Brick-by-Brick: Rebuilding the Language-Games

1 Preface

Margalit’s book The Ethics of Memory (2002) advances two different kinds of philosophers: One is the kind of philosopher who is “committed to definitions and distinctions” and the other is merely “committed to examples and illustrations” (qtd. in Walzer 2017: 52). To advance his argument to the philosopher of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) did not argue through accurate definitions, but by imprinting on the mind practical examples. In the same way as Christ in his parables, Wittgenstein’s manner of teaching was carried by suggestive, stylized, and imaginative narrations taken from history, literature, and his own life. The philosophy of Wittgenstein’s “essentialism” (Abelson 1967: 314–317) gave practical directions, and even meditations, to guide the definition of his concepts. Even as a teacher during his professorate at Cambridge University, Wittgenstein avoided giving clear definitions of the logical analysis of the ideas and concepts in his lectures, but included the “essence” of the models, paradigms, and metaphors to guide the students through the “picture of the landscape” (PI 1953: Preface, PI 2009: 3e) of the works and writings.

The interest in vague “essences” without further footnotes and/or explanations moved Wittgenstein to describe merely the “experiences” of life in the “forms of life.” By living in the symbolic part of Jesus’ parables (Jeremias 1963: 11–22), Wittgenstein exemplified the alternative explanation with the human experience of “language-games” (Glock 1996: 193–198). In the allegorical explanation of semiotic ideas he pointed the story to the case of men and women, which is more than flesh and blood. He radically challenged the logical definitions of traditional philosophy to emphasize the new direction of philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries. He added non-logical game-like stories, like Jesus’ one-liners (Gorlée 2015: 66–67), integrated within the strict components of the philosophy.

In fact, the only resistance to dogmatism challenged Wittgenstein’s philosophical position on weighty grounds. His speculative system was the metaphorical “grammar” of simple words combined into full sentences (Glock 1996: 150–155). The words “play-acted” (defined further in Gorlée forthcoming b) together as complex language-games, fabricating logical propositions (Glock 1996: 315–319). In this article, I hope to classify and explain Wittgenstein’s search for the essential step in his claim for the ruled and unruled genre of language-games. The working-descriptions or narrations of the language-game explain the historical and conceptual sentences of Wittgenstein’s propositions, which supply, or stabilize, the lexical and technical meaning in actual usage of Wittgenstein’s crucial term of language-games.

Wittgenstein would extrapolate the truth of language through the examples of the small units of language-games (Glock 1996: 193–198), in which he gave a meaning and effective power to the grammatical propositions. The “essence” was conveyed in terms of the cultural kinds of games we play in society. In the varieties of the social games, there is no single feature common to all games (Gorlée 1994: 67–85). Instead the language-games are linked together by an open-set similarity of games played with language. The similarities are characteristic of Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” between language-games (Glock 1996: 120–124).The philosopher Charles S. Hardwick thought that the concept of game was a “gross over-simplification” of Wittgenstein’s view of language-game, because to see “language as a series of GAMES is to emphasize the particularity of language” (1971: 11–12). Hardwick wrote that the “important thing is to see these games as LANGUAGE-games, not as isolated piecemeal uses” (1971: 12, Hardwick’s capitals).

The skepsis about the general (vague) and particular (actual) meanings of the use of language and its applied uses was described in my book Wittgenstein in Translation: Exploring Semiotic Signatures (Gorlée 2012). Wittgenstein’s “inner workings” were analyzed as coming from a cross-cultural philosopher of language by way of translation (Gorlée 1989a, 1989b, 2008), analyzing the transposition of Wittgenstein’s native German language into the metalanguage in which his work has been translated, namely English philosophy (Gorlée forthcoming a). Viewed in the semiotic context, I needed to get beneath the starting presuppositions by philosopher Hardwick to learn from the linguist Leonard Bloomfield more about Wittgenstein’s technical concepts of “language-game” and the underlying “forms of life” (Glock 1996: 124–129, 193–198), both of them expressing the mannerisms of the culture of Wittgenstein’s early belle époque period in a new style of writing. In Wittgenstein’s time, contemporaneous with Bloomfield’s scientific opposition to the unscientific impressionism in the emergent linguistics of the 20th century, the new style of writing started at the bottom in the minimal free units in words, then worked up to the sentence as the largest unit. The Bloomfieldian tradition may have inspired Wittgenstein’s smallest units of language-game to build the paragraphs.

In his “game” of language, Wittgenstein neither gave any real definition of language-game, nor did he define the concept of form of life. The bipolarity of these notions are constantly used in Wittgenstein scholarship and outside in society, but the skeptical beginning of the language-game and forms of life have become vague notions that need re-shaping in the empirical analysis of Wittgenstein’s own descriptions and when tracing out his examples. The historical and conceptual development of redefining Wittgenstein’s discourse is reduced to discover the meaning of the language-games in literary narrations, by means of a play-act of Wittgenstein’s alternative view, building the framework of the “game” of language. The narrative argumentation of the language-game answers the questions about the “linguïcultural” meaning and integrates language-and-culture into the reasoning of Wittgenstein’s argumentation (Anderson and Gorlée 2011).

2 Preliminary studies

Wittgenstein was a global philosopher of language, whose kaleidoscopic works and writings – mostly published in the hands of editors after his death (1951) – marshaled the state of confusion between linguistic forms. When the pragmatic or experiential use of language became a jigsaw puzzle, Wittgenstein sought in his arguments to attach some logical meaning to meaningful behaviors used as standing on their own in the use of language.

Beyond his early dissertation, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP 1933), a book with numbered and subnumbered items to form the whole volume, Wittgenstein’s later books, written from the 1930s onwards – The Blue and Brown Book (BBB 1969) and his masterwork Philosophical Investigations (PI 1968), right up to his last writings in On Certainty (OC 1969) – feature posthumously the “new” direction in philosophy. In his inquiry into the decipherment and solution of the puzzle of language, Wittgenstein seemed to converge with Bloomfield, one of the most important American linguists, who in Language (published in 1933; Bloomfield 1967) and later publications set forth to lay the foundations of semiotic linguistics (Rauch and Carr 1980).

After the horrors of World War I, the semiotic perspective resurfaced, specifically in the belief that the doctrine of semiotics could redirect the modern movement of linguistics. Ogden and Richards’ revolutionary volume The Meaning of Meaning (1923) included a semiotic appendix written by the then unknown Charles S. Peirce (1967–1914) (Ogden and Richards 1969: 279–290), setting Peirce’s doctrine of signs in an experimental tone to guide the semiotically oriented linguistics of the 20th century. The cooperative venture of The Meaning of Meaning (written in the 1920s) moved from the conventional symbolism to the purposeful and pragmatic considerations of the “new” – meaning alternative – use of language. The capitalized “science of Symbolism” (Ogden and Richards 1969: v) included some references to the logical mysticism and arithmosophy of Wittgenstein’s early period of Tractatus (TLP 1933; Ogden and Richards 1969: 89, 253, 255). Wittgenstein believed that the function of language was to serve the social “use” of mankind, generating the living and creative tool of language used in human communication. He also proposed linguistic forms as the pragmatic instrument of new humankind, moving inside and outside of language itself into culture. Yet language is marked by the “chaotic” symbiosis of cultural ingredients (within cultural items, objects, or concepts) to become effective and operative in the practice of social communication between the language speakers.

Wittgenstein’s argument has the following two points (further discussed in Gorlée 2017). First, the “new” philosophy was written in common language and with material a scheme of fragmentary items (similar to Peirce’s fragmentariness in writing, Gorlée 2007). The flow of short fragments in the series of sketches, paragraphs, and stylistic projects insisted on Wittgenstein’s special teaching method in questions and answers. Wittgenstein’s methodology attached supreme importance to logic, but rather than engaging with the completeness of philosophical reasoning to write “books,” he reduced himself to writing fragmentary “albums” (Gorlée 2012: 68–69, 187, 228, Pichler 2002, 2004, 2009). Then, Wittgenstein’s experimental writings – like Peirce’s short paragraphs – can be regarded as probes into the smallest shapes and fragmentary forms of language, considered a throwing off a metaphorical “stream of life” or figurative “stream of consciousness,” forming within the fragmentariness the cryptic “essence” of his philosophy of language. This philosophy of language deploys the energetic flow of Peirce’s three categories (Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness), as the triadic elements interacting with each other in semiosis (sign-action).

Second, Wittgenstein’s style of writing diverges from the usual volumes of “old” philosophical reasoning, written in complex language and suited primarily for philosophical specialists. Wittgenstein seldom used scientific or technical terminology, except when introducing some key terms, particularly the hybrid connection of the new term language-game and the underlying form of life. Thanks to Wittgenstein’s own use and the translations of his works, these terms were naturalized from the intellectual word (mot savant) into foreign learned or “popular” forms in the current use of German, English, French, and other languages. Overall, it seemed that Wittgenstein’s brief fragments, written in ordinary language, are unencumbered by worries about understanding (and even misunderstanding) those familiar, but unfamiliar, words. Despite the flow of categories in the unbroken continuity of words, the connected and disconnected fragments are explored to grasp the unfamiliar meaning that must be stitched together into a whole. Easily understood at the surface of language, quoted without any problems, the concept of language-game remains difficult to properly understand. Wittgenstein’s intended meaning of the fragmentary speech-acts must be extrapolated from his words and sentences to form the whole meaning of this concept.

As a contributor to the scholarship of dividing and subdividing words and sentences in the philosophy of language, Wittgenstein becomes a “hidden hero” of semiotics (Gorlée 2012: 1 and passim). He was regarded as a “cryptosemiotician,” because he as “late modern thinker [was] involved with but not thematically aware of the doctrine of signs, still a prisoner theoretically of the solipsist epistemology of modern philosophy” (Deely 2015: 1: 98). In the semiotic context, I will give an interpretative, technical, and cultural assessment of the semiotic standpoint of the language-games and their elements, transforming the logical meaning and uncovering some illogical or unlogical meanings. This inquiry is focused on understanding Wittgenstein’s semiosic perspective on cognition as well as his cognitive perspective on semiosis as the action of signs giving meaning.

Wittgenstein’s first decision – in the early Tractatus (TLP 1933) – was to restore the linguistic semiology based on the Swiss linguistic semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), with respect to contemporary associates overseas, such as the American linguist Bloomfield. Bloomfield credited Saussure for providing in his posthumous main work Course in General Linguistics as the “theoretical foundation to the newer trend in linguistics study” (Baskin qtd. in Saussure 1959: XV). The rule-governed protective mechanism, drawing on logical analogies, was Wittgenstein’s early “calculus” analogy of language, naming the fixed connection of sign referring to object. The systematic transposition of a sign and the various objects into sign-and-object was like the consultation of a dictionary-like tool with “a strongly organized ‘center’ but with a more and more fuzzy ‘periphery’” (Eco 1984: 85).

The first logical picture theory of the Tractatus was at a later date regarded by Wittgenstein as a mistake, viewed as a misreading of the miscellaneous “reality” of how we really use our linguistic tools as dynamic instruments in human communication. From the middle period (1929 onwards), during the lectures of The Blue and Brown Books (BBB 1969) and his masterwork, Philosophical Investigations (PI 1968, rev. and retrans. PI 2009), right up to his last writings in On Certainty (OC 1969) (all these edited publications were published posthumously), Wittgenstein’s writings explore the advent of the popular, but often misunderstood, versions of “reality” and “irreality” in the variety of all kinds of language-games.

In Wittgenstein’s later view (after the Tractatus), the interpreted-signs of sign-and-object are transformed into Peirce’s interpretant-signs. The speech-acts of Wittgenstein’s notion of language-game follow the changing flow of Peirce’s interpreter’s moods. Peirce’s neologisms of the interpretants^[1] prompt the fixed set of the sign-and-object through the mental and neurological mechanisms of interpretation (and translation). This dynamic activation of the original sign transmitted to the next sign-receivers fluctuates with the demands of the situation, giving a variety of choices inside the network of the language-game’s interpretants. The effect of the interpreter’s mind has the strategy of an infinite encyclopedia (Eco 1984: 80–84). The encyclopedic function struggles to choose “good” speech-acts, but “evil” and “in-between” speech-acts can also be expressed by the interpreter’s human mind. The language-game does not, however, function as a personal message, but rather as a rule of social communication. Wittgenstein’s firm views about the philosophy of language wrestled with the puzzle-signs of what he found in the language-games, blaming, ridiculizing, and criticizing the ambiguity and contradiction of the speech-acts. Indeed, man’s and woman’s desire – and their human ability – for creating the collective tool of language-games sometimes leads to unclear or erroneous forms of personal or cross-cultural communication attached to the specifically human feeling in pseudo-semiosis.

The first part of The Blue and the Brown Books – with the editorial title Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations – was Wittgenstein’s Blue Book (1933), based on sets of short dictations in English to his class at the University of Cambridge. From 1936, these English dictations were paraphrased in Philosophical Investigations (written in German language). Wittgenstein looked extensively at the activity of “operating with signs” (BBB 1958: 16; German redraft in PI 1953: 1, rev. ed. PI 2009: 5f.)^[2] and presented in social communication the down-to-earth language-game, thus:

I will give someone the order: “fetch me six apples from the grocer,” and I will describe a way of making use of such an order: The words “six apples” are written on a piece of paper, the paper is handed to the grocer, the grocer compares the word “apple” with labels on different shelves. He finds it to agree with one of the tables, counts from 1 to the number written on the slip of paper, and for every number counted takes a fruit off the shelf and puts it in a bag. — And here you have a case of the use of words. I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. (BBB 1969: 16–17)

Wittgenstein explained the language-game of shopping, writing that:

The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which the forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. (BBB 1969: 17)

The language-game of shopping had been reduced to a child’s task of learning of the “activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent” in the “primitive” forms of life of the social (cultural) environment of visiting a greengrocer’s shop, but with the general aim of “building up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms” (BBB 1969: 17). Wittgenstein’s problem is to make the groundless language-games extend beyond a simple fairy-tale of a child’s learning objects and numbers in the adult life schooled to comprehend ideas and play specific “games” in the historical saga of man’s collective enterprise of using language. The language-games use the essential tools of a craftsman to play out a series of episodes narrated by all kinds of interpreters and receivers in various circumstances (Secondness and Firstness). This strategy marks Wittgenstein’s “universal” linguistic forms of cultural life in Peirce’s interpretants (Thirdness).

Wittgenstein appeared to follow Bloomfield’s social type of language, but taking some skepsis about the limited human knowledge (both from 1933, written in the same year as Wittgenstein’s lectures in The Blue and the Brown Books). Wittgenstein seemed to question Bloomfield’s operation of linguistic “meanings” as a “weak point in language-study,” which would “remain so until human knowledge advance[d] very far beyond its present state” (Bloomfield 1967: 140). Like Wittgenstein, Bloomfield used “some other sciences” to “resort to makeshift devices,” illustrating the “new” science by the same “apples” divided into three operations:

One is demonstration. If someone did not know the meaning of the word apple, we could instruct him by handing him an apple or pointing at an apple, and continuing, as long as he made mistakes, to handle apples and point at them, until he used the word in the conventional way. This is essentially the process by which children learn the use of speech-forms. If a questioner understood enough of our language, we could define the word apple for him by circumlocution – that is, in the manner of our dictionaries, by a roundabout speech which fitted the same situation as does the word apple, saying, for instance: “The well-known, firm-fleshed, smooth-skinned, round or oblong pome fruit of the trees of the genus Malus, varying greatly in size, shape, color, and degree of acidity”. Or else, if we knew enough of the questioner’s language, we could answer him by translation – that is, by uttering a roughly equivalent form of his language; if he were a Frenchman, for instance, we could give pomme [p℮m] as the meaning of apple. This method appears in our bilingual dictionaries. (Bloomfield 1967: 140)

Beyond the linguistic cliché of the apples, Wittgenstein agreed with Bloomfield’s distinctions, but defined them in the medium of logical notations, understandable on their own terms. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein announced the “number of primitive ideas” determined in the “propositions which the variable stands for” (TLP 1933: 5.4.76, 5.501) due to their exact sense, meaning, and construction. He subdivided the network of propositions as following:

We may distinguish 3 kinds of description: 1. Direct enumeration. In this case we can place simply its constant values instead of the variable. 2. Giving a function fx, whose values for all values of x are the propositions to be described. 3. Giving a formal law, according to which those propositions are constructed. In this case the terms of the expression in brackets are all the terms of a formal series. (TLP 1933: 5.501)

The historical and cognitive parallels between Wittgenstein and Bloomfield do deserve special study, juxtaposing de Beaugrande’s manual (1991: 58–87) with the analysis of Wittgenstein’s complete works.

As was the case for Bloomfield, Wittgenstein’s activity of “operating with signs” (BBB 1958: 16; German redraft in PI 2009: 5f.) featured the Gestalt of a cross-cultural operation in The Blue and the Brown Books (from 1933), by way of linguistic research across cultures. In order to understand human communication, dynamic rather than static tools of language are applied. New forms of name and object and new interpreters are added to the use of language, such as the game of adding time and space, word and gesture, and other contextual information inside the figure of the language-games to speculate about various interpretants and meanings. Wittgenstein offers a theoretical foundation to the dialogue with the members of a native “tribe” or the group of co-workers building a wall. In The Brown Book, their form of speech connects culture and freedom reflecting their background in a definite structure of language (BBB 1958: 77–185). In Wittgenstein’s view, the logical interpreters have turned into social workers and cultural craftsmen and artisans, mechanizing their toolbox to achieve technical results and artistic effects, operating spiritually in open-ended processes for the surrounding society. Language-games have changed into human games between work and play, between tool and joy.

Wittgenstein enjoyed examples of do-it-yourself language-games, illustrating the purposeful (pragmatic) use with the use of technical instruments. His first “engineering” example was a short story, starting as:

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (PI 2009: 11)

Wittgenstein focused on the carpenter’s use of the tools of individual or single words and their objects. He indicated their functions to justify their standard use, but without distinguishing between the different kinds of word-tools. Wittgenstein emphasized in the language-game demonstrative (ostensive) words (BBB 1958: 1) taken from the toolbox to perform their standard functions, but he also stressed the possibility of changing and modifying the use of tools to create differences within the games as mapped in its changing nature of Wittgenstein’s language-games of a semiotic (cultural) nature.

The primary account of the different experiences with the fixed sign-action of sign-and-object has now generalized into the dynamic game with different speech-acts. The semiotic forces of a language-game are, in Peirce’s terms associated by Wittgenstein’s argumentation in the complex sign, with the possible object mediating the interpretant-sign of problematic nature (Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness). Wittgenstein changed the primacy of language to focus on the secondary background, receiving elements, instances, and collections from the cultural background inside the interpretation of the linguistic language-game. Thus Wittgenstein strongly reacted against the cliché of an unchanging (static) language-game to appeal to the dynamic and elastic series of different cultural circumstances with wit, prophecy, and meditation as reflecting on his games of experiencing Firstness and Secondness.

3 General language-games

Following the lecture notes of The Blue and Brown Books, Wittgenstein also listed in the beginning of his main work, the Philosophical Investigations, the cumulative number of what he really meant by his language-games:

Giving orders, and acting on them —

Describing an object by its appearances, or by its measurements —

Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) —

Reporting an event —

Speculating about the event —

Forming and testing a hypothesis —

Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams —

Making up a story; and reading one —

Acting in a play —

Singing rounds —

Guessing riddles —

Cracking a joke; telling one —

Solving a problem in applied arithmetic —

Translating from one language into another —

Requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. (PI 2009: 23)

Wittgenstein’s alternating lyricism and irony of the language-games – such as greeting, asking a question, testing a speculation, making a confession, apologizing, lying, reading a map, telling a story, playing a card game, inventing a secret language, writing an e-mail message, or, for that matter, writing this essay – feature linguistic (speech) and non-linguistic activities of dealing semiotically with the game of language in “reality.” On the level of passing from spoken to written language, language-games transpire in gesture, the simple emotion through accent, intonation, facial expression, punctuation, as well as other cultural accessories of language. Language-games are baptized as dramatic Gestalt-forms of cultural play-acts.

The theatrical interplay between language and “reality” by different personal or professional interpreters does not always reflect the truth, but often sports with language-games as his fictional experiment, used as a tool for teaching. The organization of the two elements of games plays with social forms of collective and personal language, veering between the philosophical, the educational, and the emotional. Although the language-game “stands for” rule-governed and free alternatives of the source text, the readers face Wittgenstein’s exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize learning, discovery, or some experimental and trial-and-error methods to find an unreal target solution to the game of language (Gorlée 1994: 70–81). The first game is the purely cognitive game, such as playing chess, provided with (self-)educating rules and techniques as the evaluation of the feedback (instructions) of the game. Then comes the creative game one can freely play with language, transposing words into significant activities of all kinds of play-acting, using interactive tools in words and sentences (as we know of Wittgenstein’s own fragments of texts).

Subsequently, the language-game has become a radical experiment to work through the difficulties of the linguistic appliances to communicate with all speakers. The dynamic nature of Wittgenstein’s first language-game of shopping does not function in a social vacuum, being more than looking at the shopping list, counting the apples, or in the second example the inspection of the tools of carpentry. The elements of language and game semiotically reflect the interaction of the linear narrative structure – speech-patterns as cotext – but at the same time handle (or even manipulate) the non-linguistic and non-logical impressions and thoughts of extraneous data – such as looks, half-words, gestures, objects, and other substitutes for language in the speech of voice, vocal thrill, and punctuating marks – by copying both nonlinear and nonverbal contextual information from vocal into written language. Thus Wittgensteins’s strategy surrounds the non-performative legitimation of the gesture language. His strategy seeks consensus as agreement between men through the dialogue of the language-game. Instead with gesture speech Wittgenstein produces no certainty, but only the degree of uncertainty to believe the truth of such diverse materials of communication.

Wittgenstein’s inner and outer forms of life are interwoven in the primary nonverbal sign, with secondary meanings alongside verbal language. The meanings of the speech-patterns are no longer personal messages, but have a social and communal nature of Peirce’s Thirdness. As argued by the language-game of shopping and the carpenter’s toolbox, they must obey cultural rules, so that Wittgenstein’s symbolism of sign language can function collectively for all speakers. At the same time, they must show the experience of the so-called “naïve” interpreter to learn and visualize the forms of life in the “serious” complexities of their public behavior. The adult speech-patterns or interpretants (Thirdness) of language-game are not merely the cognitive behavior of human experience, but are rooted in our own physical reactions (Secondness) and emotional sensations (Firstness). In terms of the triadic nature of philosophy, these interpretants nourish the three different ways of cultural life, including not only in the meaning (significance) of using the words and sentences, but also in the expressiveness of the miscellaneous thoughts, drawings, gestures, punctuation, and even sounds of Wittgenstein’s literary vocabulary – including generally his artistic insights (Gorlée 2008).

In any process of a dynamic truth-searching process, the search for truth is the goal-directed (teleological) process, questioning separate and distinct, or personal and collective, forms of identity. The sociocultural identity of speech-acts will not be reduced to merely a systematic structure of naming things, in the same way as language-games move in and out of language including cultural objects and ideas. Reflecting in real life the visible action of the language-game on the surface, the deeper tendency is to communicate semiotically our ideas, intentions, and thoughts to the community of other speakers.

In Wittgenstein’s view, the language-and-culture mode of language-game closely connected “language” and “culture” together in the new compound noun, called “linguïculture” (Anderson and Gorlée 2011). This marriage of linear and rational language together with the irrational, nonlinear data of culture (and subculture) remained the essential ingredient to achieve an enduring and satisfying understanding of Wittgenstein’s language-games functioning in the framework of Peirce’s triadic semiosis. The double paradigm of linguïculture suggests the direct connective of language-and-culture to the cognitive-intentional-intuitive layer of life, thinking beyond that of the relative openness of language itself to make the language speakers captives of the deeper penetration of the cultural background information. The relation is not to the sociological world (Welt), but instead to the general semiotical Umwelt, the respective cultural milieus of the observers (interpreters) of the inward and outward sign.

4 Language-game of the builders

The version of The Brown Book is divided into two parts: Part I (BBB 1958: 77–125) and Part II (BBB 1958: 127–185). The first numbered items of Part I concern the generality of the language-game, followed by a number of language-games with practical examples. In The Brown Book, the language-game is regarded as the stable and fixed type of “brick”, although the ingredients going into it are not stable and are indefinite “bricks.” The close “bricks” reconstructing Wittgenstein’s language-games are shown by the various conjectures of the interjections (Gorlée 2015) used by the builders to understand the building blocks in Wittgenstein’s next example of language-games. This cognitive and creative game is applied to solve the correct understanding of the “building” messages of making Wittgenstein’s language-games.

Wittgenstein’s next example fabricates the language-game in a more complex activity of, once again, a fictional game. The strategy of the “complex primitive language” (PI 2009: 2) is the scenario of the language-games of building a brick wall, where the building materializes by placing the number of bricks according to the interjective keywords (or word-tools) (Gorlée 2015: 63–80). Puzzling the game with a number of confusing word-tools, Wittgenstein creates a varying response to his questions, commands, and answers, accepting to an almost uncanny degree the structure of an infinite number of groundless games of language-and-culture (Gorlée 2015: 73–75).

As a technical (that is, learned) activity embedded in a cultural model, the language-game of the builders moves linguistically away from common (Wittgenstein’s “primitive”) words like the nouns “table,” “chair,” loaf” (PI 2009: 1, 2) from the simple language-game of shopping. The new language-game emerges with the technical language-game, performed by a team of builders acting together in a team. The strategy of the “primitive” and “complete” commands (PI 2009: 2) comes from the main builders, whereas the assistant-builders place the actual bricks. Building a wall is, for Wittgenstein, more than the manual manipulation of assembling some bricks together. The labor of building a brick wall, obeying the commands, and using the material tools is no atomical action of collecting some “bricks and mortar”^[3] to build the primitive toolbox of the child’s language. Instead, it represents the building of a new structural activity – a linguistic-and-cultural life-form. Indeed, the Wittgensteinian language-game exemplifies the wonder of “linguïcultural” activity (Anderson and Gorlée 2011).

Wittgenstein’s rule of “such-and-such a call” (PI 2009: 2) must be obeyed by the action of the building to play the professional game. The semiotic adequacy of the builders’ commands – such as “Bring me a brick” (BBB 1958: 78) – are the “direct” quotes as communicative codes, which the builders name to each other during the “indirect” co-activity of the building of the wall. In other words, the quotes are the catchwords (or clues) of the builders’ language-game. The actions and reactions in the technical language-game include the traditional nouns and verbs of the action utterances used in performing the totality of this play-act. The whole game of the builders moves from separate words or pseudo-sentences to the whole utterance indicating the fragment of the teamwork, and back again. The fragments can be reduced to a shorter form, with abstraction of the words, rephrased from the long list to a shorter, and ultra-short, list. This game seems to function if the builders keep in mind the unity of linguïcultural impression and their identity of worker being part of the whole speech-act (interpretant) of the total teamwork.

Instead of the plural forms of “cubes, bricks, slabs, beams, columns,” the single form, “‘cube,’ ‘brick,’ ‘slab,’ ‘column’” (BBB 1958: 77, PI 2009: 8) is also used by the builders to point to individual tools to construct the wall. Wittgenstein also used “One slab” (BBB 1958: 83) to direct the opposition between the economical or, better, cultural terminology. The elliptical sentences in one or two words – “This slab” for instance – function as the “cultural shorthand” for the complete command ‘Bring me a brick.’ (BBB 1958: 78). The builders (and also the readers or receivers of Wittgenstein’s work) must reconstitute the missing words (imperative in this verbal action of first person personal pronoun and indefinite article) in order to make a full sentence, moving from the actual to the virtual message. There is no symmetry providing the identical meaning. If we focus on a single language-game without the teamwork of the builders, the elliptical words are not understood by the players of the language-game, but remain irrational habits in Peirce’s sense of sensations; yet now, the daily language-game immerses the players in a codification of language and paralanguage, creating an intimacy with language in new habits – Peirce’s renewed activity in “habituality” (Peirce’s habits are fully discussed in Gorlée 2016).

Eventually, the descriptive phrases can develop further and form a new model for everyday discourse in Peirce’s routine of “habituescence” (MS 930: 18), without explaining the term in his fragmentary and unpublished manuscript. After habit and habituality (Firstness and Secondness), Peirce’s habituescence in Thirdness refers to the inter-group process of habits collectively, forming the tendency or capacity toward Peirce’s natural action. Peirce stressed that the definition of habituescence into the “Third mode of Consciousness” moves away from “the formation of every acquired habit […] as constraints” of “good habits” to show the great “skill” of “natural habits” (MS 930: 18). Peirce’s habits in three stages provide the “eternal” skill for all activities of words and sentences. In unusual circumstances of emergency, the speaker does not use standard language, but can shift to non-standard forms of personal speech, ranging from vulgar to technical language, or even dialectal or foreign language (Bloomfield 1967: 42–56, 151–154). On the whole, Peirce’s natural habits are the center of Wittgenstein’s language-games (discussed in Gorlée 2015: 24–31).

The demonstrative (ostensive) word without direct identifier “this” is used to build “that” – reflecting Peirce’s linguïcultural clue-words “thisness” building “thatness” (CP: 1.341). The “random selections” (CP: 1.341) of the words “‘cube,’ ‘brick,’ ‘slab,’ ‘column’” do not work in isolation, but must be contextualized in the cultural “reality” of building the brick wall to give the commands in a loose way in the “rudimentary assertive form” (CP: 2.354) of professional speech without accurate content in themselves. This method is the same as in Wittgenstein’s pseudo-propositions turning from senseless “things” into the scale of full propositions. In the language-games, Wittgenstein spoke in technical metaphors about the “cabin of a locomotive [with] handles there, all looking more or less alike” (PI 2009: 12). Instead, one is the handle of a moving “crank” or a “switch” with “two operative positions,” a “brakelever” as in stopping the vehicle, or a “pump” moving “to and fro” (PI 2009: 12). Wittgenstein stressed that language-tools “serve to modify something” (PI 2009: 14) moving into different functions (and perhaps disfunctions or refunctions).

The linguistic categories of “universal semantic primitives” (Wierzbicka 1997: 26–27) are used in the language-games of the builders to fabricate the final logical type (Thirdness, symbol, habituescence) generating from pseudo-logical tokens (Secondness, index, habituality) and tones (Firstness, icon, habit). The secondary tones and tokens (CP: 4.158) mark the listener and reader with semiotic signals to pursue what these clues really must express in the definitive type (Thirdness, symbol) of language-games. A simple gesture, sketch, or drawing can open the varieties of language-games to all kinds of tokens and tones (BBB 1958: 79–80, 82). The quote “‘Five slabs!’” (BBB 1958: 79) will emphasize the extra-number as cultural token, while the exclamation point marks the interpreter’s meaning with an emotional tone of surprise (CP: 4.153–4.159). Wittgenstein’s “This slab!” and “Slab there!” (BBB 1958: 80) are meant as impersonal tokens forming shortened sentences or pseudo-propositions, as will happen to questions and answers. “How many slabs?” (BBB 1958: 81) has the question mark with a numeral as the reply. Another example of “saying something” and thereby “meaning something” would be the addition of a proper (personal) name (tone and token) to the commands, such as “John’s slab,” to make from the vocative clues a personal message directed at a single builder.

Beyond linguistic forms, the cultural remarks argue in Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings with contradictory and ambiguous linguistic-cultural shapes in the variety of language-games. These are employed in an examination to allow not only the production of various conjectures of a semiotic definition, but to actually apply them for solving the specific practical problems of understanding the “building” message in the determinate meaning of the general language-games. The meaning of words consists in the verbose thought-experiment in a treasure of all kinds of daily-and-technical words that come up in the pragmatic use (and disuse) of language by all kinds of language-users. The concept of meaning for later Wittgenstein had lost its straightforward referentiality of the earlier Tractatus. Moving away from the clear isomorphism of the picture idea, meaning had turned from the concrete dictionary to “signify” (PI 2009: 15) in the pages of the Philosophical Investigations the mark of an abstract tool in the diversity of the human toolbox. Finally, Wittgenstein stressed in his final writings that the pragmatic meaning of the language-game is described as a complex, elusive, semiosic entity to be vaguely understood by the interpreters (sign-receivers).

Wittgenstein only acknowledged the vagueness of the meaning of language-games in his On Certainty (OC 1969), which is particularly loaded with Peircean themes about the belief and indecision of uncertainty. Wittgenstein seemed to accept in his final years the fuzziness of the combination of certainty-and-uncertainty as the vagueness inherent in the language-games. The signification of the hypothetical and logical arguments – Wittgenstein’s true and false claims of the subjective and logical arguments of language-and-culture – represent the paradox of the false belief, the error, the falsification, the doubt, the rule, the sureness, as well as the real truth of the language-game in action (semiosis).

In my book Wittgenstein in Translation: Exploring Semiotic Signatures (Gorlée 2012, see also Gorlée 2017), I have argued that Wittgenstein’s ideas agreed with the practical belief and pseudo-final judgment (CP: 5.538–5.548) of the methodology of Peirce’s doctrine of signs. The mutual cooperation of truth and falsehood connects Peirce’s theory of fallibilism with error-bound infallibilism (Gorlée 2004: 149–233), but both of them operate in the linguïcultural sign representation of the power tool of Wittgenstein’s language-games. All this shows that the limits of human knowledge can (and cannot) bring some truth and untruth to the actual performance of Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games.