Most conversations over coffee become futile when someone in the conversation says “It depends on how you define X.” As a matter of fact, that it seems necessary, from time to time, to make that statement indicates that things were already going wrong before either of you stirred the sugar into your coffee. It’s just a matter of time before someone says “I wasn’t technically lying when I said…” or “So what you’re really saying is…” when you both know that no one was really saying anything of the sort. And then someone says, “But you just said…” and someone else says, “That’s not what I meant. I meant…” and it all goes downhill even further.
Why? Because if you have to define words that you’ve been using for the last 20 years, you’ve already lived a life of confusion.
Wittgenstein took aim at something he was already a bit skeptical about. If words are attached to objects, and objects had properties that allow it to be attached to the word, we find ourselves forever looking to generalize definitions to fit the objects we are trying to talk about – even if they don’t really fit. That’s what a definition is. It’s an attempt to describe what all the objects that use that particular word are like. Consider the word “apple.” When we want to identify something as an apple, we look for the characteristics that all apples have in common, which is it’s apple-ness (or something like that). It’s not color. There are red apples and green apples. It’s not shape. Square apples have been developed for easy shipping. It’s not taste. There are sweet and sour apples. The truth is, most of us just use the word apple for the fruits we have been told are apples. Yes, there are scientific rules that define these things but those rules have their own problems when it comes to the meaning of words. Who hasn’t heard someone declare “Tomatoes are technically a fruit” as though no one short of a PhD had encountered this truth before, and we must now re-write our shopping lists accordingly. And, even then, kids are expected to identify apples long before they know the scientific rules. How is that fair? More on language rules in a later posting.
But then we do something really strange. Even if we accept that all apples have at least one characteristic in common, we start using the word “apple” differently anyway. The apple of my eye. Adam’s apple (which seems to have nothing in common with either apples or Adam). Both the French and the Austrians, not always the best of friends, refer to potatoes as “apples of the earth.” But, you say, these are metaphors. Yes, but now we have to decide when someone is using a metaphor by (are you ready?) defining “metaphor” which was our problem to start with. And the French and Austrians are just fine with their non-metaphorical potatoes and the unscientific relationship between the apples they get from trees and the ones they get from the earth.
Now consider words like “love” or “equality” or “justice” or “friendship” or “hatred” or “stupidity.” I’ll bet you’ve had a conversation or two about those ideas that never got past the definition stage.
So what do we do? Wittgenstein says that, instead of looking for attributes for objects that you can generalize into a definition, look at how it’s used and, more importantly, who it’s being used by. Maybe a definition isn’t the best way to determine what a word means. Maybe something that might be referred to as a family resemblance might work better.
Object 1 has properties A,B and C
Object 2 has properties B,C, and D
Object 3 has properties C,D and E
Object 4 has properties D,E and F
Object 4, all by itself, has nothing in common with Object 1. But could it be that it’s relationship with Objects 2 and 3 might just give us a better insight into what Object 4 actually is and might knowing about Object 1, and its relationship with 2 and 3, help us understand what Object 4 means? The point is, there may be no central core to a word in which the meaning is located. Quite the opposite. It’s what’s happening outside the word that gives it meaning.
Now plug in the more complex words just mentioned and suddenly a conversation hung up on the definition of “love” just might be jostled free if you are willing to include the word “stupidity” in the conversation.
Now here’s the really interesting part. According to Wittgenstein, we all do this already. We bring all these relationships among words and ideas with us into a conversation. But we are frozen-terrified to let anyone know what they are. Some of that comes from being embarrassed about these relationships and some of it comes from not knowing them very well ourselves. He calls this mess of rules, grammars and meanings “language games”. Knowing who is playing what game is the secret to communication. And being a bit more open about the secret rules you’re playing by is what turns you from a incomprehensible boor into a friend.