[lit-ideas] language games
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:35:10 -0800
Lawrence asks
What did Wittgenstein intend with his word games. Were they strictly
for fun or were they primarily educational tools?
You know a priori that nothing having to do with Wittgenstein was 'fun.'
(During his lectures he sometimes often make an amusing point and laugh
at himself; if others laughed, he would hold up his hand and say, 'No,
I'm serious.')
In the Blue Book, comprised of notes dictated to some members of his
class on the philosophy of mathematics, after he had decided that the
class was too large for him to conduct it as he would have liked, he writes
'I shall in the future again and again call your attention to what I
shall call language games. These are ways of using signs simpler than
those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday
language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child
begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of
primitive forms of language or primitive languages. If we want to study
the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement
of propositions with reality, the nature of assertion, assumption, and
question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of
language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing
background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at
such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud
our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities and reactions
which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in
these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from
our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated
forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.
'Now what makes it difficult for us to take this line of investigation
is our craving for generality.'
Despite what he says above he really doesn't intend to investigate
actual 'primitive languages.' Language games are like thought
experiments with words, designed to break the grip of our confused and
misleading ways of thinking about language itself, mental processes, and
other things which philosophers have made into abstractions and
generalized to death. Later, in the Investigations, language games are
no longer (if they ever were) confined to 'the forms of language with
which a child begins to make use of words.'
The linguistic transactions of 'the Builders' in §2 of the
Investigations is a good example of a language game.
Robert Paul
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