Later Wittgenstein on the Invention of Games

Abstract

ABSTRACT.Wittgenstein in his later posthumous writings investigates the meanings of names as a practical activity of rule-governed language game playing. Rules for language games, as for all games in Wittgenstein's frequent analogies, are determined in turn by the "point" and "purpose" of the games. Wittgenstein also famously maintains that a game could not be invented without being played, or even having been played only once, in the absence of a cultural context embedded in a form of life in which games and the playing of games is already an established practice. This essay examines Wittgenstein's general concept of the invention of games, their dependence on rules as part of his general later remarks concerning the nature of meaning, and proposes an interpretation by which it is not only intelligible but inevitable that on his approach it should be impossible for a game to be invented that is never played or played only once in lieu of a games-playing component to a prevailing form of life. The solution to the problem of understanding Wittgenstein on this topic derives from a further application of his concept of a criterion of correctness, generally thought to belong exclusively to his so-called private language argument.Keywords: Wittgenstein; rule; language game; mvention; meaning1. Language and Other GamesWittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations is concerned to understand how a given name refers to a particular object. It is a question that Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus explicitly maintains does not need to be answered in order to explain the meaning of language. Shortly after returning to pililosophy in 1929, Wittgenstein repudiates the disposable Tractatus semantic infrastructure of logical atomism, picture theory of meaning, and general form of proposition. He appears to have decided, among a package of insights gained from the dismantling of the Tractatus, that, symptoms aside, the project's spectacular failure was fundamentally due to its inability to explain the naming of simple objects by simple names at the foundations of the Tractatus analysis of thought, world and language in Wittgenstein's early account of the possibility conditions for expressing determinate meaning in a language.The first sentence of The Blue Book, compiled from Wittgenstein's first lectures dictated to students at Cambridge University in 1930, accordingly asks: "What is the meaning of a word?"1 In sharp contrast, only a decade previously, leaning heavily on Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions in "On Denoting," Wittgenstein in the Tractatus had argued that nameobject semantic coordinations were strictly unnecessary in light of the designation of specific objects by definite descriptors:5.526: One can describe the world completely by completely generalized propositions, i.e. without from the outset co-ordinating any name with a definite object.In order then to arrive at the customary way of expression we need simply say after an expression 'there is one and only one x, which... : ' and this x is a1The starting point for Iris later masterwork, Philosophical Investigations, is predicated on Wittgenstein's having rejected the three pillars of the Tractatus. He nevertheless remains ultimately engaged, as in the early thought, in a bold effort at turning pililosophy against itself. Philosophical Investigations seeks another, radically different and even more revolutionary account of how language functions in the expression of thought. Wittgenstein investigates the philosophical grammar of terms and expressions extracted from their normal usage where they give rise in endlessly complicated ways to gratuitous philosophical problems. Perspicuous representations of the philosophical grammar of philos ophically problematic language are detailed by the later Wittgenstein in the expectation that in another way his new pragmatic explanation of language will also undermine the traditional concept of philosophy as a search for truth in a specific field of genuinely meaningful propositions. …