Page 138 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
cept such as chair, game, or number, as tied to a fixed stock of features, such that 'overlapping similarities' between items in the extension consisted in over- lapping subsets of that stock which the various items possessed.
2.5 Rules, Concepts, and the Importance of Surroundings
With an eye on surroundings, we can return to the fundamental question. Though any rule admits of various understandings, we often see what rules require in specific cases. Another understanding would have been the right one if it were one that a reasonable person would have. But it is not. Some- times, though, what we see is that one would say different things about what a rule requires, depending on the surroundings in which we are to say them. The variations in understanding that some being might have are sometimes variations in the understanding that we would have under varyingcircumstances. We pick up a marble, but it is a cat's eye: the part that is colored is blue (for the most part), but much of it is clear. Into which basket must it go according to the rule? Into the left one, if it is a blue marble. But is it? We have various ways of classifying things as blue or not, and accept different ways for different purposes. In some surroundings, placing the marble in the left basket would be correctly perceived as just what the rule requires. In others, it would not. Nor need that
mean that we confront a different rule each time. The phenomenon of an object fitting a concept takes shape from the family resemblance discussion: it is a view of the object counting as doing that in given surroundings where it is to count as doing so or not. Changing the surroundings may changewhether it so counts. In different surroundings, what is required for then fitting the concept may differ. Look- ing at the various surroundings in which an object may be judged to fit a concept, and what would be required, in each, for doing so, one may perceive in these fluctuating requirements networks of 'over- lapping and criss-crossing similarities.' That point is completely orthogonal to the question of whether
wordscanbedefinedbygeneralformulae—an orthog- onality that Wittgenstein emphasizes.
3. Family Resemblance and the'Essence of Language'
The family resemblance discussion begins and ends with a reference to 'the essence of language.' In Sect. 65, the point is that Wittgenstein will supply no essence; family resemblance explains why not. In Sects. 91-2, the points are at least twofold. First, though it may be useful to analyze words in one way or another for some purposes, there is no such thing as the way in which they really are to be analyzed, no unique logical form. For the lexicon, there is no purpose-independent fact as to whether a word is really to be defined via a formula or in some other way. An analysis draws a comparison between words and one picture of how to do or say things; one which may be useful, but which reveals no unsuspected essence of the words in question.
Second, one might think of an essence of words, or language, as something which determines just how and where they are correctly applied, of what spoken truly; some property of the words which is what really confers on them all the facts of this sort. In that sense, words have no essence. There is certainly none contained in what they mean. (The point of the rule- following discussion is to show that there could not be such an essence and to show how we may live, and think, quite well without any.) What facts there are of the correct use of words come from the constantly shifting surroundings of their use. The idea of family resemblance aims to get us to the point of seeing that.
See also: Concepts; Names and Descriptions; Private Language; Rules; Wittgenstein, Ludwig.
Bibliography
Cavell S 1979 The Claim of Reason. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Kripke S 1980 Naming and Necessity. Basil BlackweU, Oxford
Travis C 1989 The Uses of Sense. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Wittgenstein L 1958 Philosophical Investigations. Basil BlackweU, Oxford
Hermeneutics E. Itkonen
'Hermeneutics' is a Continental, mainly German, Dilthey (d. 1911). The former based text interpretation philosophical tradition whose originators include on the interaction between 'grammatical under- Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834) and Wilhelm standing' (of what a sentence means) and 'psycho-
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