Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Language Games

A philosopher who tried to map the limits of language twice — first by sealing them shut, then by pointing out the door was never there.

Almost no one writes one philosophical masterpiece in a lifetime. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two, and the second is a sustained attack on the first. Together they bracket the twentieth century's argument about what language is for and what it can do. The early book promised to dissolve every philosophical problem in a single hundred-page move. The later one quietly admitted that nothing in language was that tidy — and that the early book had been its own best illustration.

The story is worth following slowly, because the turn from one Wittgenstein to the other changes how you hear sentences.

The book written in the trenches

Wittgenstein began the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a Cambridge student under Bertrand Russell. He finished it as an artillery officer on the Italian front in 1918, scribbling propositions into a notebook between bombardments. The manuscript he carried home is shorter than a novella, organised as a tree of numbered statements: seven main propositions, then sub-propositions decimalised beneath them. Proposition 1.1 sits under 1, then 1.11 under 1.1, and so on. The whole world, he hoped, would resolve like that — cleanly, recursively, into atomic facts.

His aim was almost embarrassing in its ambition. He wanted to show, once and for all, what language could and could not say. If you got that boundary right, every traditional philosophical problem — about God, the self, the good, the beautiful — would either disappear or reveal itself as a misuse of words. In the preface he wrote, with no apparent irony, that the book had solved philosophy. Then he left academia and went to teach primary school in rural Austria.

The picture theory

The engine of the Tractatus is the picture theory of meaning. A meaningful sentence, Wittgenstein argued, is a picture of a possible state of affairs in the world. Not a picture in the literal sense of a drawing, but in the structural sense: the elements of the sentence stand for objects, and the way those elements are arranged mirrors the way those objects would be arranged if the sentence were true.

Take “the cup is on the book.” The word “cup” stands for a cup. “Book” for a book. “On” for the relation of one thing resting on another. The sentence is meaningful because its parts and their arrangement could correspond to parts and arrangements of the world. It is true if the world is in fact arranged that way, and false if not. Either way, it has sense.

Atomic facts compose into bigger ones through the rules of logic. Run that machinery to its limit and you get the whole of what can be said. Anything that cannot be cashed out as a picture of a possible fact — ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of life, the existence of God, even most of philosophy — is not false. It is simply nonsense. Not pejoratively: it just falls outside the boundary of sense.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

That is proposition 7, the whole of it. The most famous sentence in twentieth-century philosophy, and the book's closing line. What Wittgenstein meant was not that mystical or ethical questions are unimportant — he thought they were the only things that really matter — but that language, properly understood, has nothing to say about them. They show themselves in how we live. They cannot be put into propositions.

Why he came back

Wittgenstein spent the 1920s away from philosophy. He gave away his inheritance, taught children, designed a house for his sister in Vienna. Then, slowly, doubts gathered. He came back to Cambridge in 1929 and started lecturing again. By the time he died in 1951 he had written a second book — published posthumously as the Philosophical Investigations — that systematically undid the Tractatus.

The trouble, he came to think, was that the picture theory only described a tiny corner of what language actually does. “The cup is on the book” fits the theory. But what about “Slab!” shouted on a building site? What about “ouch”? What about a child counting, a judge sentencing, a friend telling a joke, a stranger asking the time, a priest pronouncing a marriage? These are not pictures of states of affairs. They are things people do with words. And once you see language as a kind of action rather than a kind of mirror, the whole architecture of the Tractatus falls away.

Language games and family resemblance

The later Wittgenstein replaces the picture with a different image: a language game. A language game is any patch of language tightly woven together with the activity it serves. Counting bricks. Giving orders. Reporting an event. Making up a story. Asking, thanking, cursing, praying. Each comes with its own rules, its own moves, its own way of being right or wrong. There is no single “language” standing behind them, just as there is no single “game” standing behind chess, solitaire, football, and ring-a-ring-of-roses.

Try, he says, to find the one feature that all games share. Competition? Solitaire isn't competitive. Winning? Children playing catch are not trying to win. Skill? Roulette has none. Fun? Ask a chess grandmaster on a losing streak. There is no essence of game. What we have instead is a tangle of overlapping similarities — some games share rules, some share equipment, some share a mood — like the resemblances running through a large family.

The same is true of words. What is a “number”? Integers are numbers; so are fractions, irrationals, complex numbers, quaternions. They share features in chains, not a single common essence. What is a “chair”? A dining chair, a beanbag, a throne, a stool, a child's high chair. Wittgenstein's claim is that this is the norm in language, not the exception. Words rarely have crisp definitions. They have family resemblances, threads of overlapping use.

And so meaning is not the shadowy object a word points at. Meaning is use: how a word is wielded in the practices of a community. To learn a language is to learn a form of life, not to memorise a dictionary. To do philosophy — the later Wittgenstein insisted — is mostly to notice when a word has wandered off from the language game where it earned its keep. Most philosophical puzzles come from grammar pretending to be metaphysics: from asking “what is time?” or “what is mind?” as if the question had the same form as “what is gold?”

The young man who closed the Tractatus with “whereof one cannot speak” thought he had found the edge of the world. The older man who wrote the Investigations realised there was no edge to find — only a sprawling, living patchwork of ways human beings get things done with words. Both books are right about something. Together they teach the same lesson from opposite sides: the urge to ask the deepest question is often the urge to make a word do something it was never built to do.