ABSTRACT
To later Wittgenstein, language may be thought of as a fabric made up of language games, without presupposing that it contains a single unifying thread. Language is a family resemblance concept, not a concept like ‘bachelor’ which admits of definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. The concepts of reference, meaning and the like distort our understanding, if we try to use them to theorise about all such language-games in abstraction. If we ‘look and see’ at language-games up close, we find that they can be described without those concepts being privileged in the description. It is an illusion to think that the meaning of a word is like an entity attached to the word, telling us how to respond to it. Such a thing would be powerless: if, for example, the meaning were a mental entity that was grasped whenever one used or heard the word, the entity would stand in need of interpretation, just as the word itself does. Russell held that the ability to talk about material objects depends upon our acquaintance with sense-data. Wittgenstein urges that such a language is impossible, in his so-called ‘private-language’ argument.
