ABSTRACT
Enthusiasts for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy will perhaps complain that the project is inconsistent with the therapeutic, non-theoretic style of philosophising which was one of his chief bequests. They may hold that a continued quest for the sources of semantic necessity is itself the result of the kind of conceptual confusion which the post-Tractarian writings sought to disentangle. Contentious and uncontentious connotations accompany the language-game conceit. No simple rule-of-thumb is available to enable to tell over all cases whether an agent is according a game the degree of seriousness proper to the playing of it. Political history provides a fund of examples of counterfeit-core-games of a sort Marx made much of in the famous opening passage of his Eighteenth Brumaire. These are propagandistic attempts to relive through re-enactment an historical period which is irrevocably dead or dying. Wittgenstein had argued that if language was to be a means of communication not only in definitions, but also in judgements.
