Page 149 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

I shall in the future again and again draw 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, or of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of 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 withoutthe confusing backgroundof 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 disap- pears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut andtransparent.Ontheotherhandwerecognizeinthese 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.
(Bl.B: 17)
Oddly, the notion is not mentioned again in The Blue Book, and he does not illustrate it with a single explicitly signalled example. However, in The Brown Book (Br.B) of 1934-35 virtually every page provides a case. Here are two:
from one language to another; asking, thanking, curs- ing, greeting, praying. This is a deliberately chaotic list, explicitly designed to elude capture by any single classificatory scheme. It is clear, however, that 'lan- guage game' no longer simply refers to the kind of simple, artificially constructed examples found in Br.B (although there are plenty of those in PI as well), or to 'the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words' mentioned in Bl.B; 'language game' in PI can frequently mean any isolated aspect of the whole practical, social, and intellectual back- ground against which language is used.
2. The Purposes of the Game Analogy
A central purpose is to break the hold of a very tempt- ing philosophical theory. This says that people give their words meaning by privately matching them with objects—either physical objects or properties, Pla- tonic objects or mental concepts—and that the way these words are actually employed in sentences and speech acts is something secondary, derivative, and inessential. The analogy is intended to show that the speaking of a language is something people do, part of a communal, social, activity. Words only have meaning through being used in sentences, and sen- tences only have a meaning through being used in speech-acts. Speech-acts themselves are only to be understood through understanding the needs, values, and social practices of the society that uses them—a complex which Wittgenstein calls a 'form of life' (PI: §23). What might be called the contingently private uses of language—thinking to oneself, making entries in a diary—are parasitic on language's more public forms:
How should we counter someone who told us that with him understanding was an inner process?—How should we counter him if he said that with him knowing how to play chess was an inner process?—We should say that when we want to know if he can play chess we aren't interested in anything that goes on inside him.—And if he replies that this is in fact just what we are interested in, that is, we are interested in whether he can play chess— then we shall have to draw his attention to the criteria which would demonstrate his capacity, and on the other hand to the criteria for the 'inner states.'
(PI: 181) A major advantage of a philosophy of language that
gives use (PI: 43) priority over denotation or meaning is that it helps end the tyranny of declarative sentences and propositions. There is more temptation to think that declarative sentences have their meaning con- ferred by private acts of ostensive definition than orders, questions, and requests which seem intrin- sically more other-directed. There are very few declarative sentences which would naturally prompt a specific, expected reaction, but the repertoire of natural responses to orders e tc . is invariably both more limited and closer to the occasion of prompting.
Imagine this language:-
munication between a builder A and his man B. B has to reach A building stones. There are cubes, bricks, slabs, beams, columns. The language consists of the words 'cube,' 'brick,' 'slab,' 'column.' A calls out one of these words, upon which B brings a stone of a certain shape. Let us imagine a society in which this is the only system
°
flangU age
. . . Its
- (Br.B:77)
The men of a tribe are subjected to a kind of medical examination before going into war. The examiner puts the men through a set of standardized tests. He lets them lift certain weights, swing their arms, skip, etc. The exam- iner then gives his verdict in the form 'So-and-so can throw a spear' or 'can throw a boomerang' or 'is fit to pursue the enemy,' etc. There are no special expressions in the language of this tribe for the activities performed in the tests; but these are referred to only as the tests for certain activitiesin warfare.
(Br.B: 102)
By the time the reader reaches Wittgenstein's late mas- terpiece, Philosophical Investigations ( P I ) , published posthumously in 1953, the notion of a language game has broadened significantly. At §23 he gives his most extensive list of examples: giving and obeying orders; describing the appearance of an object or giving its measurements; constructing an object from a descrip- tion (a drawing); reporting an event; speculating about an event; forming and testing a hypothesis; presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams; making up a story and reading it; play acting; singing catches; guessing riddles; making a joke, telling a joke; solving a problem in practical arithmetic; translating
function
is the com-
Language Game
127