Language Games and Family Resemblances (Wittgenstein)

What is knowledge? What is beauty? What makes me the same person from moment to moment? As a species, we have spent eons ruminating on these questions and others like them, yet we are no closer to an answer now than we were in the fledgling days of philosophy. There are few if any other fields whose experts have struggled so impotently with the same problems for so long. According to Wittgenstein, this is because the questions we are asking don’t make any sense, they are pseudo-questions.

To say that these questions are nonsensical feels intuitively wrong, after all ‘what is knowledge?’ is a grammatically correct sentence. But just like we can draw pictures of things that cannot really exist, we can put words together in ways that obey the laws of grammar but do not represent a coherent state of affairs in the world. Consider for a moment the sentence: ‘A sound you heard sees the sun’, it is obviously nonsensical while still being a proper sentence. The question ‘what is knowledge?’ is similarly proper, and makes just as little sense to ask as it does to talk about a sound seeing the sun. At least in the way a philosopher asks the question.

The crux of the issue comes down to something called essentialism: the idea that the words we use have an underlying meaning or ‘essence’ that connects their myriad uses together and is somehow the truest meaning of the word (Pitcher 1964). Wittgenstein’s’ main criticism of traditional philosophy is that it is a victim of our species’ “craving for unity” (Pitcher 1964): our biological desire for all things referred to by a general term to have something in common to justify their shared classification. When this craving is applied to the words we use the result is Essentialism.  A philosopher asking questions like ‘what is knowledge?’ is trying to find the essence of knowledge as a word or concept. It is obvious that if such essences do not exist then any efforts to find them are futile, and the vast swathes of philosophical discourse concerned with uncovering them are rendered meaningless drivel, such is the magnitude of the assertions Wittgenstein makes in Philosophical Investigations.

Wittgenstein’s’ alternative to Essentialism is something he calls ‘family resemblances’ but before I explain what this is it is necessary to first introduce another Wittgensteinian term: Language games. Language games can be defined as “any kind of human activity in which human language is embedded” (Mcginn 1997) and can be used to explain situations where the same word is used to mean two different things in two different instances: it is because in each circumstance a different language game is being played. When philosophers come up with a theory to explain something, such as “what is knowledge?” and then later find that this theory does not account for all the ways we use the word ‘knowledge’ what they have stumbled across are contradictory language games. Unfortunately for them, they take this contradiction to mean that their theory for knowledge is flawed and so work on a new one to try and reconcile the contradiction that has arisen. The result of this is a confusing collection of ideas on what knowledge means that does little to aid humanity’s understanding of reality. What these philosophers fail to understand, and what is clear to the layman, is that we do not mean exactly the same thing every time we use the word ‘knowledge’. What we mean is dependent entirely on the language game we are playing at the time. When somebody corrects us after we use the wrong name to refer to them and you think to yourself “I knew her name” You aren’t implying that they are wrong about their own denomination, you are merely describing how certain you were you had the right one; and when you say, “I know my father” you don’t mean you know him in the same way that you know world war two ended in 1945. It is clear that these uses are all related, but it is also clear that no one definition can adequately describe all the different meanings of ‘know’ in these different language games. ‘Family resemblances’ is the explanation Wittgenstein gives for how each of these different meanings are related. Rather than every word having an essence that gives all its different uses unity, Wittgenstein says that the uses are connected through a criss-crossing network of similarities and there is no one detail or aspect of a word that unites all its uses under a single etymological umbrella (Wittgenstein 1967).

To further elucidate the terms ‘Language game’ and ‘Family resemblances’ I would like you to conduct a series of thought experiments concerning the word ‘table’. First imagine a traditional dining room table; now imagine you are going on a camping trip with a group of friends and you decide to stop for the night and make dinner. Near you is a rock with a flat top and you say to your companions “I’ve found our table”, in reference to it. What you mean by this isn’t that the rock is identical to the dining room table I asked you to hold in your mind, but that, like your dining room table, this rock can be used as a surface to eat food off. Now imagine on this same trip you and your friends go cloud watching and you say to them “I see a table” in reference to a cloud that makes a rather convincing silhouette of the dining room table I asked you to imagine earlier. In this case your use of the word ‘table’ makes sense because the cloud looks like a traditional table, and in the prior scenario it made sense because the rock had the same function as that table. In all three situations, it makes sense to use the word ‘table’ to describe the object in question. Now, to highlight the arduous path philosophers who subscribe to essentialism have ahead of them try to find a strict definition of the word ‘table’ that works in all three contexts, I’ll wait. The cloud-table is related to the traditional-table through superficial similarity, the rock-table is related to the traditional-table through potential use, but the rock-table and cloud-table are only related to each other by first pointing out the similarities between them and the traditional-table. In these thought experiments each different use of ‘table’ is a different language game, and their nebulous relatedness is an example of family resemblances. I hope it is obvious that no amount of intellectual prowess can overcome the Sisyphean treading of philosophical water that comes about from trying to find the essence of words in a world where only familial resemblances exist.

Essentialism and Family resemblances entail very different conclusions as to what the purpose of philosophy is, and the value of much of the work that has been done so far. Essentialists have the task of finding the unitary[1] definitions of words, but according to Wittgenstein words have a plethora of different meanings depending on the language game being played, so any attempt to give one definition to unite them all is impossible. A common rebuttal to this is to say that the ambiguous nature of our language is a shortcoming, and the job of a philosopher is to remedy this by fixing the meaning of the words we use. Wittgenstein thought that such a goal is impossible, for all language is mercurial and will change over time irrespective of our efforts to place them in stasis. If we breed a new subtype of dog into existence that has a never before seen green-coloured coat, the word ‘dog’ now has the potential to imply a characteristic that it was not previously able to. In a world where words are unitary this new breed would not be a dog, and a new word would need to be made in order to talk about it even though in all ways except its colour this creature is still a dog. When defining this new word, the most efficient way to communicate its meaning would be to describe it as “like a dog, but with a green coat”. If the best way to describe a new word is to repeat the definition of a word that preceded it, surely increasing our lexicon was pointless. I would go so far as to say that the ambiguity of our language is not a shortcoming, but instead allows us to communicate ideas to each other more effectively. the price we pay for this is that sometimes people can interpret the words we say through the lens of a different language game than we intended, but the ability to satisfactorily express ourselves in most situations is worth it.

Think back to our table thought experiment. Imagine again that you come across the rock-table, but this time you exist in a world where words have only a unitary meaning and you have not come across a word that means ‘a rock suitable for eating off’ before.  So, knowing that you cannot call this rock a table, because that word is already taken, you make up a new word and say to your friends “I have found a tablock”. When they ask you what a tablock is the easiest way to explain what you mean is to say, “it’s a rock that’s like a table”. In this way, an essentialist language would be cumbersome and pleonastic, and filled with redundancies that crop up as multiple people invent new words to fill in the same gaps in language too fast for the first word created to become ubiquitous. On the other hand, a language that has only familial resemblances tying words together is flexible, allowing humans to communicate novel experiences to each other through familiar ideas and words as in the original thought experiment we performed. The job of the philosopher, in Wittgenstein’s opinion, is to examine the ways we use language in different games as opposed to trying to solve the contradictions that appear when you ignore the fact that words are not unitary things. With this approach, many of the problems that have plagued philosophy since its inception become non-issues. All that we must do to achieve this is add an extra step to our investigative process; when we ask, “what is knowledge?” or any other question, before we do anything else we must ask another question: what language game are we playing?

I began this essay hoping to convince you that Wittgenstein’s theory of ‘Family Resemblances’ is a superior way of explaining the way we use language than Essentialism. If you agree that a green dog is still a dog, and that both a rock and a cloud can be called a table, then there is no other option than to accept Wittgenstein’s theories. This view also has the effect of making our world a less mysterious place, not by providing answers to philosophical conundrums, but by revealing that these conundrums never existed in the first place. If this philosophical destruction upsets you, please keep in mind that “what we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards” (Wittgenstein 1967).

By James Rowarth

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Bibliography:

Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Philosophical Investigations (3rd Ed) Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

Pitcher, G. (1964). Puzzlement and Philosophy, and the Attack on Essentialism, in The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. (Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, 1964, pp. 188-227)

McGinn, M. (1997). Style and Method, in Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (London: Routledge,), pp. 9-32.

[1] A unitary word has only one meaning, finding the definition of a unitary word is identical to finding its essence