Wittgenstein on Language and Meaning

Introduction
The role of language as a vehicle of thought makes way for human thinking to be as multifaceted and diverse as it is. This is for the reason that with language, one can describe the past or speculate about the future and so deliberate and plan in the light of one’s beliefs about how things stand. To cement this view, language enables one to imagine counterfactual objects, events, and states of affairs. In this connection, it is intimately related to intentionality, the feature of all human thoughts whereby they are essentially about, or directed toward, things outside themselves. If, as is the case, language allows one to share information and to communicate beliefs and speculations, attitudes and emotions, then, it creates the human social world, uniting people into a common history and a common life-experience. In the end, what we see is that language is an instrument of understanding and knowledge.
Along these lines, the philosophical investigation of the nature of language—the relations between language, language users, and the world—and the concepts with which language is described and analyzed, both in everyday speech and in scientific linguistic studies become pertinent and absolutely imperative. On the whole, philosophy of language as an academic and philosophical discipline is distinct from linguistics. This is for the reason that its investigations are conceptual rather than empirical. But this, however, does not mean that philosophy of language will not call to mind the message in which linguistic and other related disciplines reveal. Of course, it must pay attention to the facts which linguistics and related disciplines reveal.
It is in recognition of the aforesaid that Ludwig Wittgenstein entitled his significant books on language and meaning as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. It is also the reason why he insisted on tackling the problems encountered in philosophy. Against this milieu, this essay shall bring to center-stage Wittgenstein’s contribution to the discourse of language and meaning in philosophy. To do this, this essay shall pay attention to the picture theory of meaning and the language theory. This will be followed by the conclusion of the essay.






Ludwig Wittgenstein on Language and Meaning
In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein attempts to show that traditional philosophy rests entirely on a misunderstanding of “the logic of our language.” In a letter to Russell, he spells out the cardinal problem of philosophy saying that “the main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions – that is, by language — (and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown. For this reason, Wittgenstein attempts to draw a limit to thought, or rather not to thought. To do this, he opines that we have to be able to think what cannot be thought. As such, he proposes that it will only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. Wittgenstein tried to spell out precisely what a logically constructed language can (and cannot) be used to say. For him, language, thought, and reality shares a common structure, fully expressible in logical terms. He carries on the project of language and meaning in his later work titled Philosophical Investigations. Here, Wittgenstein attempts to show that language is a veritable instrument of thought and a vehicle for human communication.

On the Picture Theory of Meaning
Wittgenstein, following Frege’s and Russell’s footsteps, argues that every meaningful sentence must have a precise logical structure. That structure may, however, be hidden beneath the clothing of the grammatical appearance of the sentence and may therefore require the most detailed analysis in order to be made evident. Such analysis, Wittgenstein was convinced, would establish that every meaningful sentence is either a truth-functional composite of another simpler sentence or an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation of simple names.
He argues further that every atomic sentence is a logical picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly the same formal structure as the atomic sentence that depicts it. Similarly, Von Wright, in his Biographical Sketch of Wittgenstein, reports the following:
Wittgenstein told me how the idea of language as a picture of reality occurred to him. He was in a trench on the East front, reading a magazine in which there was a schematic picture depicting the possible sequence of events in an automobile accident. The picture there served as a proposition; that is, as a description of a possible state of affairs. It had this function owing to a correspondence between the parts of the picture and things in reality. It now occurred to Wittgenstein that one might reverse the analogy and say that a proposition serves as a picture in which the parts of the propositions are combined – the structure of the proposition – depicts a possible combination of elements in reality, a possible state of affairs.

Wittgenstein employs this “picture theory of meaning” – as it is usually called – to derive conclusions about the nature of the world from his observations about the structure of the atomic sentences. He postulates, in particular, that the world must itself have a precise logical structure , even though we may not be able to determine it completely. Of course, the logical form of any picture consists in its serving to distinguish the possible existence of a state of affairs from its nonexistence. This, as Milton Munitz comments, is the common underlying feature of any picture.
Against this background, Wittgenstein postulates that language is first and foremost a representational system. It is with language that we make to ourselves picture of facts: and to the objects in the reality correspond the elements of the picture: a picture, he writes, is a model of reality. And in turn, this picture is itself a fact. ” This leads immediately to a notion of words, which stand for the objects. So, “as the objects are linked in the world to form facts, the words are linked in language to form propositions. A sentence is meaningful if and only if it is a fact which corresponds to a possible fact in the world; it’s true if it corresponds to an actual fact.”
To buttress this view, Wittgenstein contends that:

Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it.

For him, propositions are pictures, and language is used to make these pictures. The use of the term picture here is not accidental, for Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning is one which draws on the visual analogy precisely because the propositions are themselves facts, not mental representations. To substantiate this argument, Wittgenstein writes thus:

To the objects correspond in the picture the elements of the picture; the elements of the picture stand, in the picture, for the objects. The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with one another in a definite way; the picture is a fact. ...... In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures. What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner--rightly or wrongly--is its form of representation.

The implication of this, as the argument continues, is that the essential nature of the propositional sign becomes very clear when we imagine it made up of spatial objects (such as tables, chairs, books) instead of written signs. Thus, the mutual spatial position of these things then expresses the sense of the proposition.
On the view of Wittgenstein, the world consists primarily of facts, corresponding to the true atomic sentences, rather than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are linked together in simple objects, corresponding to the simple names of which the atomic sentences are composed. We are aware of these facts by virtue of our mental representations or thoughts, which are most fruitfully understood as picturing the way things are in the world. These thoughts are, in turn, “expressed in propositions, whose form indicates the position of these facts within the nature of reality as a whole and whose content presents the truth-conditions under which they correspond to that reality.” In a similar fashion, he posits that everything that is true—that is, all the facts that constitute the world—can in principle be expressed by atomic sentences.
On another note, Wittgenstein argues that the propositions of logic are tautologies. He claims that since they are true under all conditions whatsoever, tautologies are literally nonsense: they convey no information about what the facts truly are. But since they are true under all conditions whatsoever, tautologies reveal the underlying structure of all language, thought, and reality. Thus, on his opinion, the most significant logical features of the world are not themselves additional facts about it.
A properly logical language, he held, deals with only what is true. In particular, Wittgenstein avows that all sentences that are not atomic pictures of concatenations of objects or truth-functional composites of such are strictly speaking meaningless. Wittgenstein maintained that all philosophical sentences including most notably all of metaphysics are pseudo-sentences and that in spite of their grammaticalness and common usage, these pseudo sentences are really devoid of any cognitive content. To add to these, he included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, all propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all propositions of logic, indeed all philosophical propositions, and finally all the propositions of the Tractatus itself. These are all strictly meaningless; they aim at saying something important, but what they try to express in words can only show itself.
As a result, Wittgenstein concluded that anyone who understood what the Tractatus was saying would finally discard its propositions as senseless, that he or she would throw away the ladder after climbing up on it. Someone who reached such a state would have no more temptation to pronounce philosophical propositions. He or She would see the world rightly and would then also recognize that the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural science; but those could never touch what was really important in human life, the mystical. That, he says, would have to be contemplated in silence. For this reason he concludes by declaring thus: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Wittgenstein concluded, following the foregoing, that the Tractatus was itself flawed by what it had tried to combat, that is, the misunderstanding of the logic of language. Turning his attention back to language he concluded that almost everything he had said about it in the Tractatus had been in error. There were, in fact, many different languages with many different structures that could meet quite different specific needs. Language was not strictly held together by logical structure, but consisted, in fact, of a multiplicity of simpler substructures or language games. Sentences could not be taken to be logical pictures of facts and the simple components of sentences did not all function as names of simple objects.

On the Language Theory (Use Theory of Meaning)
In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein emphasized that there are countless different uses of what we call “symbols,” “words,” and “sentences.” The task of philosophy is to gain a perspicuous view of those multiple uses and thereby to dissolve philosophical and metaphysical puzzles. These puzzles, as this view continues, were the result of insufficient attention to the working of language and could be resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by which they had been reached. Wittgenstein describes language as a game by means of which children use words to learn their native language. In other words, he conceives of language-game as a simplified model embedded in a form of life, a clear instance of some characteristic use of language in a typical life situation. He further argues that language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language game, for him, is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages.
According to him, words are like tools in a tool-box. Words are instruments of language which may have varying uses, according to the purposes for which language may be used. The varying ways in which words may be used help to structure our concepts of reality. Here, words may be used in a multiplicity of ways: for example, to describe things, to ask questions, to report events, to speculate about events, to make requests, to give commands, to form hypotheses, to solve problems, and to perform other acts of communication.
Moreover, Wittgenstein declares that every word in a language signifies something. Explaining this, he opines that “the meaning of a word may be defined by how the word can be used as an element of language.” A word may be given different meanings, according to how it is used in a language-game. Like the rules of a game, the rules of a language-game may change, and different rules may be applied to different games. According to Wittgenstein, there is no single rule which is common to all games.
He maintains that common philosophical views about meaning, about the nature of concepts, about logical necessity, about rule-following, and about the mind–body problem were all the product of an insufficient grasp of how language works. He argues further that language is, in part, an activity of giving names to objects, or of attaching labels to things. For example, a builder may instruct an assistant as to what type of stone is needed for the construction of a building, by saying “slab” or “block” or “pillar” or “beam,” according to the order in which the building-stones are needed, so that the assistant can bring the correct type of stone for the construction of the building. However, the naming of an object is only a preparation for an anticipated move in the language-game. Linguistic movement occurs when a sentence is constructed, such as, “Bring me a slab.”
The rules of a game may (or may not) leave doubt about how the game should be played. The rules of a game may be definite or indefinite, clear or unclear. If the rules are unclear, then they may still be understandable enough to be used for playing a game. Commenting on this, Wittgenstein emphasizes that the meaning of a word may not depend upon whether the word refers to something that actually exists. For example, if something ceases to exist, the word or name for that thing may still have meaning. If we say that the name for something exists, we may affirm that the name has meaning, even though the name may refer to something which no longer exists. As a consequence, the word “pain” may have meaning, even if it refers to something which no longer exists. A person may understand what it means to have pain, even if he or she is not actually having pain.
To broaden this view, Wittgenstein avows that each word or name may be used in more than one language-game, and thus each word or name may have a family of meanings. A word or name may be useful without having a fixed meaning. The meaning of a word may be fixed or variable, definite or indefinite. A word or name for something may have multiple uses to express or designate that thing. Words may be empty of meaning, or may have some meaning, or may be full of meaning. Words may be given meaning by the way in which they express thoughts and feelings. However, words may have different meanings when they are used differently to describe thoughts and feelings. Words may have either an essential or unessential (accidental) meaning, according to how they are used in a language-game.
Words may have a simple meaning, or may have a composite meaning. Simple aspects of meaning may be combined to produce composite aspects of meaning. Composite aspects of meaning may be combined to produce more complex aspects of meaning. According to Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is not what is referred to, or designated by, by that word, but is the use which the word has as an element of language. If we want to define the meaning of a word, we must define how the word is used as an instrument of language. To this end, imagining a language, he asserts, means “imagining a form of life.” In other words, language, Wittgenstein would argue, is embedded in a ‘form of life’—a set of activities in which the rules of a language-game serve as a basis for communication.
More still, Wittgenstein postulates that the problem with logical analysis is that it demands too much precision, both in the definition of words and in the representation of logical structure. He thus goes further to argue that in ordinary language, concept words do not denote sharply circumscribed concepts, but are meant to mark ‘family resemblances’ between the things labelled with the concept. He also held that logical necessity results from linguistic convention and that rules cannot determine their own applications, that rule-following presupposes the existence of regular practices.
Furthermore, the words of our language have meaning only insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct application. He is of the view that language exists in a linguistic community; it involves the use and application of grammatical rules. These rules include ostensive definitions, criteria and ‘strict’ definitions that stipulate necessary and sufficient conditions. As a consequence, if one recognises the foregoing crucial features of language, Wittgenstein would say there cannot be a completely private language , that is, a language that in principle can be used only to speak about one’s own inner experience. The very notion of a ‘private language’ would dispense with the requirement that language be embedded in the activities and practices of a linguistic community; it would also dispense with the requirement that the language be guided by the availability of grammatical rules for public adoption and use.
Along the line, Wittgenstein used his private language argument to wield a critique against the Cartesian dualism. The theory of mind-body dualism envisages the mind as a substance different yet linked to the body. According to this philosophy, whereas bodily (physical) phenomena are accessible externally, the mind’s activities, states and processes are accessible only to ‘internal’ observation, to introspection. Hence, mental experiences are private. They cannot be known by others in the same direct and immediate way as they are known by the person whose experiences they are. This implies that what goes on in someone’s mind could at best be known by inference and by analogy. This Cartesian tradition is summarized in Gilbert Ryle as the acceptance of the model of “the ghost in a machine.” In this way, Wittgenstein tries to show that private language cannot be operative as it is in the ordinary language used by a linguistic community, even though he does not deny that people have their own private mental life.
More on this view, Wittgenstein describes the activity of using language as similar to playing a game of chess. Words are like the pieces on a chessboard. Each word has a different use or function in the language-game. He, however, does not define what a ‘game’ is, but gives examples of various games, such as chess, tennis and cricket. Each game has its own set of rules, and each is played differently. People who are playing a language-game, and who are playing by different rules, may have difficulty in understanding one another other. This stems from the fact that they may have different interpretations of the rules, or may apply rules differently. People may, in some cases, decide the rules of a game while they are playing the game.
Consistent with Wittgenstein’s opinion, the failure to understand words, or the failure to use words clearly, may often be caused by misunderstanding of how words are used in a language-game. Failure to communicate clearly may be caused by the use of words which have an unclear or indefinite meaning, or by lack of understanding of the relation between the meaning of words and the way in which they are used. The task of philosophy may be to clarify the uses of language, and to assemble ‘reminders of usage’ or simply put, reminders for a particular purpose concerning how rules are applied to language.
Wittgenstein also argues that the uses or meaning of words may change, according to changes in the circumstances and scene of a language-game. To use words meaningfully, people must decide which language-game they want to play, and how they want to play it. Put differently, he avers that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, and at the same time, the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.
Importantly, Wittgenstein explains that when people communicate with each other, they may have to choose between a private language and a common language. The rules of a private language may not be the same as the rules of a common language. The meaning of words in a private language may not be the same as the meaning of words in a common language. People may need a common language in order to share an understanding of the meaning of words. This boils down to the reason that the connection between a word and its meaning may be arbitrary. Given an instance, a person may arbitrarily choose to use the word “cold” to describe something which is warm, or to use the word “warm” to describe something which is cold. The use of the word “cold” to describe something which is warm, or the use of the word “warm” to describe something which is cold, may be meaningful if it is consistent with the rules of a language-game. However, in some cases, the use of words may not be governed by any rules, or may occur beyond the limits of a language-game. In such cases, aimless or meaningless combinations of words may not be governed by the rules of any language-game.
Wittgenstein asserts that the understanding of what is designated by a particular word may sometimes depend upon a previous experience of whatever is designated by that word. For example, to understand the meaning of the word “pain,” it may be necessary to have experienced pain. In order to imagine another person’s pain, it may be necessary to recall one’s own previous experience of pain.
Wittgenstein recalls that understanding of the meaning of words may also depend on what is meant by the term “understanding.” Meaning may be understood, but understanding (as an act of knowledge) may itself have meaning. He further suggests that it would be misleading to describe meaning, otherwise called intending, and understanding as processes, for they do not occupy a time interval. He thus writes:

The understanding of language, as of a game, seems like a background against which a particular sentence acquires meaning. But this understanding, the knowledge of the language, isn’t a conscious state that accompanies the sentences of the language. Not even if one of its consequences is such a state. It’s much more like the understanding or mastery of a calculus, something like the ability to multiply.

What all this adds up to is the rejection of any philosophy that would seek to assign meaning of such terms as ‘intending’ and ‘understanding’ to private mental mechanisms or processes that are distinct from the multiple publicly observable occasions in which language is used. To understand ‘understanding,’ ‘intending’ and similar ‘acts of thought,’ one should examine what is involved in acquiring competence in the use of language through overtly discoverable reliance on various teaching and learning situations. They have to do with the mastery of techniques for the application of various rules that govern the use of different linguistic expressions. The acquisition and mastery of techniques in the use of language are public matters. That a person has acquired and can use these techniques does not involve any appeal to hidden, private, mental mechanisms or processes. They can be tested for in a public way. Put simply, what Wittgenstein is saying here is that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria.”
Over again, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein repeatedly draws attention to the fact that language must be learned. This learning, he says, is fundamentally a process of inculcation and drill. In learning a language, the child is initiated in a form of life. In Wittgenstein’s later work the notion of ‘form of life’ serves to identify the whole complex of natural and cultural circumstances presupposed by our language and by a particular understanding of the world. He elaborated those ideas in notes on which he worked between 1948 and his death in 1951 and which are now published under the title On Certainty. He insisted in them that every belief is always part of a system of beliefs that together constitute a worldview. All confirmation and disconfirmation of a belief presuppose such a system and are internal to the system. In his own words;

All confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

For all this, he was not advocating for relativism, but naturalism which assumes that the world ultimately determines which language games can be played. Wittgenstein’s final notes vividly illustrate the continuity of his basic concerns throughout all the changes his thinking went through. For they reveal once more how he remained sceptical about all philosophical theories and how he understood his own undertaking as the attempt to undermine the need for any such theorizing. The considerations of On Certainty are evidently directed against both philosophical sceptics and those philosophers who want to refute scepticism.
Against the philosophical sceptics, Wittgenstein insisted that there is real knowledge, but this knowledge is always dispersed and not necessarily reliable; it consists of things we have heard and read, of what has been drilled into us, and of our modifications of this inheritance. We have no general reason to doubt this inherited body of knowledge, we do not generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position to do so. But On Certainty also argues that it is impossible to refute scepticism by pointing to propositions that are absolutely certain, as Descartes did when he declared ‘I think, therefore I am’ indubitable, or as Moore did when he said, “I know for certain that this is a hand here.” The fact that such propositions are considered certain, Wittgenstein argued, indicates only that they play an indispensable, normative role in our language game ; they are the riverbed through which the thought of our language game flows. Such propositions cannot be taken to express metaphysical truths. Here, too, the conclusion is that all philosophical argumentation must come to an end, but that the end of such argumentation is not an absolute, self-evident truth, but a certain kind of natural human practice.

Evaluation and Conclusion
This essay has attempted an exposition of Wittgenstein’s contribution to the discourse of language and meaning. This was done by looking at the picture theory of meaning and the language theory (otherwise called the use theory of meaning). On the one hand, the picture theory of meaning posits that it is with language that we make to ourselves picture of facts: and to the objects in the reality correspond the elements of the picture: so that a picture becomes a model of reality. And in turn, this picture is itself a fact. On the other hand, the language theory posits that language is a veritable instrument for communication. It is a simplified model embedded in a “form of life.” The highpoint of the language theory is that words are like tools in a tool-box. Words, as this view continues, are instruments of language which may have varying uses, according to the purposes for which language may be used. In this way, every word is used to signify something in a language or language game, and at the same time, meanings are the product of language game.
Given the above concession, it can be argued, following the Wittgensteinian dictum, that we should be concerned with the use of words in our language rather than the meaning. This is for the reason that words are instruments of language which may have different uses. In this way, the superfluity of communication can only be possible if the right words are being employed in our communication.





























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