Here’s one I like from the Blue Book:

“In the future I will draw your attention again and again to what I will call language games. These are ways of using signs that are simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the ways of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsity, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, from the nature of assertion, supposition, and question, we shall see with great advantage primitive forms of language in which these thought-forms appear without the confusing background of highly complicated thought processes. (Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, 17)

This description makes it seem that Wittgenstein is proposing a research program on various aspects of language. In fact, I must point out the affinity between this way of speaking of language, that is, with the recourse to “ways of thinking” (from this perspective, language must respond to thought: language is the vehicle of expression of thought) , and contemporary discourse on the linguistic processes present in cognitive and linguistic sciences. Note also how the use of the term “language games” is coordinated with the notion of simpler, more basic and/or elementary forms of language. Later, Wittgenstein rejects the idea that any language game is really more or less basic than other language games.

Finally, I was struck by Wittgenstein’s attitude toward standard protocol types characterized by a Cartesian or Lockean epistemology. Was Wittgenstein still in the grip of traditional Western epistemology here? Does he intend, or did he intend, to actually use ‘language games’, here as more primitive forms of language, as a way of answering questions about the nature of truth and falsehood? Would we say that he is exercising a kind of representational theory of meaning and therefore a correspondence theory of truth? I’m not so sure, but it should certainly make you aware of something: Even in this “later” period, Wittgenstein may not have fully grasped the implications of seeing language and meaning as an activity.

Now let’s look at a description of the language games present in the later work, The Brown Book:

“Communication systems such as 1), 2), 3), 4), 5), we will call them “language games”. Children are taught their native language through such games, [Notice–this position is not altogether consistent with most contemporary theories of cognitive development whereby infants learn the meaning of words via being able to represent what the word(s) denote] and here they even have the entertaining character of the games. We do not refer, however, to the language games we describe as incomplete parts of a language, but as complete languages ​​in themselves, as complete systems of human communication. To keep this point of view in mind, it is very often useful to imagine a language as simple as the entire communication system of a tribe in a primitive state of society. Think of the primitive arithmetic of such tribes.” (Wittgenstein, Brown Book, 81)

Well, clearly this description lends itself to a very different kind of interpretation. Here, the language games are not intended to be more or less simple versions of “real” “everyday” language. In contrast, language games are considered complete language systems. However, Wittgenstein must be careful here. It is easy enough to take “language games are complete language systems” to mean that a particular language game is complete in the sense of operating on quite independent syntactic and semantic rules, so that the “meaning” of a expression within that particular game need not be interpreted further. Wittgenstein should not be read here as saying that, in all cases for p within the language-game S, p need not be further interpreted by the speakers of the language-game S. The possibility should remain, even with a “complete language system” for any p will be ‘given a new meaning’/interpretation.

In short: the integrity of the language system does not guarantee that any expression within that system is immune from interpretation.

But getting back to my main point, here clearly Wittgenstein’s intentions are quite different compared to his somewhat epistemic intentions implicit in his description of language games in the Blue Books. If you’re interested in Wittgenstein’s development from the Blue Books to the Brown Books, check out Rush Rhees’ advance to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books, of which Rush is a translator. Rhees takes a different approach to this type of discussion, but it is quite illuminating and highly recommended nonetheless.

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