I find it difficult to understand Monk's interpretation of W concerning Language Games. I quote Marie McGinn below; to me it's clearer and more convincing.
Wittgenstein's concept of a language game is clearly to be set over and against the idea of language as a system of meaningful signs that can be considered in abstraction from its actual employment. Instead of approaching language as a system of signs with meaning we are prompted to thing about it in situ, embedded in the lives of those who speak it. The tendency to isolate language, or abstract it from the context in which it ordinarily lives, is connected with our adopting a theoretical attitude towards it, and with our urge to explain how these mere signs (mere marks) can acquire their extraordinary power to mean or represent something. Wittgenstein's aim is to show us that in this act of abstraction we turn our backs on everything that is essential to the actual functioning of language; it is our act of abstracting language from its employment within our ordinary lives that turns it into something dead, whose ability to represent now cries out for explanation. the sense of a need to explain how language (conceived as a set of symbols) has the magical power to represent the world is thus connected with our failure to look at it where it actually functions. Wittgenstein does not set out to satisfy our sense of a need for a theory of representation (a theory that explains how a dead sign acquires meaning) but to dispel this sense of a need through getting us to look at language where it is actually doing work, and where we can see its essence fully displayed. In directing us, through the concept of a language game, to "the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not to some non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm (PI 108), Wittgenstein hopes gradually to bring us to see that "nothing out of the ordinary is involved" (PI 94), that everything that we need to understand the essence of language "already lies open to view" (PI 126).
Hi Simon - an initial response:
McGinn is easier to understand than Monk. But that is not all good. I think she is saying the same as Monk, if you abstract the basic ideas, but he offers many examples, quotations etc which perhaps give us the flavour of W more than McGinn does. And perhaps the flavour is extremely important. But Monk is a bit of a mess to read on language games. In a sense, McGinn is offering us an anti-theory, which is a kind of theory. No doubt W could have summarised his views as neatly as she does, if he had wanted to, but he didn't do so, apparently.
I suffer from a lack of deep exposure to "the idea of language as a system of meaningful signs that can be considered in abstraction from its actual employment", in other words I am not deeply familiar with the view that W is being described as criticizing. However, one way i feel uneasy is about the idea in McGinn that "it is our act of abstracting language from its employment within our ordinary lives that turns it into something dead." I am under the impression that a lot of the attitude to language that is being criticized is about language not being used in an 'ordinary' way. It is true that that attitude ignored vast stretches of language in its generalizations, which was a mistake. Nonetheless, I wonder if it nonetheless had something valid in its aims.
From another angle, some language which has been, in another sense, abstracted from its ordinary employment and used, say, in poetry, is not dead. [I am not sure if this point is relevant.]
I find the list of activities 'in' which there is a multiplicity of language games [Monk p82] rich and suggestive, but it is a list of activities which does not include philosophy, as far as I can see. I am not sure how this ties up with the Mary Midgley view of philosophy as sorting out 'plumbing problems' with concepts which I thought she derived from W. Perhaps all would be clearer with more reading of what W actually said,rather than summaries.
I really like the idea of a 'craving for generality' which is what McGinn is referring to but strangely does not mention. But I found W's explanations of it extremely odd and almost incomprehensible. Surely generality gives power, and this craving is a craving for power?
