Language Games

Overview

Recall questions on Wittgenstein's abandonment of the picture theory, language games and forms of life, religious language as non-cognitive, D Phillips on religious belief, and the charge of fideism.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Explain the picture theory of meaning and why Wittgenstein abandoned it.

   Model answer

   In his early work Wittgenstein held that a meaningful proposition is a picture of a possible arrangement of things, sharing a structure with what it depicts, so that language maps onto the world; whatever could not be pictured that way - ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of life - might be shown but could not be said. He came to think this rested on a false account of how language works, taking one function, describing, and treating it as the whole, when naming and describing are only some among countless things we do with words.

2. 2

   What replaced the picture theory?

   Model answer

   The view that the meaning of a word is its use in the practices where it appears. Wittgenstein compared words to tools: asking what a word means with no setting in view is like asking what a tool does with no workshop in view. Different areas of life have different games with different rules - joking, praying, commanding, measuring, thanking - and someone understands a word when they can go on using it correctly in the game where it belongs.

3. 3

   What is a form of life, and why does the phrase matter?

   Model answer

   It is the shared pattern of activity in which a language game is embedded - what people do, not only what they say. Language is not a free-floating code but part of living: the language of promising belongs to a community that keeps promises. On this account religious language is inseparable from worship, prayer, ritual and moral practice, so anyone who takes the sentences on their own, apart from the life, has not yet got their meaning.

4. 4

   Why does the language games approach say the believer and the atheist often talk past each other?

   Model answer

   Because they may be playing different games with the same words. If religious language has its own grammar, then testing it by the standards of empirical science is a mistake of the same kind as complaining that the rules of chess have never been experimentally confirmed. On this view a sceptic who demands evidence for God as though God were an unusually large object has misunderstood the utterance, and a believer who offers evidence of that sort has made the identical error.

5. 5

   What does D Phillips say about religious belief?

   Model answer

   That it is not a hypothesis competing with scientific ones, and that philosophers go wrong by treating it as a poorly supported theory. Understanding a belief means seeing what it does in a believer's life: petitionary prayer is not a technique for producing results but a way of handing over what one cannot control, and talk of eternal life is not a forecast about surviving one's own death but a description of a quality of life lived in relation to God. On this reading the philosopher's job is to clarify religious language, not to referee it.

6. 6

   What is fideism, and why is the language games approach accused of it?

   Model answer

   Fideism is the view that religious belief rests on faith and can neither be supported nor undermined by reasoning from outside. Critics say the language-game approach comes to exactly this: if religious language can be assessed only by its own internal rules, no outside criticism can ever land, and faith becomes immune by definition. Phillips resisted the label, arguing that he was describing how the language actually works rather than shielding it, and that a great deal of religious talk is confused by the tradition's own standards.

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