are things that themselves to Wittgenstein only really serve this purpose they do because there are people currently going along with them. In other words, all of this is subject to change as the community changes. These rules and practices sort of crystallize into what he calls a grammar. And that grammar becomes the thing that makes any statement anyone ever makes seem coherent or not.

Now, it gets slightly more complicated than this, but we're almost there. Bear with me for one more minute or so, because Wittgenstein would also want us to consider that these rules and practices that inform our language don't just materialize out of thin air. We are human beings, after all. There are certain natural tendencies we have, just as creatures. And those tendencies will always be at least a piece of anything that we ever want to say that's meaningful. Wittgenstein calls these forms of life in the book.

And these are things that he'd want us to respect deeply. They're a source for us finding common ground with each other. He'd want us to just make sure we remember these things are always driving us forward to some extent. Human things like caring for loved ones, the desire to survive, joking around with each other, mourning for the dead. There's always an undercurrent of our own humanity that has an impact on the things we ever decide to communicate and what rules and practices make sense to us.

Now, if it helps you, he doesn't lay it out this way, but if it helps you and you're a visual person, when it comes to thinking about this whole process he explains about the meaning of a word and how it arises, you could think of the base of this process as those forms of life we just talked about. Those ladder up into and collaborate with the rules and practices that collectively emerge.

The rules and practices crystallize into a grammar of what makes anything coherent. And then finally, after all that, the meaning of a word only arises for Wittgenstein when a person decides to speak it and use it publicly in a community setting.

At the risk of redundancy here, again, this doesn't come from an essence. This doesn't come from pointing at something and giving it a definition. The meaning of a word happens. It is created and recreated in real time when it is used by people in a particular way within a linguistic community. And this is what is meant when people say in Wittgenstein's later work that the meanings of words come from their use.

Now I promise we'll come back to this, but there's an obvious juicy rebuttal to all this so far that's going to really help me make his point for the rest of the episode about some of the details here. You know, someone could hear what's been said so far and say, "Well, what about triangles? Is the definition of a triangle something that only makes sense when some person says it? And if there are a bunch of delusional people that all came along and decided triangles only have two sides, are we supposed to listen to them?"

I mean look, this is an a priori fact of the universe. A triangle is a polygon with exactly three sides and three interior angles. To use the word in any other way than that is to misunderstand what the word is. Wittgenstein would agree with basically all of this in spirit, but he'd want to bring this person's attention to something that they're doing there. In his terminology, this person's playing a totally different language game than we typically do when we talk about everyday concepts.

More specifically, this person's operating in the language game of Euclidean geometry. Remember those rules and practices that ultimately crystallize into a grammar? And how that grammar determines the criteria for what makes anything coherent or not? Well, geometry has a very specific set of these rules and practices that are distinct to it. For example, answers have to be calculable within the rules of the system. Terms have to be grounded in shared definitions or axioms. Proof is the primary thing that makes something justifiable in geometry.

Now these rules and practices are different than the ones we use when we have conversations about more ordinary things. And notice how everything about this different grammar is similarly grounded in a practice of communally agreed upon criteria and how all these rules only hold up because there are other people that are willing to go along with them.

In other words, geometry is an absolutely beautiful closed system of rules that allows for certain people willing to use this grammar to speak in a particular way to each other while operating in the community of geometry. These are people playing a very different type of language game that has a very different kind of grammar, where if it was applied to many other areas of our life, it would make it almost impossible to still be functional. I mean, just to illustrate this, imagine someone that's a big fan of chess, another great closed system of rules.

They're such a big fan of chess, it turns out, that they decide they're going to transpose the rules of chess onto their dating life. Bro, how was your date? Oh, it was good. She asked me a really tough question, but I used the Sicilian defense on her, bro. Bro, do you think she likes you? I don't know. Like, I think she does, but I'm hoping we can castle queenside once all the pieces get out of the way. It's like you'd be an idiot to live your life in this way.

And to Wittgenstein, this really is a story that's gone on over and over again throughout the history of philosophy. There's a certain archetype that pops up a lot of the mathematician turned philosopher. They want to find out the truth about everything, and they're really intrigued by the kind of certainty and precision that math seems to provide to people.

So whether it's Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, whoever it is, these are people whose projects came up short not because they're stupid, but because they're literally trying to do the impossible. They're applying a grammar that lies at the heart of one language game to a completely different language game. This is why, by the way, this is such an effective rhetoric tactic by the debate master at the beginning of the episode. You're giving your opponent an impossible task, something that makes sense in a totally different language game.

And then you can just sit back, relax, and point out all the exceptions to it as they scramble for answers and people start to doubt their knowledge. See, whenever we talk about something with more ordinary language, there is no singular static definition of a thing that's going to apply to all the cases. It uses a completely different kind of grammar. Far more open-ended than something like geometry or chess. Concepts like insurrection, justice, whatever it is,

Wittgenstein says concepts have blurred edges in ordinary language. They're not these clear-cut things that someone can just lay out an airtight definition of.

At best, what we have whenever we look at a concept, he says, are a bunch of different takes on something complicated that bear a sort of family resemblance, as he says. Let's describe what he means by that. The example he uses in the book is to ask the question, "What is a game?" Think of all the different kinds of games there are. Hopscotch, poker, tic-tac-toe, Call of Duty, rock, paper, scissors, all of these are games.

And the temptation by a lot of people is to try to find something similar between all these examples. Some essence to them that makes all of these games. But Wittgenstein's point is that no matter how much work you do trying to craft the absolute perfect definition of a game, you're ultimately committing a category error. And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that helps the sponsors out of the show today. For an ad-free experience, patreon.com slash philosophize this. This episode's sponsored by ZocDoc.

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Whenever someone, anyone out there, has an understanding of the word "game" in ordinary language, what they're doing there is less analogous to having a perfect definition of the word, and it's more analogous to knowing your way around a family album. You know those books of photos people keep of when they've gotten together for the holidays over the years? I mean, I don't do it.

But if I had a family, I would. Just kidding, I do know. Anyway, understanding the word game is like opening up one of those albums and saying, oh, there's Aunt Gladys. She's an oncologist. And look over there, that's Danny. That's her sister's son. That one right there is Grandma Beatrice, still hanging in there strong she is. What we call games, like people in a family, share a kind of family resemblance that can be more or less educated to spot.

But despite the people in the photo album all bearing some kind of resemblance, there's no single characteristic about them, or essence, that makes that resemblance what it is. The edges are much more blurry than that. It's a lot more like a bunch of Venn diagrams, all overlapping each other in different ways. Some overlap more than others. Sometimes two of them, both still part of the family, don't resemble each other much at all. And so too with games, or with any other concept we try to understand in this particular kind of language game.

You can also see to Wittgenstein here not only why it becomes easy for philosophers to get lost in puzzles that don't actually exist, you know, when they try to rationally unify concepts down into things with these hard edges, but you can also see why it becomes so easy for people to be talking past each other. Because consider how language games operate in a real world example if Wittgenstein is right here.

And I know this is a charged example, but look, I hope I've earned enough respect as somebody that's writing these in good faith to be able to use this one. It's an absolutely perfect one to show what he thinks the consequences of these language games can be. Gender identity. I know. One side of the table might say that gender is a biological fact. That male and female is either an XX or an XY chromosome situation. That I can look under a microscope and tell you exactly which one of these you are, male or female. Now the other side of this may say something like,

Look, when I think of male or female, I'm not thinking of chromosomes under a microscope. I don't think of XX or XY. I think of a mustachioed man or a woman with long flowing hair. Point is to this person, gender is a community generated set of norms. Its meaning is defined by a social performance of the gender roles of either male or female within a culture. That the edges of those concepts are going to be a bit more blurry.

and that it's going to come down to a practice rooted in communal criteria, rather than being able to read axioms out of a book about biology. Now to Wittgenstein, these are two people coming to the table using two very different language games, and as long as they remain rooted only in theirs, they will never see eye to eye on this stuff. The same world, in other words, can be seen through different grammars and different language games, and the specific language game you're using can shape what aspects of the world stand out as meaningful or even visible to you.

And for Wittgenstein, another way to put this would be to say that classification and perception interfold each other. If you remember the recent episode we just did using the duck rabbit as an example, you may remember I was borrowing that example from the work of Wittgenstein. Well, here it is in Philosophical Investigations.

On that episode, we were using it to describe different experiential framings of reality. But in this case, Wittgenstein's saying that there is no single language game that somehow captures the hidden essence of reality. The same events in the world, the same problems that need to be solved can be looked at through different grammars and different obvious solutions will emerge because of the rules and practices we're bringing to bear upon the moment.

So whether you see a duck or a rabbit, or whether you see an event as a protest or an insurrection, or whether you see gender as a social performance or a biological fact, this has less to do with you uncovering the hidden essence of reality and more to do with the specific language game you're playing.

Now to simplify all this so far, if you wanted two things that Wittgenstein's later work says is missing from many of the other theories of language, it's going to be a consideration of the role of practice and difference. Practice meaning that underlying grammar that so many people ignore the importance of.

And difference meaning the actual family resemblances of words with those blurry edges, where they don't necessarily have some clear essence that we can define when the debate master asks you to. And for whatever it's worth, it won't be a coincidence that so many philosophers after this book comes out will use the words "practice" and "difference" in their work so much more. If you had one of those etymology, like, usages of the word graph thing, it goes way up after this in philosophy. Now, I'm sure you've guessed where all this is going. If we buy what Wittgenstein's selling here,

then this isn't just going to be two or three of these language games that are going on that are competing with each other. Not only is there usually a diversity of languages that people are speaking in any given area,

But now imagine each person is now oscillating between God knows how many different language games with varying levels of self-awareness that that's the way communication works. Picture the sheer quantity, it's amazing, of just dumb, completely irreconcilable arguments that are going on between people. And think of how many of them believe that if they just push a little further in this argument they're having, the other person's going to come around. More than that, if Wittgenstein's right here,

then it's really interesting to consider how the role of a philosopher changes in this new world. I mean, what do they have left to do?

The idea we're just going to sit around explaining these huge mysterious concepts like time or mind, it just starts to seem pretty delusional. Because these things that seem like they're huge philosophical problems become, after you accept his premises, just mistakes of grammar that need to be clarified. As he says in philosophy, quote, "...all explanation must disappear and description alone must take its place," end quote.

The job of a philosopher then becomes something almost like being a cartographer of language, making maps, reading them. Philosophy turns from something where people are sitting around, kind of tortured, trying to come up with these grand theories that explain big things, and it turns into something that more resembles a kind of therapy, he says. Let me explain what he means here because there's multiple different therapies he thinks philosophers should be providing. First of all, when people are talking past each other in the world,

If the debate master is someone who's demanding the essences to things, then the philosopher should be something like the opposite of that. Just like a cartographer, they should be gathering and surveying as many examples of how a word is used as they can. And then once they survey the different usages of a word, their job is to lay them out side by side so that they can be observed and compared by people. This is therapeutic just because of the context and humility that it brings to people. It helps them understand how language is actually functioning.

As he says, quote, "What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses which you had not dreamed. I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. And now you're free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it." End quote. Another thing a philosopher has to do now, if we accept Wittgenstein's work, is to spend more time clarifying those rules and practices that dictate so much about how our language works.

There's tons of moments in his work where he thinks that even a slight correction that goes on at the level of grammar can solve some of the most seemingly impossible philosophical problems. Think about how the classic debate between free will and determinism starts to dissolve once you and whoever you're debating with stop treating words like they exist in isolation and start acknowledging the ordinary contexts that give those words meaning in the first place to you. Words like "can" or "cause" or "responsibility."

To Wittgenstein, there's no hidden essence of these things written into the universe waiting for us to explain them with some kind of theory. And more than that, think of how this applies to things like time and mind, two more monolithic concepts that people torture themselves over. Instead of thinking of time as something that's hidden and mysterious about the universe that we have to explain,

Try thinking of the way the word time actually functions in our ordinary language about it. How we talk about keeping time, for example. Instead of mind being some category of the universe that Descartes needs to explain to us through some big dualistic system, instead think of the way the word mind functions for us. How do we use it? When is something just a brain and when does it become a mind? A philosopher's job is to remind people.

of the ordinary contexts and grammar that allow for any of these words to make sense to us in the first place at all. Another type of therapy a philosopher should be doing, he says, is what he calls "marshalling reminders and analogies." What he means by this is trying to come up with memorable reminders that illuminate how language works and thus guides people out of confusion. Leads the fly out of the fly bottle, as he says.

And this is more than just confusion. Like, there's so many disputes out there that seem like they're huge issues that people have been arguing about for years between themselves. But when they get out of abstract theorizing about the words and instead start focusing on the concrete uses of the words that they're arguing about,

Sometimes problems that seem really big can just completely dissolve with that move. As he says, "If misunderstandings result from the ambiguities of our language, then philosophical problems arise when 'language goes on holiday.'" If philosophers do more or less what I've tried to do on this episode today and come up with ways that actually communicate these ideas to people, then this is another kind of therapy he thinks that's worth providing as well. Now, somebody could say back to all this. Let's play devil's advocate for the debate master.

Is Wittgenstein really saying that there's no room for asking someone their definition of something? I mean, it seems like with so many uses of ordinary words going on out there, clarifying what you're talking about is going to be one of the first steps of any productive conversation. And first of all, that's right. Okay, Wittgenstein would certainly agree with that point.

The question becomes though, when someone in a debate does this sort of thing, we gotta ask, are they using it as a rhetorical tactic like it was described at the beginning? Asking for a definition, being poised, ready to poke holes in it? Or are they doing it in good faith? And if somebody's really coming from this place, wouldn't the question be formulated a bit differently than it often is? Wouldn't another way of framing this same sentiment be to say, "Hey, first off, can we just clarify what each of us means by insurrection in this context? I think it would help the conversation."

Isn't that a little different than what's often done? See, for Wittgenstein, it's about finding a way to negotiate meaning between different grammars and language games. It's not about destroying your opponent. It's not about making them realize how dumb they are about this particular thing. All of that just presupposes that there's some essence to the discussion that you as an individual have privileged access to.

Truly negotiating meaning though, through conversation, is a cooperative thing. Because once you acknowledge that the meanings of words lie in the way that they're used, then any shared understanding we might seek to have with each other, the only way that that ever happens is through dialogue and adjustment along the way. Certainly not debate masters. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you all for making the podcast and my family's life possible. Books coming along good. I think it's just an update. I think you're going to be happy with it when it comes out next year.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.