What a Wittg’ed Game You Play

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations exhibits a series of what he calls “language games,” which are simple practices in which words and other linguistic units have uses. Many of these games amuzingly involve the genderless, perhaps inhuman “builders” known only by the names ‘A’ and ‘B’. In the first of these activities, presented in paragraph 2, A and B build an unidentifed structure or structures with building stones and communciate solely (at least verbally) with the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, and “beam”. With these words A calls for a stone and B responds by fetching an appropriate exemplar. Wittgenstein ends this passage typically cryptically with the injunction that we should “(c)onceive this as a complete primitive language.” Presumably this means that no other linguistic resources should be necessary for this language game to be meaningful to the participants.

The words of this building game play different roles than the stones, but I propose first that they are meaningful in effectively the same way as the stones are, i.e. by having a functional role in the carrying out of the practice, and second that this means of being meaningful is essentially that which Heidegger attributes to the pragmata encountered in transparent coping.

That is to say, Wittgenstein provides here an account of how something that could reasonably be termed “language” could derive its meaning from its elements’ (i.e. its words’) place in the equipmental totality. “Slab” means what it means because it references (in Heidegger’s sense of the term) not only slabs or a particular slab, but also the structure that A and B are building, the walkway on which B must walk to fetch a slab, and so on; and this meaning is effectively of the same type as, though not identical to, the meaning of the slab itself, which also references the structure under construction and the walkway, as well as the word “slab”.

As with my earlier post on Heidegger I am not primarily attempting historical scholarship here, but am instead drawing on resources from a prominent philosopher to sketch a view that he himself would almost surely not have endorsed, at least in full. Wittgenstein’s accounts of language games such as the one above aphoristically echo the early Heidegger’s contributions to the concept of primal praxis while indicating further how language itself might derive its meaning from such praxis rather than the reverse being true. If language gets its meaning by being embedded in practices, just as is true on this view for other sets of objects, then it becomes less intuitive to suppose, as most philosophers since the linguistic turn have, that the human capacity for linguistic meaning is temporally and conceptually prior to meaningful behavior. Perhaps primal praxis comes first.