Upon the recent rumors of Noam Chomsky’s death, shockwaves have been spreading across the world, with political commentators and linguists alike grieving the possibility of the world losing one of its most influential voices. A famed critic of imperialist and capitalist world leaders, the alleged news received an outpour of celebration for his contributions to human sciences, and an equally massive outcry for pushing ideas developed to try to neatly explain a very un-neat thing: the manner that humans learn languages. Chomsky lives another day but a far more pressing question remains— If a theorist’s work and character can be assassinated in an instant, is anyone safe from the court of public opinion? And who might be the next victim?

Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of the greatest thinkers of modern times, held by popular consensus to be the most influential philosopher of the entire 20th century, considered in many circles to be to philosophy what Einstein is to physics. Just as with the sciences, countless philosophers dedicate their lives to a single branch of thought and are forgotten – barring possibly a single minor contribution – but Wittgenstein was a pioneer for philosophy of analytic logic, mathematics, mind and consciousness, and – of relevance to us as linguists – philosophy of language.

Wittgenstein’s attitude towards language – and philosophy generally – is split into two vastly conflicting schools of thought, one in his earlier adult life and a completely different one in later life. The difference is so stark that many consider the two philosophies completely contradictory. Yet both viewpoints are still argued to this day. I could skip right to comparing those viewpoints, but where’s the fun in that? We can spare a minute or two for the life of one of the greatest minds of our times.

Wittgenstein was born in 1889 to one of the richest families in Europe, the youngest in a family of eight. His siblings were all considered prodigies in various things, a curse far more than a blessing for this family. His oldest brother was a musical prodigy, having been recorded to have started crying “Wrong! Wrong!” at the age of five upon hearing two brass bands play the same tune in different musical keys. He ended up so overwhelmed by the chaos of noise around him that he took his own life in 1902. In 1904, his second oldest brother took his own life at 22, as a prodigal chemist at the Berlin Academy after the death of his gay lover. 14 years later, less than two weeks before the end of the First World War, his second oldest brother shot himself so as not to need to continue to fight. With three of his four older brothers dead by their own hand, Wittgenstein himself was known to have been suicidal for many years as well, but lived on out of pure hyperfixation to understand the world around him.

He arrived in England from his home in Austria for the first time in 1908, a 19 year old, as a scientist. His lifelong pursuit of the sciences led him to try and understand science in its purest form – mathematics, which he then endeavored to understand in its purest form – logic, a branch of philosophy. An all-consuming fascination with logic led him to Cambridge a measly three years later, where he turned up at the office of a Bertrand Russell – at the time, possibly the greatest logician at the time, who described the young Wittgenstein three months later as “the young man one hopes for,” someone whom he felt “will solve the problems that I am too old to solve,” a level of praise that couldn’t possibly be matched by another student until decades later – from Wittgenstein taking the role of professor and teaching a young Alan Turing, the inventor of the first computer and father of computing – but that’s a story for another time.

This brings us very neatly to the linguistic theories he formed in the first half of his life! Working alongside Russell, he developed their “Ideal Language Philosophy”, the idea that language should always be changed to work towards being more efficient and clear to eventually attain an “ideal” state – a state where complex ideas can be communicated quickly without confusion. This idea stemmed from the very logic that the two philosophers always seeked to apply; if a system follows rules to achieve something (like language using grammar and syntax), then the rules can be made more strict – such as removing irregular word forms in language – and new rules can be implemented to make communication as efficient as possible.

This theory seems easy enough to get on board with, until you consider the effects this would have on real-life language use. People use inefficient and flowery language in every given opportunity, communicating artistic expression and metaphor and emotion and subjective opinions of any kind, and removing this would remove an essential part of what it means to communicate. Unless he considered opinions meaningless, this theory made no sense. Lucky for us, he considered opinions meaningless. He had his own idea of what makes something meaningful, and everything else he considered meaningless, and this idea was given the name of the picture theory of meaning. Yes, catchy name, I know. Effectively, something was only meaningful if it directly described (or “pictured”) the state of something in the real world – so “the ball is blue” is meaningful, but “mint is tasty” is not meaningful (a statement I can get on board with). This extends beyond simply preferences though, the same goes for statements of religion – like “God exists” – or moral judgements – like “murder is bad” – because neither of these are directly observable in the world, and thus would be considered meaningless to him. Given that language is – at least currently – exclusively a human construct, it is incredibly illogical to dismiss essential aspects of the human experience – subjective opinion and interpretation and experiences – as entirely meaningless.

This idea of needing to modify language that is already functional to fit an arbitrary standard isn’t far from any other prescriptivist view of language. If a language is fully developed for communication and can be understood by every user, then why should it matter if it’s not the most efficient that it could possibly theoretically be? Prescriptivist ideas – from this theory but also generally – are efforts to impose someone’s idea of how things should be where it’s not necessary in the slightest, and that is arguably more illogical than any pattern of communication.

Wittgenstein himself happened to agree with this line of thinking a bit later on in life. After the First World War, Wittgenstein hung up his hat and turned his back on philosophy, theory of language, and anything adjacent. He left to return to Austria, where he was a primary school teacher in villages for 11 years, a job he despised. A mathematician held a conference in Austria in 1929 – one that he attended – that inspired him to return to philosophy. Within the year, he was headed to Cambridge once more, though this time as a Fellow and not a student, though it seemed that his view of the world had somehow changed entirely in his time away. Now having replaced Russell, he was developing his own theories of how the world works – separated from the logic that he once held so dear.

Wittgenstein in 1930

His first year as a Fellow of Philosophy at Cambridge

The timeline for the formation of these opinions are unclear, as nothing written by Wittgenstein from 1922 onwards was ever published within his lifetime – his later theories only known from the word of his students and from a manuscript of his that was published in 1953, two years after his death. Regardless, it is undeniable that the views he held in the first half of his career are diametrically opposed to those in the latter half, immediately apparent from his linguistic theories just as much as any other theory.

He ended up completely dropping his system of what’s meaningful and meaningless, instead going with a radically new approach: everything is meaningless! Likely Wittgenstein’s most famous and prevalent theory – not just in linguistics circles but also in philosophy and the wider world – is his idea of “language games”. He asserts that language cannot have meaning, neither words, nor phrases, nor sentences, unless applied in a very specific context. The fun part is that there is no consistent way to define or describe the circumstances where anything might be meaningful! The principle that led him to even coin the term is “the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life-form”, to quote his own manuscript. There are no good ways to just explain the concept, nor even any bad ones – he couldn’t even define a language game, only features and examples of them.

One example he writes is with the word “water”. “Water!” could be something like an exclamation, an order, a request, or an answer to a question, and the meaning of the word will change depending on the language game it’s used in, and – if not used in a language game – it’s completely meaningless. If the word is used outside of a language game, it is an assortment of sounds and nothing more, simply slightly more sophisticated-sounding babbling. I can use the word “water” as an order to someone to bring me water, but another person might use it as an order to water plants, and another might use it as a code word for a secret society, and another might use it to warn someone that they’re about to drive into a lake. Outside of these language games, there is no meaningfulness to “water” – if the word was said to foreign speakers, they may hear it as meaningless gibberish, or ascribe it a completely different meaning than the English uses that somehow reference the transparent liquid. If the word was said in a context without speakers present, it wouldn’t have any significance whatsoever, except to the person saying it, and only in the language game that they intend.

He provides another example with the word “game”, arguably the most famous example of his to demonstrate meaninglessness outside of language games. The word “game” can refer to board games, betting games, games of random chance, war games, sports games, ‘the game of life’, joint activities of any kind, activities done alone that are entertaining, and so on. A definition of “game” given by a chess player will be drastically different from the definition from a solitaire player, that would be different from a definition from kids playing duck-duck-goose, that being different to someone playing Russian roulette, and the examples are unending. Despite all of these people referring to the same word of “game” and despite all of these people recognizing all of the other activities as games, the meaning of the word is vastly different depending on the context, or the language game. The same extends to phrases, grammar structures, and entire sentences, with an example a bit further on.

Language games are often framed with an analogy; people will say that a conversation is like someone playing chess with the other speaker, where pieces only have significance within the game but not outside of it. While that part does correspond to language games, this is a terrible analogy, because chess is known for being an incredibly rigid and strictly rule-based game, one where the pieces can only be used in very specific and unique ways, or else moves are objectively incorrect, and both sides are bound by the exact same rules of movement. Language itself is nothing like this, and different people will communicate the exact same thing to others in different ways, and still be confidently understood. A very simple example would be the use of double negatives between “standard” and “non-standard” English – there aren’t any problems with understanding that come up if one person said to another “He didn’t tell us nothing!” and the other replied with “Yes, he told us nothing!” It just isn’t the case by any means that everyone has to use the same rule to be understood, simply that there is a mutual understanding of the rules, even if “non-standard”.

A language game – if sticking with the board game analogy – is a lot more like Monopoly: often incredible unnecessarily complex and convoluted, sure, but every single family that plays seems to have their own house rules for things like being paid if in jail, or if you should be paid for passing GO, or a million other things, and none of these sentences or concepts would make any sense without a shared knowledge of Monopoly. In much the same vein, every different language game tends to have their own distinctions for things, even if the concepts are referring to the same abstract idea (like “water” from earlier, always referring to the transparent liquid in some capacity), and the terms of the language game make no sense without a shared knowledge of the rules of the game.

If I’ve lost you, that’s entirely understandable, but the distinction that I want to point out is the seemingly incomprehensible switch from Wittgenstein in his entire view of the world and language generally – from “things are always meaningful if they externally exist, and humans play no role in deciding what is meaningful, so subjective human experiences aren’t meaningful”, to the opposite end of “things are never meaningful in any capacity, unless they are given meaning by humans that will collectively subjectively decide what is meaningful”.

Regardless of what system the guy is using, there must be some reason for Wittgenstein to have based his entire philosophical identity on language games, and it doesn’t immediately seem apparent what it could be. Obviously, a logically minded person of such renown wouldn’t change his mind – and then go on to build such a reputation from it – just on a whim, so what motivation could he have?

It would seem that – even in the decade and a half away from the lecture rooms and debates and conferences – Wittgenstein didn’t forget his philosophical dilemmas for a second. Language games – as a system – are explained and brought up by Wittgenstein in such depth because it helped him answer the greatest philosophical questions he had – questions like “what is knowledge?” and “what is consciousness?” – because he could assert that these words or concepts can’t be defined because they only exist within language games. He has a whole family of theories that were developed in the later half of his life that can be boiled down to a single sentence: “meaning is use”.

For him, words aren’t given meaning by the real world objects they correspond to, and words aren’t given meaning by mental representations, but meaning comes from how the words are used and nothing else. The word “mug” isn’t given meaning by any specific physical handled ceramic hot drink container somewhere out in the world, and it’s not given meaning by my mental idea of any ceramic hot drink container with a handle, the word is given meaning solely by the way it’s used. Meaning is use – the meaning comes from how it’s used. This applied to philosophy can be seen very apparently when talking about ethics. If someone mentions “a good deed”, a very philosophical thing to do is wonder “But what is good? What makes something good? If there are good deeds, can other things be good that aren’t deeds? What decides if things are good or not?”. This is not a problem for Wittgenstein though, seeing as he is very comfortable being a philosopher but saying that there doesn’t need to be an objective standard of “good”, because someone saying “a good deed” isn’t suggesting the existence of a goodness standard to him – simply that someone is using “a good deed” to refer to something that benefits someone or something else within that context, its meaning comes from its use, nothing more. He posits that all of these philosophical questions are nothing more than philosophers trying to be pedantic and define things that don’t need defining – like knowledge and good and evil and consciousness – things that don’t need defining because they’re already perfectly understood in the language games they’re used in

He used this to let go of the countless issues that have plagued philosophers for millenia, and finally put his analytical mind at ease, until his death in 1951. He didn’t exactly provide very many satisfying answers for philosophers – in fact, he is incredibly frustrating as a philosopher, given his solution to life’s greatest questions is that they aren’t questions at all – but he did provide an incredibly intriguing way to consider language as a whole, the purpose it serves, and the drastic swings people can have over a lifetime about what is and isn’t meaningful (both literally and metaphorically). Hopefully he gets to live as the star in the night sky he always wanted to be, but – for us linguists – trying to understand the way he saw language before he passed is our own game of Russian roulette.

Wittgenstein

Playing his own game

His three brothers playing along

From the other side

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Illustrated by Jolie Liu