The Meaning of a Word

Wittgenstein's insight into language and the pilgrimage I took in my younger years when words ceased to mean anything

"Philosophers very often talk about investigating, analysing, the meaning of words. But let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there can be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

In my twenties, I had an existential crisis. I lost faith in any capacity to communicate with words. It seemed to me that there were no guarantees that a sentence I uttered would be taken in the sense I intended and - worse - it felt as if it was far more likely that misunderstandings would result from any sincere attempt to communicate, since it was unavoidable that everyone had their own different meanings for every word. So, with a flair for classical drama that was far from accidental, I went hitch-hiking for forty days and forty nights, to try and rediscover some faith in the human condition. It was an opportunity to visit various friends of mine who I had met at university but were now doing doctorates in different places in the United Kingdom, and it was the first time that I took on the role of itinerant philosopher.

It was in London that I was introduced to someone - alas, I cannot remember her name or who introduced us - who proposed a simple and pragmatic way of bypassing my problem. With an admirable skill at listening (a much undervalued practice), she contemplated the nature of my problem in the terms that I had expressed it. Her solution was to propose that I approach every conversation with the intent to use the other person’s definitions of the terms being used. She had recognised that my dilemma revolved around there being no adequate way of negotiating whose definition was ‘correct’ - and as such, I could avoid the problem by always accepting the other person’s definition.

It was a few years later, in a bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, that I first stumbled upon the thoughts of the brilliant yet deeply troubled philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In notebooks that would lead to what would be called his ‘philosophical investigations’, he reflected upon the way that words were used to signal specific intentions. He imagines a pair of builders working on a project, and that when one calls out ‘brick’, ‘column’, or ‘slab’, the other hands them the relevant object. From this simplified thought experiment, Wittgenstein probes the way we use language, and concludes in a later collection of his thoughts that the meaning of a word can be defined by the way that it is used in the language - that meaning is usage.

This idea - that the meaning of a word is how it is used - is one of the ground-breaking realisations in Wittgenstein’s later work, leading to the concept of a ‘language-game’, which has been greatly discussed (and abused) ever since. The builder’s game is the context by which a certain set of words take up their meaning, but our communication is infused with myriad such games, each of which has its own terms that take their meaning from the role they have within the game. The counsel of my existential saviour in London can be understood as the suggestion to always ensure you are playing the game of the person you are talking to, and never trying to force them to play your own game.

Her advice has served me well, and Wittgenstein’s insight has also been a great blessing. Today, the idea of being reduced to paralysing doubt by our problems in communicating is unthinkable to me - rather, I am always acutely aware of the games that we are playing and the roles being played by the words we are using within those games. All too often, we go awry precisely because we fail to recognise not only the different games others are playing with language, but also that even within a single conversation, our own words may be taking part in very different games...