Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games
Language-game or Sprachspiel is … ‘to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life’, (PI 23) and consists of both language and actions.
7. […] We can also think of the whole process of using words […] as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language. I will call these games “language-games” and will some- times speak of a primitive language as a language-game.
Children learn their native language and acquire the rule through learning to play language-games. Learning to play the game is understood in terms of making a move in the game. Learning to play the game is a paradigm of learning to be rational. As Rorty suggests above ‘Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games’. There are many different types of language-game and together they comprise a natural language with the consequence that the rule of language function like the rules of games but there is nothing essential to all games. There are only family resemblances…
At paragraph 23 Wittgenstein introduces the multiplicity of language-games:
23. But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?—There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols”, “words”, “sentences”. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.)
Here the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life. Review the multiplicity of language-games in the following examples, and in others:
Giving orders, and obeying them—
Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements
Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)—
Reporting an event—
Speculating about an event—
He goes on to specify different kinds of games later in paragraph 23:
Forming and testing a hypothesis—
Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams—
Making up a story; and reading it—
Play-acting—
Singing catches—
Guessing riddles—
Making a joke; telling it—
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic—
Translating from one language into another—
Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. —
…Now think of the language-game in philosophy that deals with the question of rationality. All those linguistic practices that revolve around the asking for and giving of reasons that establish a discursive concept of rationality in terms of the concepts of reason, of logic, of logic as language, of rule-following and following a rule, games of seeking, finding and presenting evidence, practices of justification, doubt and ‘standing fast’, statements of belief, and, of course, truth. The assessment of knowledge claims is a vast enterprise considered historically, so vast that it would be a difficult task to chart all the practices of this game as they have developed over time and how they are related in complex ways. In particular, it would be also difficult to emphasize the relations between thought, language and reality that make-up some of the epistemological background of the rationality game. It may also involve an understanding of ‘proof’ in some contexts and consideration of new approaches in, for example, deliberative models; perhaps even ‘game-theoretical’ approaches including games of partial information and rational act speech models. Undoubtedly, it would involve careful observations of the semantic multiplicity of the linguistic settings in which people invoke rationality—in science, ethics, politics, and so on. It may mean the recognition of various types of sentences used in these settings. On Wittgenstein's view rationality is embodied in the shared knowledge of meaningful and expressible actions achieved through language-games. The philosophical language-game of rationality already takes place against an assumed linguistic background of ordinary language.
…But it is not just openness and variability that characterize language-games: language-games are, on the contrary and above all, sites of regularities. More precisely, they contain regularities in the combination of linguistic expressions and action, i.e. the governing rules of a language-game. An important feature of language is thus the repeatability made possible through the application of specific rules (cf. von Savigny 1995). The rule concept, as a result, goes beyond the constitution of simple word meanings in the language-game. It concerns actions, or reasoning about the possible options for action, and is therefore, in its function, close to the original meaning of the word “rationality”.
…Laugier (Citation2011) speaks of the ‘rehabilitation of daily existence’ as a new type of ethical or spiritual exercise that is played out in ordinary language in a transformative ‘habitual and repeated practice and use of language through speech, writing and reading in ‘the privileged space of the ethical relationship to language’ – ‘a silent ethics, inscribed in the understanding of the limits of meaning, and that of a simple, naïve and ordinary relationship to the world, prefiguring Cavell’s readings’. (p. 323)
…And he goes on the make three observations about language-games: ‘rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players’; ‘if there are no rules, there is no game’; ‘every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game’. He formulates this analysis into the domain of general agonistics where ‘to speak is to fight’ where ‘the social bond is composed of language “moves”’. In an age characterised by the breaking up of the grand narratives and the dissolution of the social bond ‘language games are the minimum relation required for society to exist’…