Language Games in the Blue and Brown Books

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Wittgenstein's conception of the philosophy of language changed with The Blue and Brown Books. His philosophical method is a method of investigation, but he is more speculative and certainly more friendly in this book than he was in his Tractatus. He leaves most questions open to more questions. His use of language games throughout is his way of dealing with the impossible task required in the Tractatus of creating a new logical language. In The Blue and Brown Books, anything can be said, whether or not it is logical, but everything that is said is subject to tireless clarification.

Language games were also used to show that language is learned through training, as in teaching a child the language, or teaching anyone a new language. Once trained, it is much easier to understand what people mean without having to explain the meaning of their words. Training eliminates the problem of meaning and explaining, which are probably not equal concepts anyway. In other words, just because a person explains the meaning of what was said does not mean that she is actually saying what is meant, or even what was learned. This is because the meaning of words entails more than what can be spoken, such as gestures and expressions, movement and experience.

Wittgenstein's idea with The Blue and Brown Books was to examine primitive languages, which are not cluttered by complicated thinking, in order to study the problems of truth and falsehood, and the agreement of language with reality. In some ways this method adds the same complications encountered in the Tractatus: that of discarding what we already use in order to build a system which everybody can understand without question. These problems are eventually solved, however, when he admits that grammatical functions in one language may not have counterparts in another one at all, and that the agreement of language with reality may be different in different languages and at different stages of development with language. Language, in fact, turns out to be a myriad set of experiences which is not always conveyed with words. In many cases, what is not said (spoken) is part of the language and may have just as much meaning as what is spoken. Most words are accompanied by expressions and gestures and experiences which are part of the meaning of the words. This gives language a liberty it never could have had in the Tractatus.

The Blue Book is different from the Brown Book in that it is a logical analysis of the nature of language and correct grammar, whereas the Brown Book is an encyclopedia of the possible variations of how language can be used (the language games), and what these uses might mean. All of this boils down to the big question: what is language? The answer to this question may be, simply, that language is a philosophical problem—an important one at that, the uses for which are nowhere more important than they are in the courtroom (an example I will use throughout for the purpose of comparison). Wittgenstein seems to suggest in the Brown Book that language lacks the kind of structure he originally proposed in the Tractatus, a suggestion I find most disappointing but conventionally true. He proposes that language may lack logic altogether, that in fact it is impossible to determine what belongs to it and what does not, or even what is a proposition and what is not. This realization occurs to him in the Brown Book. In the Blue Book he still clings to the idea that language is logical, and that people approach it logically. I think that most people do not approach language logically or even suppose that it is logical. This may be more of a blessing in some situations than even a scholar would like to admit. For example, the Bork nomination to the Supreme Court was defeated on precisely these grounds, that Bork left out any room for interpretation of the language for what Wittgenstein included in the Brown Book: feelings, expressions, gestures, and experiences that go along with what is said. Most scholars were appalled at the defeat on the grounds that Bork was right about the literal meaning of the language of the Constitution. A similar problem arises whenever the Bible is interpreted, and over the interpretations of the many life-or-death situations we care about. Yet in these crucial language game arguments it is probably essential that the leaders make room for these "other things" that go along with language in their interpretations. When cases (legal cases) are argued too narrowly, many human rights are violated. But when cases are argued too broadly, then it is possible to take certain rights away later or to take too many liberties, respectively, as in the Supreme Court abortion ruling and prison furlough. Whether or not Wittgenstein believes that language should lack the kind of logical unity he had hoped for it in the Tractatus, or even in the Blue Book, is a good question. He doesn't give an answer, and I suspect that his answer would be a circle and lead us back to reconstructing a logical language in which all propositions are tautologies.

I think that in leaving language open to all the baggage (feelings, experiences, etc.), as it were, we bring an existential structure to the philosophical problem of what is language. If we argue "what is language" and leave out the baggage, then we put human rights in danger, in perhaps the majority of cases. For example, arguing a legal case without feeling interpretation would have landed Hedda Nussbaum in jail along with Joel Steinberg. There is no constitutional right to murderous negligence. But apparently, Hedda Nussbaum was given the right on the grounds that murderous negligence was surrounded by the baggage of "abuse manipulation," and this was the added interpretation to the basic logic of the language. Unfortunately, adding feeling interpretation to the language can have disastrous consequences as well, as in the Florida case in which a jury acquitted a rapist on the grounds that the victim asked for it because of her attire. These two senses of the meaning of language, 1. that it is like mathematics, and 2. that it lacks such unity, sound very much to me like the difference between literal (narrow), and loose (broad) interpretations, as shown in the above legal cases. This may be an oversimplification of Wittgenstein's intent, but he arrived at the idea by using primitive language games to show how much is added to language as it gets more complicated. And most of what is added has to do with human experiences expressed simultaneously with spoken words.

Wittgenstein does not clarify why he thinks that people believe that language does have the kind of logic and intelligibility which he first proposed in the Tractatus. It is certain that many scholars believe that it does, especially in law and philosophy, politics and discourse. I think that people are in constant conflict over the meaning of their language, between the literal and the loose, the living and the fixed, the logical and the illogical interpretations. In the justice system, where it is crucial that language be interpreted fairly, juries and judges may use all manner of interpretation. They either bring their own experiences to the meaning of language, or they approach it logically and literally. In either case, consumers suffer or they don't suffer at the hands of judges. Wittgenstein writes that the man who is philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is used, and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against paradoxical results. When some juries tried consistently to apply the language of the laws governing rape in the late 1980s, laws which disallowed making the victim responsible for the crime against her, they came up against paradoxical results. These results usually had to do with their own experiences (prejudices?), and the experiences of the language of the defendant and the victim. For example, the defendant is aroused by the victim's lace miniskirt. His experience certainly doesn't justify the crime, but the jury allows his experience in their interpretation of the language of rape laws. The victim is a prostitute—she is actively looking for male customers. Her occupation does not justify the crime against her according to the literal rape laws, yet the jury takes her experience into consideration.

Wittgenstein does not explain why anyone thinks of words logically. He does give examples which help explain why one would want a logical language such as the following: a person is told that the train arrives at 3:30. She has no reason to believe that it arrives at any other time, yet the person who told her that the train arrives at 3:30 may have slammed her fist on the counter when she said so, or she may have laughed. Such expressions simultaneous with words may lead a person to think that there is more to the words than what is spoken. Perhaps the logic of language depends upon taking in all of the meaning of the words at the same time. This, then, circles right around to his objection in the Tractatus—generalization. In that book, there could be no generalizations of the language. Only the particular case (one rock) applied to the general idea (many rocks) was logically acceptable. Yet Wittgenstein clearly doesn't believe in generalization: he talks about a general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. When we think of leaf, we think of particular leaves (oak, maple, etc.), but we agree that the image of the leaf we see has something in common with all leaves. What really happens is that we look at words as though they were all proper names, and we then, he writes, confuse the bearer of the name with the meaning of the name. Again, this happens in criminal cases all the time! As an aside, Wittgenstein does allow for generalization in terms of a "family" of things. He writes that all the different processes of expecting someone to tea have many features overlapping, yet there is no single feature in common to them all.

Words have the meaning we give them, according to Wittgenstein. In a radical departure from traditional philosophy, words do not correspond to things or events, but to usages of words in contexts. This usage is learned, taught, trained. But there is more to the meaning of a word than what can be learned or taught, says Wittgenstein, and this is the great insight of his new philosophy: the way language is used also depends upon the emotional accompaniment of the words, including feelings and expressions and gestures. This is why the meaning of a word can never be captured in words, or even spoken about. Wittgenstein goes on to explain that "thinking" depends on language, but that thinking is not in language, and that thinking is probably very much the same thing as having experiences. This is why he proposes that thinking cannot be explained by language. He refers to a sort of intuition or something akin to it which accompanies understanding of words. He does not say much about this, leaving it open to speculation and research.

In a nutshell, Wittgenstein says language games are a new way of looking at what language is and how language is used, which is quite different from the way philosophers have thought about language in the past. Language games help us see that language is learned by training and use, not by formal explanations or definitions, and that language includes all the expressions, feelings, and experiences that accompany the words. Meaning is therefore much more complex and contextual than previously thought.