Introduction

The role of language as a vehicle of thought makes way

for human thinking to be as multifaceted and diverse as it is.

This is for the reason that with language, one can describe

the past or speculate about the future and so deliberate and

plan in the light of one’s beliefs about how things stand. To

cement this view, language enables one to imagine

counterfactual objects, events, and states of affairs. In this

connection, it is intimately related to intentionality, the

feature of all human thoughts whereby they are essentially

about, or directed toward, things outside themselves. If, as

is the case, language allows one to share information and to

communicate beliefs and speculations, attitudes and emotions,

then, it creates the human social world, uniting people into a

common history and a common life-experience. In the end, what

we see is that language is an instrument of understanding and

knowledge.

Along these lines, the  philosophical investigation of

the nature of language—the relations between language,

language users, and the world—and the concepts with which

language is described and analyzed, both in everyday speech

and in scientific linguistic studies become pertinent and

absolutely imperative. On the whole, philosophy of language as

an academic and philosophical discipline is distinct from

linguistics. This is for the reason that its investigations

are conceptual rather than empirical. But this, however, does

not mean that philosophy of language will not call to mind the

message in which linguistic and other related disciplines

1

reveal. Of course, it must pay attention to the facts which

linguistics and related disciplines reveal.

It is in recognition of the aforesaid that Ludwig

Wittgenstein entitled his significant books on language and

meaning as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations.

It is also the reason why he insisted on tackling the problems

encountered in philosophy. Against this milieu, this essay

shall bring to center-stage Wittgenstein’s contribution to the

discourse of language and meaning in philosophy. To do this,

this essay shall pay attention to the picture theory of

meaning and the language theory. This will be followed by the

conclusion of the essay.

Ludwig Wittgenstein on Language and Meaning

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein

attempts to show that traditional philosophy rests entirely on

a misunderstanding of “the logic of our language.”1 In a letter

to Russell, he spells out the cardinal problem of philosophy

saying that “the main point is the theory of what can be

expressed by propositions – that is, by language — (and, which

comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 1961), p. 3.

2

expressed by propositions, but only shown.2 For this reason,

Wittgenstein attempts to draw a limit to thought, or rather

not to thought. To do this, he opines that we have to be able

to think what cannot be thought. As such, he proposes that it

will only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what

lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.3

Wittgenstein tried to spell out precisely what a logically

constructed language can (and cannot) be used to say. For him,

language, thought, and reality shares a common structure,

fully expressible in logical terms. He carries on the project

of language and meaning in his later work titled Philosophical

Investigations. Here, Wittgenstein attempts to show that language

is a veritable instrument of thought and a vehicle for human

communication.

On the Picture Theory of Meaning

Wittgenstein, following Frege’s and Russell’s footsteps,

argues that every meaningful sentence must have a precise

logical structure. That structure may, however, be hidden

beneath the clothing of the grammatical appearance of the

sentence and may therefore require the most detailed analysis

in order to be made evident.4 Such analysis, Wittgenstein was

convinced, would establish that every meaningful sentence is

either a truth-functional composite of another simpler

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, G. H. Von Wright, ed.,(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 72. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, pp. 3-4.4 Robert Audi, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), s. v. “Wittgenstein”.

3

sentence or an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation

of simple names.

He argues further that every atomic sentence is a logical

picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a

result, have exactly the same formal structure as the atomic

sentence that depicts it.5 Similarly, Von Wright, in his

Biographical Sketch of Wittgenstein, reports the following:

Wittgenstein told me how the idea of

language as a picture of reality

occurred to him. He was in a trench on

the East front, reading a magazine in

which there was a schematic picture

depicting the possible sequence of

events in an automobile accident. The

picture there served as a proposition;

that is, as a description of a possible

state of affairs. It had this function

owing to a correspondence between the

parts of the picture and things in

reality. It now occurred to

Wittgenstein that one might reverse the

analogy and say that a proposition serves

as a picture in which the parts of the

propositions are combined – the

structure of the proposition – depicts

a possible combination of elements in

reality, a possible state of affairs.6

5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 11.

4

Wittgenstein employs this “picture theory of meaning” –

as it is usually called – to derive conclusions about the

nature of the world from his observations about the structure

of the atomic sentences. He postulates, in particular, that

the world must itself have a precise logical structure7, even

though we may not be able to determine it completely. Of

course, the logical form of any picture consists in its

serving to distinguish the possible existence of a state of

affairs from its nonexistence. This, as Milton Munitz

comments, is the common underlying feature of any picture.8

Against this background, Wittgenstein postulates that

language is first and foremost a representational system. It

is with language that we make to ourselves picture of facts:

and to the objects in the reality correspond the elements of

the picture: a picture, he writes, is a model of reality. And

in turn, this picture is itself a fact. ”9 This leads

immediately to a notion of words, which stand for the objects.

So, “as the objects are linked in the world to form facts, the

words are linked in language to form propositions. A sentence

is meaningful if and only if it is a fact which corresponds to

a possible fact in the world; it’s true if it corresponds to

an actual fact.”10

To buttress this view, Wittgenstein contends that:

6 Von Wright, “Biographical Sketch,” in Norman Malcolm and Georg H. Von Wright, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 7-8.7 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. xiii.8 Milton Munitz, Contemporary analytic Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981), p. 195.9 Ibid., p. 9.10 www.hum.utah.edu/~phanna/classes/ling5981/autumn03/.../node19.html (4th Dec. 2013).

5

Propositions cannot represent logicalform: it is mirrored in them. Whatfinds its reflection in language,language cannot represent. Whatexpresses itself in language, we cannotexpress by means of language.Propositions show the logical form ofreality. They display it.11

For him, propositions are pictures, and language is used to

make these pictures. The use of the term picture here is not

accidental, for Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning is one which

draws on the visual analogy precisely because the propositions

are themselves facts, not mental representations. To

substantiate this argument, Wittgenstein writes thus:

To the objects correspond in thepicture the elements of the picture;the elements of the picture stand, inthe picture, for the objects. Thepicture consists in the fact that itselements are combined with one anotherin a definite way; the picture is afact. ...... In order to be a picture afact must have something in common withwhat it pictures. What the picture musthave in common with reality in order tobe able to represent it after itsmanner--rightly or wrongly--is its formof representation.12

The implication of this, as the argument continues, is that

the essential nature of the propositional sign becomes very

clear when we imagine it made up of spatial objects (such as11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 31.12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, pp. 9-11.

6

tables, chairs, books) instead of written signs. Thus, the

mutual spatial position of these things then expresses the

sense of the proposition.

On the view of Wittgenstein, the world consists primarily

of facts, corresponding to the true atomic sentences, rather

than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are linked

together in simple objects, corresponding to the simple names

of which the atomic sentences are composed. We are aware of

these facts by virtue of our mental representations or

thoughts, which are most fruitfully understood as picturing

the way things are in the world. These thoughts are, in turn,

“expressed in propositions, whose form indicates the position

of these facts within the nature of reality as a whole and

whose content presents the truth-conditions under which they

correspond to that reality.”13 In a similar fashion, he posits

that everything that is true—that is, all the facts that

constitute the world—can in principle be expressed by atomic

sentences.

On another note, Wittgenstein argues that the

propositions of logic are tautologies. He claims that since

they are true under all conditions whatsoever, tautologies are

literally nonsense: they convey no information about what the

facts truly are. But since they are true under all conditions

whatsoever, tautologies reveal the underlying structure of all

language, thought, and reality. Thus, on his opinion, the most

significant logical features of the world are not themselves

additional facts about it.

13 Ibid., p. 22.

7

A properly logical language, he held, deals with only

what is true. In particular, Wittgenstein avows that all

sentences that are not atomic pictures of concatenations of

objects or truth-functional composites of such are strictly

speaking meaningless. Wittgenstein maintained that all

philosophical sentences including most notably all of

metaphysics are pseudo-sentences and that in spite of their

grammaticalness and common usage, these pseudo sentences are

really devoid of any cognitive content.14 To add to these, he

included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, all

propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all

propositions of logic, indeed all philosophical propositions,

and finally all the propositions of the Tractatus itself. These

are all strictly meaningless; they aim at saying something

important, but what they try to express in words can only show

itself.

As a result, Wittgenstein concluded that anyone who

understood what the Tractatus was saying would finally discard

its propositions as senseless, that he or she would throw away

the ladder after climbing up on it. Someone who reached such a

state would have no more temptation to pronounce philosophical

propositions. He or She would see the world rightly and would

then also recognize that the only strictly meaningful

propositions are those of natural science; but those could

never touch what was really important in human life, the

mystical. That, he says, would have to be contemplated in

14 Thomas J. Hickey History of Twentieth Century Philosophy of Science (1995), p. 75.

8

silence. For this reason he concludes by declaring thus:

“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”15

Wittgenstein concluded, following the foregoing, that the

Tractatus was itself flawed by what it had tried to combat, that

is, the misunderstanding of the logic of language. Turning his

attention back to language he concluded that almost everything

he had said about it in the Tractatus had been in error. There

were, in fact, many different languages with many different

structures that could meet quite different specific needs.

Language was not strictly held together by logical structure,

but consisted, in fact, of a multiplicity of simpler

substructures or language games. Sentences could not be taken

to be logical pictures of facts and the simple components of

sentences did not all function as names of simple objects.

On the Language Theory (Use Theory of Meaning)

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein emphasized that

there are countless different uses of what we call “symbols,”

“words,” and “sentences.” The task of philosophy is to gain a

perspicuous view of those multiple uses and thereby to

dissolve philosophical and metaphysical puzzles. These

puzzles, as this view continues, were the result of

insufficient attention to the working of language and could be

resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by

which they had been reached. Wittgenstein describes language

as a game by means of which children use words to learn their

native language.16 In other words, he conceives of language-

game as a simplified model embedded in a form of life, a clear15 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 89.

9

instance of some characteristic use of language in a typical

life situation. He further argues that language games are the

forms of language with which a child begins to make use of

words. The study of language game, for him, is the study of

primitive forms of language or primitive languages.17

According to him, words are like tools in a tool-box.

Words are instruments of language which may have varying uses,

according to the purposes for which language may be used.18 The

varying ways in which words may be used help to structure our

concepts of reality. Here, words may be used in a multiplicity

of ways: for example, to describe things, to ask questions, to

report events, to speculate about events, to make requests, to

give commands, to form hypotheses, to solve problems, and to

perform other acts of communication.

Moreover, Wittgenstein declares that every word in a

language signifies something. Explaining this, he opines that

“the meaning of a word may be defined by how the word can be

used as an element of language.”19 A word may be given

different meanings, according to how it is used in a language-

game. Like the rules of a game, the rules of a language-game

may change, and different rules may be applied to different

games. According to Wittgenstein, there is no single rule

which is common to all games.

He maintains that common philosophical views about

meaning, about the nature of concepts, about logical16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1953), p. 5.17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), p. 17.18 Ibid., p. 6.19 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 7.

10

necessity, about rule-following, and about the mind–body

problem were all the product of an insufficient grasp of how

language works. He argues further that language is, in part,

an activity of giving names to objects, or of attaching labels

to things.20 For example, a builder may instruct an assistant

as to what type of stone is needed for the construction of a

building, by saying “slab” or “block” or “pillar” or “beam,”21

according to the order in which the building-stones are

needed, so that the assistant can bring the correct type of

stone for the construction of the building. However, the

naming of an object is only a preparation for an anticipated

move in the language-game. Linguistic movement occurs when a

sentence is constructed, such as, “Bring me a slab.”

The rules of a game may (or may not) leave doubt about

how the game should be played. The rules of a game may be

definite or indefinite, clear or unclear. If the rules are

unclear, then they may still be understandable enough to be

used for playing a game. Commenting on this, Wittgenstein

emphasizes that the meaning of a word may not depend upon

whether the word refers to something that actually exists. For

example, if something ceases to exist, the word or name for

that thing may still have meaning. If we say that the name for

something exists, we may affirm that the name has meaning,

even though the name may refer to something which no longer

exists. As a consequence, the word “pain” may have meaning,

even if it refers to something which no longer exists. A

20 Ibid.21 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 3.

11

person may understand what it means to have pain, even if he

or she is not actually having pain.

To broaden this view, Wittgenstein avows that each word

or name may be used in more than one language-game, and thus

each word or name may have a family of meanings. A word or

name may be useful without having a fixed meaning. The meaning

of a word may be fixed or variable, definite or indefinite. A

word or name for something may have multiple uses to express

or designate that thing. Words may be empty of meaning, or may

have some meaning, or may be full of meaning. Words may be

given meaning by the way in which they express thoughts and

feelings. However, words may have different meanings when they

are used differently to describe thoughts and feelings. Words

may have either an essential or unessential (accidental)

meaning, according to how they are used in a language-game.

Words may have a simple meaning, or may have a composite

meaning. Simple aspects of meaning may be combined to produce

composite aspects of meaning. Composite aspects of meaning may

be combined to produce more complex aspects of meaning.

According to Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is not what

is referred to, or designated by, by that word, but is the use

which the word has as an element of language. If we want to

define the meaning of a word, we must define how the word is

used as an instrument of language. To this end, imagining a

language, he asserts, means “imagining a form of life.”22 In

other words, language, Wittgenstein would argue, is embedded

22 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 8.

12

in a ‘form of life’—a set of activities in which the rules of

a language-game serve as a basis for communication.23

More still, Wittgenstein postulates that the problem with

logical analysis is that it demands too much precision, both

in the definition of words and in the representation of

logical structure. He thus goes further to argue that in

ordinary language, concept words do not denote sharply

circumscribed concepts, but are meant to mark ‘family

resemblances’ between the things labelled with the concept.24

He also held that logical necessity results from linguistic

convention and that rules cannot determine their own

applications, that rule-following presupposes the existence of

regular practices.

Furthermore, the words of our language have meaning only

insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct

application. He is of the view that language exists in a

linguistic community; it involves the use and application of

grammatical rules. These rules include ostensive definitions,

criteria and ‘strict’ definitions that stipulate necessary and

sufficient conditions. As a consequence, if one recognises the

foregoing crucial features of language, Wittgenstein would say

there cannot be a completely private language25, that is, a

language that in principle can be used only to speak about

one’s own inner experience. The very notion of a ‘private

language’ would dispense with the requirement that language be

embedded in the activities and practices of a linguistic

23 Milton Munitz, Contemporary analytic Philosophy, p. 307.24 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 32.25 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. sec. 243.

13

community; it would also dispense with the requirement that

the language be guided by the availability of grammatical

rules for public adoption and use.

Along the line, Wittgenstein used his private language

argument to wield a critique against the Cartesian dualism.

The theory of mind-body dualism envisages the mind as a

substance different yet linked to the body. According to this

philosophy, whereas bodily (physical) phenomena are accessible

externally, the mind’s activities, states and processes are

accessible only to ‘internal’ observation, to introspection.

Hence, mental experiences are private. They cannot be known by

others in the same direct and immediate way as they are known

by the person whose experiences they are. This implies that

what goes on in someone’s mind could at best be known by

inference and by analogy. This Cartesian tradition is

summarized in Gilbert Ryle as the acceptance of the model of

“the ghost in a machine.”26 In this way, Wittgenstein tries to

show that private language cannot be operative as it is in the

ordinary language used by a linguistic community, even though

he does not deny that people have their own private mental

life.

More on this view, Wittgenstein describes the activity of

using language as similar to playing a game of chess. Words

are like the pieces on a chessboard. Each word has a different

use or function in the language-game. He, however, does not

define what a ‘game’ is, but gives examples of various games,

such as chess, tennis and cricket. Each game has its own set

of rules, and each is played differently. People who are26 See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), chap. 1.

14

playing a language-game, and who are playing by different

rules, may have difficulty in understanding one another other.

This stems from the fact that they may have different

interpretations of the rules, or may apply rules differently.

People may, in some cases, decide the rules of a game while

they are playing the game.

Consistent with Wittgenstein’s opinion, the failure to

understand words, or the failure to use words clearly, may

often be caused by misunderstanding of how words are used in a

language-game. Failure to communicate clearly may be caused by

the use of words which have an unclear or indefinite meaning,

or by lack of understanding of the relation between the

meaning of words and the way in which they are used. The task

of philosophy may be to clarify the uses of language, and to

assemble ‘reminders of usage’ or simply put, reminders for a

particular purpose concerning how rules are applied to

language.27

Wittgenstein also argues that the uses or meaning of

words may change, according to changes in the circumstances

and scene of a language-game. To use words meaningfully,

people must decide which language-game they want to play, and

how they want to play it. Put differently, he avers that the

meaning of a word is its use in the language, and at the same

time, the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing

to its bearer.28

Importantly, Wittgenstein explains that when people

communicate with each other, they may have to choose between a

27 Ibid., p. 50.28 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 20.

15

private language and a common language. The rules of a private

language may not be the same as the rules of a common

language. The meaning of words in a private language may not

be the same as the meaning of words in a common language.

People may need a common language in order to share an

understanding of the meaning of words. This boils down to the

reason that the connection between a word and its meaning may

be arbitrary. Given an instance, a person may arbitrarily

choose to use the word “cold” to describe something which is

warm, or to use the word “warm” to describe something which is

cold. The use of the word “cold” to describe something which

is warm, or the use of the word “warm” to describe something

which is cold, may be meaningful if it is consistent with the

rules of a language-game. However, in some cases, the use of

words may not be governed by any rules, or may occur beyond

the limits of a language-game. In such cases, aimless or

meaningless combinations of words may not be governed by the

rules of any language-game.

Wittgenstein asserts that the understanding of what is

designated by a particular word may sometimes depend upon a

previous experience of whatever is designated by that word.

For example, to understand the meaning of the word “pain,” it

may be necessary to have experienced pain. In order to imagine

another person’s pain, it may be necessary to recall one’s own

previous experience of pain.

Wittgenstein recalls that understanding of the meaning of

words may also depend on what is meant by the term

“understanding.” Meaning may be understood, but understanding

16

(as an act of knowledge) may itself have meaning. He further

suggests that it would be misleading to describe meaning,

otherwise called intending, and understanding as processes,

for they do not occupy a time interval. He thus writes:

The understanding of language, as of agame, seems like a background againstwhich a particular sentence acquiresmeaning. But this understanding, theknowledge of the language, isn’t aconscious state that accompanies thesentences of the language. Not even ifone of its consequences is such astate. It’s much more like theunderstanding or mastery of a calculus,something like the ability tomultiply.29

What all this adds up to is the rejection of any

philosophy that would seek to assign meaning of such terms as

‘intending’ and ‘understanding’ to private mental mechanisms

or processes that are distinct from the multiple publicly

observable occasions in which language is used. To understand

‘understanding,’ ‘intending’ and similar ‘acts of thought,’

one should examine what is involved in acquiring competence in

the use of language through overtly discoverable reliance on

various teaching and learning situations. They have to do with

the mastery of techniques for the application of various rules

that govern the use of different linguistic expressions. The

acquisition and mastery of techniques in the use of language

are public matters. That a person has acquired and can use

29 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, edited by Rush Rhees. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 50.

17

these techniques does not involve any appeal to hidden,

private, mental mechanisms or processes. They can be tested

for in a public way.30 Put simply, what Wittgenstein is saying

here is that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward

criteria.”31

Over again, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein

repeatedly draws attention to the fact that language must be

learned. This learning, he says, is fundamentally a process of

inculcation and drill. In learning a language, the child is

initiated in a form of life. In Wittgenstein’s later work the

notion of ‘form of life’ serves to identify the whole complex

of natural and cultural circumstances presupposed by our

language and by a particular understanding of the world. He

elaborated those ideas in notes on which he worked between

1948 and his death in 1951 and which are now published under

the title On Certainty. He insisted in them that every belief is

always part of a system of beliefs that together constitute a

worldview. All confirmation and disconfirmation of a belief

presuppose such a system and are internal to the system. In

his own words;

All confirmation and disconfirmation ofa hypothesis takes place already withina system. And this system is not a moreor less arbitrary and doubtful point ofdeparture for all our arguments: no, itbelongs to the essence of what we callan argument. The system is not so much

30 Milton Munitz, Contemporary analytic Philosophy, p. 306.31 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, secs. 580, 503-504.

18

the point of departure, as the elementin which arguments have their life.32

For all this, he was not advocating for relativism, but

naturalism which assumes that the world ultimately determines

which language games can be played. Wittgenstein’s final notes

vividly illustrate the continuity of his basic concerns

throughout all the changes his thinking went through. For they

reveal once more how he remained sceptical about all

philosophical theories and how he understood his own

undertaking as the attempt to undermine the need for any such

theorizing. The considerations of On Certainty are evidently

directed against both philosophical sceptics and those

philosophers who want to refute scepticism.

Against the philosophical sceptics, Wittgenstein insisted

that there is real knowledge, but this knowledge is always

dispersed and not necessarily reliable; it consists of things

we have heard and read, of what has been drilled into us, and

of our modifications of this inheritance. We have no general

reason to doubt this inherited body of knowledge, we do not

generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position to

do so. But On Certainty also argues that it is impossible to

refute scepticism by pointing to propositions that are

absolutely certain, as Descartes did when he declared ‘I

think, therefore I am’ indubitable, or as Moore did when he

said, “I know for certain that this is a hand here.”33 The fact

that such propositions are considered certain, Wittgenstein

32 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. Von Wright, eds. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), p. 16.33 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 9.

19

argued, indicates only that they play an indispensable,

normative role in our language game34; they are the riverbed

through which the thought of our language game flows. Such

propositions cannot be taken to express metaphysical truths.

Here, too, the conclusion is that all philosophical

argumentation must come to an end, but that the end of such

argumentation is not an absolute, self-evident truth, but a

certain kind of natural human practice.

Evaluation and Conclusion

This essay has attempted an exposition of Wittgenstein’s

contribution to the discourse of language and meaning. This

was done by looking at the picture theory of meaning and the

language theory (otherwise called the use theory of meaning).

On the one hand, the picture theory of meaning posits that it

is with language that we make to ourselves picture of facts:

and to the objects in the reality correspond the elements of

the picture: so that a picture becomes a model of reality. And

in turn, this picture is itself a fact. On the other hand, the

language theory posits that language is a veritable instrument

for communication. It is a simplified model embedded in a

“form of life.” The highpoint of the language theory is that

words are like tools in a tool-box. Words, as this view

continues, are instruments of language which may have varying

uses, according to the purposes for which language may be

used. In this way, every word is used to signify something in

a language or language game, and at the same time, meanings

are the product of language game.34 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 27.

20

Given the above concession, it can be argued, following

the Wittgensteinian dictum, that we should be concerned with

the use of words in our language rather than the meaning. This

is for the reason that words are instruments of language which

may have different uses. In this way, the superfluity of

communication can only be possible if the right words are

being employed in our communication.

21

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