Wittgenstein for Dummies

Making Sense with Language Games

What’s a language game?

Wittgenstein is clear about what his language games were not: not some empirical claim regarding the origins of language in the human brain. He’s not that interested in neurophysiology or species phylogeny.

He defines “language game” internally to his Philosophical Investigations, which I capitalize because some of his investigations were indeed collected into a book by that title.

Something Ludwig didn’t get to do a lot in his life, to the best of my knowledge, is drive a car. He lived until the 1950s, so I could be wrong. Maybe a biographer will correct me. I’ve never seen a picture of the guy behind the wheel.

Had he been behind the wheel at all, or more frequently, he might have introduced driving as a paradigm language game. But since he didn’t, let’s do that ourselves by way of extending his investigations.

What’s special about driving is that, although it does involve reading road signs, a lot of the semantics are in the form of dashboard symbols, the wheel and pedals, a shifter (even on automatics), and then, outside the car, lots of painted lines, solid or dotted, curbs and guard rails.

Driving off road may involve no road signs at all (given no roads). We still have a terrain to contend with.

The roads themselves may be included as having semantic significance. Just as the language of chess involves moving pieces on a board…