Language games and non-cognitive approaches

Overview

Recall questions on Wittgenstein's view that meaning is use, language games, forms of life and family resemblance, how religious language can be meaningful yet non-cognitive, the criticisms of language games, Aquinas' analogy compared with Wittgenstein, and the influence of non-cognitive approaches on reading religious texts.

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

   What does Wittgenstein mean by saying that meaning is use?

   Model answer

   He means that a word does not get its meaning by standing for an object, but from the part it plays in the activities of the people who use it. To know what a word means is to know how to operate with it in the situations where it belongs. So the question to ask about religious language is not what unobservable entities it names but what work it does in the lives of those who speak it.

2. 2

   Explain Wittgenstein's idea of a language game.

   Model answer

   A language game is a rule-governed practice in which words are used for particular purposes: giving orders, telling jokes, praying, reporting an experiment, thanking, cursing. Each has its own conventions determining what counts as a correct move, and those conventions are learned by participating rather than by definition. Meaning is internal to the game, so a word taken out of its game and judged by another game's rules will look defective when it is simply being misused.

3. 3

   What does Wittgenstein mean by a form of life?

   Model answer

   He means the shared pattern of activity, practice and behaviour in which a language game is embedded and from which it takes its sense. Language is not a free-floating system but part of what a community does: worshipping, mourning, healing, trading. To understand the language you have to understand the life, which is why an outsider who has never participated in a religious form of life may find its language opaque.

4. 4

   How does the idea of family resemblance support Wittgenstein's approach?

   Model answer

   He points out that the things we call games share no single feature common to all, but overlap in a network of similarities like the resemblances among relatives. This undermines the assumption that every meaningful term must have one precise definition, and so undermines the demand that religious terms be pinned to observable referents. Meaning can be perfectly serviceable without being uniform.

5. 5

   How can language games make religious language meaningful yet non-cognitive?

   Model answer

   Within the religious form of life, statements about God, forgiveness, judgement and grace have clear uses: they express commitment, shape conduct, frame worship and console the grieving, and there are recognised right and wrong ways to use them. That gives them meaning in the only sense Wittgenstein thinks there is. But they are not functioning as empirical hypotheses about an object, so they are not the sort of thing to be confirmed or refuted by evidence, and in that sense they are not making factual claims.

6. 6

   On the language-games view, what mistake is the verificationist making?

   Model answer

   He is taking the rules of one language game, the scientific one, and applying them to another where they do not belong, then declaring the second defective because it fails a test it was never playing. It is like criticising a poem for being unrepeatable or a joke for being unverified. On this account religious language is not bad science; it is not science at all, and the demand for verification is a misunderstanding of what is being said.

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