Ludwig wittgenstein gay6/11/2023 What’s going on here? The helper who responds is not like a dog reacting to an order. A brickie calls ‘Slab!’ and his helper brings it. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), he used the example of two builders. Wittgenstein was intent on bringing out how ‘the “speaking” of language is part of an activity, or form of life’. Moreover, what we do, we do in a world with others. But Wittgenstein wanted to expose how ‘words are deeds’, that we do something every time we use a word. Consider the exclamations ‘Help!’ ‘Fire!’ ‘No!’ These do something with words: soliciting, warning, forbidding. So he used ‘language-game’ to draw attention not only to language itself, but to the actions into which it is woven. He contended that words acquire meaning by their use, and wanted to see how their use was tied up with the social practices of which they are a part. It was the maverick philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who coined the term ‘language-game’. If we want to change how things are, then we need to change the way we use words. We are as if bewitched by the practices of saying that constitute our ways of going on in the world. But the way we use language affects how we live and who we can be. Ordinarily we don’t notice this we just get on with it. We live out our lives amid a world of language, in which we use words to do things.
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