11 · Concepts
Key concepts
Wittgenstein left no system, but he left ideas that keep coming back: the picture theory, language games, family resemblance, rule-following. Each page explains one of them in plain language, with a short animation and the remarks it comes from.
Early
The picture theory of meaning
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein argued that a sentence is a picture of a possible fact: its names stand for things, and their arrangement shows how the things are arranged.
02Saying and showing
Some things can be said in true or false sentences. Others, Wittgenstein argued, cannot be said but show themselves: logical form, the self, ethics, the mystical.
Later
Language games
A language game is language together with the activity it is woven into. Wittgenstein's builders show how 'Slab!' means something only inside the work they share.
04Meaning is use
For Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is, in most cases, its use in the language. Words are less like labels and more like tools in a toolbox.
05Family resemblance
Why do we call chess, football and patience all games, when nothing is common to them all? Wittgenstein's answer: overlapping similarities, like the features of a family.
06Rule-following
A pupil continues "+2" with 1004, 1008, 1012 and insists he went on in the same way. Wittgenstein on why a rule only guides within a practice, and Kripke's famous sceptical twist.
07Private language
Could you have a language that only you can understand, with words naming your private sensations? Wittgenstein's beetle in a box suggests the private object drops out.
08Seeing aspects
The lines of the duck-rabbit never move, yet you see a duck, then a rabbit. Wittgenstein on seeing as, the dawning of an aspect and what it tells us about seeing and understanding.
09Forms of life
Words live inside shared practices: eating, greeting, promising, mourning. Wittgenstein called that background a form of life, and it is why a talking lion would stay a stranger.
10Hinge propositions
Some things we never check, because all checking depends on them. Wittgenstein called them the hinges our doubts turn on, and used them to answer both Moore and the sceptic.
11Philosophy as therapy
Philosophical problems are not deep mysteries but knots in our language. Wittgenstein's aim was to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.