Words like “apple” are pretty easy to pin down. You can find something in reality that corresponds to the word and, even if you use it figuratively, you can trace the metaphors or the figures of speech back to an actual apple in one way or the other. Wittgenstein wouldn’t let you off so easy even with a word like “apple”, but, for most people, not paying attention to Wittgenstein isn’t that hard to do. However, consider a word like “hello.” It’s awfully hard to know what it actually means when you consider it all by itself. You can use it to break the silence when you pick up the phone. You can use it to announce your presence or to get someone’s attention. You can use it to signal your willingness to listen to someone when you meet someone in the hallway. You can use it to indicate you just said something sarcastically (as if just being a dick isn’t making that clear enough). You can use it as a simple greeting to indicate the pleasure you feel at seeing someone. A simple rising or falling of the voice changes it dramatically. So does punctuation. “Hello” doesn’t seem to do much of anything in some situations, but in others in prevents the kind of confused silence that throws even simple relationships into chaos. What would happen if someone picked up the phone and said nothing at all? Someone would eventually say “Hello?”
And yet, for all the ways people use “hello”, some of them even contradictory, we seem to have no trouble understanding the word. Wittgenstein chocks this up to language games – a complicated set of rules, assumptions, experiences and universal clichés that we bring to every word we use. This is more than what we have come to know as “baggage.” When we talk with someone, there is not only a matter of a long history that influences what we say. There is a tacit assumption that the person we are talking to will, or in the case of a lie, will not, understand what we are actually getting at. Let’s say Person A says “You never listen to anything I say.” The usual response that will come from Person B? “Yes I do. Just last Tuesday you asked me to feed the dog and what did I do right away?” This is a complex exchange. Person B answers like Person A is playing the “let’s get down to the facts” game. But person A is really playing the “please pay attention to me” game. All by itself, this is already a recipe for a misunderstanding, but there is a lot more going on in this exchange.
Person A knows he’s using a hyperbole. “You never listen to anything I say.”
Person B knows this too because the hyperbole game is one of the oldest in the book. But she looks to short circuit the attack with an accusation of ingratitude aimed at Person A . “Just last Tuesday…”
Person A knows instantly that Person B is playing the trump card that is allowed by the rules associated with this much more complex game. But how does he know this? Partly because both have played the “You don’t even care enough to try and understand me” game a hundred times before and they both know the rules.
So Person A plays the only card he can in this game and says something like “You know what I mean.” in an attempt to let person B knows she’s as insensitive and uncaring as the original hyperbole suggests.
Wittgenstein gives a partial list of the ways one might use a sentence. Telling a joke, describing an object, explaining an event, praying, making up a story, and the puzzling reporting-the-results-of-an-experiment-using-tables-and-diagrams. His point is that the same words and grammar can be used to say wildly different things. Definitions are not very useful. Knowing the rules everyone is playing by is the much larger part of communication. Knowing the rules makes it possible to play the game. Tackling your opponent in a football game is expected, and even admired. Doing exactly the same thing while bowling seems a little out of place.
Put language games inside the much larger context of what Wittgenstein calls a “form of life” and you have communication. A form of life is the shared human experience, either in small groups or the one used by all seven billion of us that we bring to a relationship and by which everything we do or say is understood. This makes it possible for us to at least start to understand things that we, at face value, can’t make either heads or tails of.
This means you can’t use words willy nilly just because you want them to mean something different. In a rare moment of absolute clarity, Wittgenstein writes, “The use of a word needs a justification that everyone understands.” You can’t use the word “beneficial” to describe something that hurts a lot of people.
Sadly, people do this all the time. How do they get away with it? By changing the definition of a word. And “defining” is exactly what we never should have started doing to words in the first place.