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A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the "rule" of the "game" being played.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, an associate of Russell, was one of the progenitors of the linguistic turn. This follows from his ideas in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that philosophical problems arise from a misunderstanding of the logic of language, and from his remarks on language games in his later work. [8]
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (/ ˈ v ɪ t ɡ ən ʃ t aɪ n,-s t aɪ n / VIT-gən-s(h)tyne, [7] Austrian German: [ˈluːdvɪk ˈjoːsɛf ˈjoːhan ˈvɪtɡn̩ʃtaɪn]; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
The whole argument has become famous under the heading 'language games'. The larger context in which Wittgenstein's philosophy is seen to develop considers his uncompromising opposition to essences, mental entities and other forms of idealism which were accepted as a matter of fact in continental philosophy at the turn of the preceding century ...
Believing that philosophical puzzles about colour can only be resolved through attention to the language games involved, Wittgenstein considers Goethe's propositions in the Theory of Colours, and the observations of Philipp Otto Runge in an attempt to clarify the use of language about colour. [2]
[1] [2] Wittgenstein compared the concept of logical pictures (German: Bilder) with spatial pictures. [3] The picture theory of language is considered a correspondence theory of truth. [4] Wittgenstein claims there is an unbridgeable gap between what can be expressed in language and what can only be expressed in non-verbal ways.
The private language being considered is not simply a language in fact understood by one person, but a language that in principle can only be understood by one person. So the last speaker of a dying language would not be speaking a private language, since the language remains in principle learnable.
As the citation suggests, Wittgenstein views understanding a language-game as being mostly concerned with training (which he calls "drill[ing]" in the above citation). Having said that, Wittgenstein is not one to believe that even understanding a language-game can be reduced to one process; like the plethora of language-games available to human ...