ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein begins Philosophical Investigations with the description in Augustine's Confessions of a child learning to speak: 'thinking primarily of nouns like "table", "chair", "bread", and of people's names', Wittgenstein tells us, Augustine does indeed 'describe a system of communication', but 'not for the whole of what [he was] claiming to describe', only for one of the many discrete language games learnt in infancy.1 We cannot get outside these rule-governed games, Wittgenstein argues. It is an illusion of depth, a false pointing, to juxtapose one game with another, and imagine there is something further or deeper to be 'seen'. 'Think how many different kinds of thing are called "description": description of a body's position by means of its co-ordinates; description of a facial expression; description of a sensation of touch; of a mood' (Philosophical Investigations, p. 12). The mistake is to think there is something further about 'description' to be grasped in the light of its varied use when there is nothing to be grasped apart from the senses of the word as it is used, now here, now there. Philosophical Investigations is thus premised on the aphorism with which Wittgenstein ended Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence' (p. 74).
