Language Games

Hello there. I'm Doctor Rupert Read.

I teach philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich,

and I'm an expert on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Victor Stein was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century.

Some of us think he's one of the great philosophers of all time.

He's famous for having had two philosophies based around two books.

There was his early masterpiece, The Track Tatis Logic Oh, philosophic Asse

and then his later masterpiece,

The Philosophical Investigations.

In recent years, a lot of scholars have come to think that actually these two works,

these two philosophies are much more unified than they may have been thought to be.

And that really Victor Stein mostly has won pretty much resolute point

of view throughout his work throughout his activity as a philosopher.

And at the heart of that resolute picture of how to do philosophy, I would argue,

is the concept of liberation,

the idea of freeing your mind.

That's what Wittgenstein's philosophy is really all about.

Why do our minds need freeing? Well, Vic Einstein thought that we get caught up in

standard or oversimplified or ideological ways of thinking or speaking

one way of understanding. This will touch on some of those ways in these lectures.

But one way of understanding this in a sort of overarching way to get started

is the biggest night sometimes spoke about the

difference between the will and the intellect.

He said that people think that philosophy is all about thinking

that it's all about making intellectual progress.

But he thought that actually, the real philosophical issue was very often

that you don't want to do something different

from what you're used to.

So he says, the real philosophical problem is a problem of the will, not

of the intellect

finished. I thought that we resist becoming free,

that it's more comfortable sometimes to stay trapped in ways that we're accustomed

to do things or to think about things or to see things.

And that brings us to our main topic for this first lecture,

which is the concept of language, games,

language, games, one of the central ideas

in victim, Stein's later masterpiece, The Philosophical Investigations

and Language Games, arguably his number one device

for freeing minds.

What our language games well. In the first instance,

language games are simplified objects, which we can compare with our actual,

sophisticated or complicated

language to enable us to see it more clearly.

Why is it useful to have these simplified language games?

Well, because we get stuck in the complications we can't see.

As the saying goes, The wood for the trees.

Victor and I thought it was useful to draw this analogy.

That's what it is, an analogy or a resemblance between language and games

to help us see more clearly what's going on with our language.

Now let me straight away.

Try to remove a couple of possible misconceptions of what language games are.

When Victor and I talked about language games,

he isn't saying language is just a game or it's about word play.

It's not a belittling move at all.

On the contrary,

if Finkelstein is saying that there's something game like about language,

we might think about the most serious games that there are to get us into

the right way of thinking about what he's trying to draw attention to here.

So think about Olympic Games, for example.

Think about the seriousness with which athletes

approach what they're trying to do,

or if you've ever played the game yourself with a

serious kind of intent if you ever been thinking,

Gosh, I really want to win this and you know that in order to win,

you have to stick within the rules.

Well,

then you're getting somewhere a little bit closer to the spirit of

what Wittgenstein means when he brings up the concept of language games.

So Vision is saying there's a resemblance between language and games,

and he actually talks about games for a while and says,

How are games related to each other, Our games, all one kind of thing?

And he suggests rather that games have family resemblances to each other,

like members of a family

look like each other.

What are you trying to get at here? Victor shiny, suggesting that, like games

language, perhaps doesn't have an essence.

He's asking you to pay attention to the

differences between different ways of using language,

and that's what we're going to be very interested in in these lectures.

He thinks that one of the problems that we offer often encounter when we're engaging

in intellectual work is that we tend to overly assimilate things to one another,

and he's very interested in the differences between them,

so to remove.

The first misconception is not to belittle removed because

she's not saying language is just a game.

Secondly,

he's not fixated on language.

Finkelstein is interested in language in the course of our lives.

He's interested in language as integrated with practise. He

he sometimes talks about language as bound up with forms of life.

He's very interested in context.

He's very interested in the context of a word within a sentence.

Does a word really mean anything in isolation from a sentence

in which it is a part?

And he's interested in sentences within a practise or within

a language gain sentences being used in an actual setting?

Vic Einstein was very concerned that sometimes we overly abstract,

especially when we're doing philosophy.

He wanted to return our attention to words, to sentences,

to language in its actual context of use.

So in this sense, he's very interested in language as a social enterprise.

If if his philosophy is about achieving freedom,

then it's a kind of freedom that we can best achieve.

Together we can achieve it together by thinking together about these matters.

Okay, so this may sound a little abstract to you Still,

let me try to illustrate it a little bit

more concretely by giving you a couple of quotations

from the philosophical investigations.

So first, briefly, a quotation from Section seven

of the Philosophical Investigations where finish line is in the business

of giving a sort of definition of what language game is.

And he says this

I shall call the whole

consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven

a language game.

But you might still be thinking Well, yes, but what activities?

What exactly does he mean? Let's turn, then to a longer quotation.

This one, I think, is very illustrative of what Wittgenstein is about.

This is Section 23 of the philosophical investigations.

He starts this, as he often does, by asking a question.

How many kinds of sentences are there?

Say assertion, question and command. Are there three kinds of sentences?

Finish line responds.

There are countless kinds,

countless different kinds of use of all the things we call signs, words, sentences

and moreover, this diversity is not something fixed,

given once for all

but new types of language.

New language games, as we may say,

come into existence

and others become obsolete

and get forgotten,

and he says,

in brackets here we can give a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.

So think about what happened in mathematics when

negative numbers were discovered or invented or

when fractions were discovered or invented.

The word language game, Victor Stein said,

is used here to emphasise the fact that

the speaking of language is part of an activity

or of a form of life.

And then he gives examples, as he often does, he says,

Consider the variety of language games in the following examples and in others

giving orders

and acting on them,

describing an object by its appearance or by its measurement.

Constructing an object from a description.

Reporting an event,

speculating about the event.

Forming and testing a hypothesis.

Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams.

Acting in a play.

Guessing riddles,

cracking a joke,

solving a problem in applied arithmetic,

translating from one language to another,

requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting,

praying

a lot of different examples there, and I haven't even quoted all of them.

So to sum up what I've been seeking to

indicate to you in this first lecture,

when Wittgenstein talks about language games.

He's not giving a theory of language nor a theory of anything else.

He's trying to offer you tools,

devices, if you will,

to help free your mind

and help you explore in an in an alive way.

Not as if you already know what you need to,

as scientific theories can do.

No, he wants to help you, to explore,

to enable you to see a fresh

to look and see how our language and our lives actually work.