EXPOSITION ON WITTGENSTEIN'S LANGUAGE THEORY

INTRODUCTION
The quest to provide an acceptable method through which reality could be known has been one of the contentions of some philosophers for several centuries. This dates back to the renaissance era after philosophy was liberated from the hands of theology, and science took the centre stage. The foremost contending philosophers during this period were Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei. Bacon believed strongly on the power of knowledge, because it is through it that man can conquer and dominate. But he commended the best way upon which this task can be achieved. “Bacon strongly believes … that … to be able to understand and control nature … we must employ the inductive method which is based on empirical observation of particular thing.” 1 This is because, experience is all there is for there to be an objective knowledge of reality.
Galileo took a contrary opinion on this issue of the knowledge of reality. He based his method on mathematics and deduction. This, for him, is the only way reality could be known. Owing to the high-handedness of the view of Bacon and Galileo, philosophy ended up in skepticism. This situation gave birth to Rene Descartes’ foundationalism. The basis for his foundationalism was to find certainty for philosophy. This task became paramount because the philosophical presupposition of science of his day was apparently built on shaky foundation. 2
Although Descartes was not a skeptic, but he used skepticism as a starting point so as to ascertain which method could guarantee certainty. “Hence, his strategy for finding certainty could be called methodological skepticism. Descartes’ method was to bathe everyone of his beliefs in an acid bath of doubt to see if any survived” 3 Through his method of doubt Descartes found succour on mathematical-deductive method. The method of mathematics was basically indubitable unlike the process of inductive and experience which were merely probable and deceptive. Even though he accepted mathematical method, he still subjected it to further skeptical scrutiny. This was because “Descartes … hoped to use this method (of doubt) to distinguish beliefs that were certain from those that could be doubted.” 4
In the course of doubting everything, Descartes found out he could not doubt that he was doubting. To doubt, for him was to think, and to think one must existence. At this juncture, Descartes believed that he has arrived at the only thing which is certain, and that is, that he exist – “ Cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am.” Through this philosophical rigour, Descartes believed so much in the powers of reason because through reason reality can be objectively known. Owing to the emphasis on reason over sense experience, Descartes philosophy and rationalism in general was swallowed up by dogmatism.
Edmund Husserl, overwhelmed by mathematics like his predecessor (Descartes) tried to put life once again on the quest for rigorous philosophy. Owing to the fact that Descartes’ philosophy missed the mark by only laying emphasis on metaphysics, while relegating concrete reality to the background, Husserl felt that he can put aright the flaws made by the Cartesian Foundationalism. So, in the course to establishing a solid foundation for philosophy, where objectivity of reality and philosophical truth could be sought in a clear and distinct ground, as in the methods of mathematics, Husserl formulated a method, which he felt could achieve this. This method was what he referred to as ‘phenomenology.’
Husserl maintains, especially in his early work and his master-piece on phenomenology called Ideen, that only the phenomenological approach with its specific method of bracketing, can give certitude to philosophical inquiry. Phenomenology is the guarantee to the scientificity of ontology. 5

The basic task of phenomenology, according to Husserl, was to get at reality beginning from the concrete reality. As a way of definition, Omoregbe defined Husserl’s phenomenology as “that whose aim is simply to analyze and describe experience exactly as it occurs without the prejudice of any prior assumption or presupposition. Thus the objects of phenomenology are essences understood as the meaning of a given fact of experience.” 6 In order to have a clear and distinct knowledge of reality, Husserl divided his phenomenological method into three, namely; phenomenological epoche, Eidetic reduction and transcendental reduction. In phenomenological epoche, Husserl believed that to get at the essence of reality, we must bracket all our presuppositions, beliefs and assumptions about the object which we want to know. By eidetic reduction, Husserl means the essence if a thing. At the level of phenomenological reduction, the inquirer becomes conscious of the real and essential features of the object of investigation. At the point of transcendental reduction, the world and all the objects in it now derive their existence and meaning from the transcendental ego.
As a transcendental ego, I have become a pure observer of myself …. In it I become the disinterested spectator of my natural and worldly ego and its life …. I am detached in as much as I suspend all worldly interests …. The transcendental spectator places himself above himself, and sees himself as the previously world – immersed ego. 7

In the course of investigating existential reality in a presuppositionless manner, and his claim that the transcendental reduction was the highest stage upon which the essence of reality could be known in its clarity and certainty, Husserl led philosophy into transcendental idealism.8 Owing to the inability of his predecessors to really establish a solid ground upon which philosophy could be placed, Wittgenstein (influenced with the philosophical postulations of Logical atomism of Russell and Frege) felt that the best way upon which philosophy could be carried out is on an analytic grounds, because for him, the problems which philosophy has encountered for several centuries are nothing but grammatical problems. The philosophical theories which he expounded thus, in order to advance his philosophical claims, were his Picture and Game theories, which are contained in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, respectively.

WITTGENSTEIN’S BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
“Brooding, brilliant, and enigmatic Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein …, arguably the most influential and controversial philosopher of the contemporary period,” 9 was born into the family of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein on April 26th , 1889 in Vienna, Austria. He was the youngest of the eight children of his parents, and of his four brothers, three committed suicide.
Wittgenstein’s family was one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, who was a Jew by birth and was later converted into protestanism, was one of the most successful businessmen in iron and steel industry. Owing to the influential and affluent nature of the family, the Wittgenstein’s home attracted people of culture, especially musicians, including the composer Johannes Brahms, who was a friend to the family.
In this family of flashing geniuses, Ludwig was thought to be the dullest; he had no obvious talent for music, art, poetry, or anything else. (This was only relatively true, for in mid life he learned to play the clarinet, did research on musical rhythms ….10

Wittgenstein began his educational career at home. He was tutored at home till he was fourteen. In 1903, he was sent to the Realschule at Linz, Upper Austria, a school where Adolf Hitler also attended as a student. After three successful years of his study at Linz, and owing to his interest in engineering,
“Ludwig proceeded to the Technische Hochshule in Berlin. In the spring of 1908 he went to England, where he experimented with the dynamics of Kites in Derbyshire and later enrolled into the University of Manchester as an engineering student.”11

For three years, he went into research in Acronautics, windflow, and designs for propellers and jet engines. Owing to the difficulties he encountered in his research, Wittgenstein switched from engineering and aeronautics to mathematics. His major quest on mathematics was basically to enquire into the philosophical foundations of mathematics. He also developed keen interest in logic. As a result of this, and through the advice of Gottlob Frege, he went to Cambridge to study under Bertrand Russell in 1912, beginning a life – long association with the University there, however, he discovered his time vocation and quickly demonstrated his philosophical brilliance to Russell. In his autobiography, Russell described Wittgenstein the following words: “Wittgenstein is perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating.”12 Wittgenstein studied under Russell until 1914.
When his father died in 1913, Wittgenstein inherited a fortune, which was later given away due to his new desire for a solitary and ascetic life. When the First World War broke out the next year, he voluntarily joined the Austrian Army. He fought bravely during the war. In 1918 he was captured by the Italians as a Prisoner Of War. His eight month in prison was very fruitful in that he used the period to finish his first work, ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, which was later published in 1922. After the war, Wittgenstein worked as an elementary school teacher in one of the remote areas in Austria. He also worked as a Gardener. He also played an important role in the design and construction of a house for one of his sisters.
In the late 1920s Wittgenstein engaged in intensive philosophical discussions with the Vienna circle, which developed interest in his philosophical postulations. In 1929, he retired to Cambridge to resume his philosophical career. After teaching for several years he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in 1939. At the outbreak of the Second World War in that year, and horrified by the absorption of Austria into Nazi Germany, he became a British citizen. During the war, he worked as a porter and later as a laboratory Assistant in a research project into wound shock based in Newcastle. In 1947 he finally resigned his chair and led a nomadic life for several years.
Apart from his Tractatus Logico – philosophical, Wittgenstein wrote other books, namely: Philosophical Investigation (1963) and On Certainty (1979). All these were published posthumously. Nothing much was said about the marital life of Wittgenstein, except that he was suspected of being a gay, as he spent all his life with male friends. Nevertheless, in 1949, he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer. This was an illness “he has long feared since there was a family history of death from cancer.” 13. He later died in Cambridge on April 29, 1951. “Dying alone in a garret … he said to his LandLady - tell them it’s been wonderful.”14

INFLUENCES ON WITTGENSTEIN
Every philosophical postulation has been influenced by one thought or the other and by one factor or the other. This is not far from the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s philosophical development has been based on certain influences, one of which is his father’s profession. Karl Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s father, was one of the most outstanding and influential engineers in the Austro- Hungarian Empire. He was particularly specialized in mechanical engineering. He was working with an iron and steel industry in Austria. Young Wittgenstein (Ludwig) was engrossed with this engineering profession of his father. This led him to enroll into the University of Berlin to study mechanical engineering in 1908.
Wittgenstein, after his brief stay in Berlin, later went to Manchester University for a research programme in aeronautics, designs for propeller, windflow, and so on. The difficulties which this research posed to him made him to find his answers in mathematics, but as fate may have it, he completely abandoned engineering to pursue a career in philosophy of mathematics and Logic. 15
More significant influences on the intellectual develop of Wittgenstein were the philosophical thoughts of Frege and Russell. Wittgenstein acknowledged this in the following parlance:
How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I cannot judge. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail, and therefore I give no sources, because it makes no difference to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by someone else. I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I own fore much of the stimulations of my thoughts.16

Basically, Frege influenced Wittgenstein with his philosophy of mathematics and Logic. One fundamental influence of Frege on Wittgenstein was the subjection of all propositions or sentences to truth-value. By truth-value, Frege says it is the circumstance of a sentence being true or false. The truth value of a sentence, basically, constitutes what a sentence means. To buttress this fact, Frege noted that “every assertoric sentence concerned with what its words mean is therefore to be regarded as a proper name, and its meaning, if it has one, is either the true or the false.” 17 This fact of truth-value influenced Wittgenstein a lot in his Tractatus. Re-echoing Frege’s words, Wittgenstein stated thus, “sentences can be true or false …. 18
Russell, however, had a greater impact on Wittgenstein following his philosophy of Logical Atomism. This theory basically claims that reality or what he called ‘the existing world’ is made up of facts, so, what language does is to express these facts. According to him, “when I speak of a ‘facts,’ I do not mean one of the simple things in the world; I mean that a certain thing has a certain quality, or that certain things have a certain relation.” 19. Every proposition, thus, expresses these fact. This emphasis on fact was essentially what Wittgenstein’s Tractatus tried to prove. According to Wittgenstein, the world is a totality of facts not of things. The world is determined by the facts, these facts are pictured by language. Whereas Russell noted that what constitute basic facts that represent reality are atomic facts, for Wittgenstein, it is “elementary fact,”20 a replacement of Russell’s atomic facts. Both of them mean one and the same thing.
Although Wittgenstein did not acknowledge Schopenhauer in the development of his philosophical thought, he was still influenced by Schopenhauer’s notion of solipsism. In this theory of solipsism, Schopenhauer believed that what constitute the world or reality is the subjective will of the individual. In fact, the only thing that is, is the subjective will of the individual. By definition, solipsism implies the doctrine which holds that only I exist. The only thing we can truly know is our own experience. 21 The world, thus, according to Schopenhauer is the representation of the individual subject. By this, Schopenhauer sees the world as a mental or individual representation of the mind of the individual. “This powerful claim was not far from the articulated view of the young and early Wittgenstein.”22 According to Wittgenstein, “The boundary of my language is the boundary of my world.… This thought itself shows how much truth there is in solipsism…. The world and life are one. I am my world.” 23
St. Augustine book titled ‘Confession’ influenced Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigation, that was why Wittgenstein used an excerpt from the book as a background to his postulations in his philosophical investigation. Based on that excerpt, Wittgenstein stated that “Augustine … does describe a system of communication; only not everything that we call language is this system…. Is this an appropriate description or not? The answer is: Yes, it is appropriate….”24 Amidst all the influences enunciated and elaborated above, Wittgenstein still maintain somewhat originality in the major part of his work, particularly in his philosophical investigation.

WITTGENSTEIN’S EARLY THOUGHT: THE PICTURE THEORY OF MEANING.
Wittgenstein’s early philosophical postulation was advanced in his first book, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. In this book, he strived to bring to end the problem which philosophy has been into, which is, “the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.”25 To achieve this fact he began by analyzing the relations of language to the world, showing the boundaries of what can be said intelligibly or clearly, and how thought can be clarified in its simplest form. He upheld to this claim because he believed that what must be said must be said clearly and when we cannot clear say anything the best thing is to stay silent. All these he established in his first theory of meaning, usually referred to as the picture theory.
Basically, Wittgenstein began his picture theory by noting that the world is all that is to say, the only thing that exist is the empirical and experiential reality. He also noted that what constitute the world are facts and not things.
The world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. For the totality of facts determine all that is the case, and also all that is not the case. The facts in logical space are the world. The world can be broken down into facts.26

These facts which constitute reality are broken into elementary facts. Wittgenstein, however, defined elementary facts as the combinations of objects. Emphatically, he stated that there is nothing accidental in logic, because if something can be a constituent of elementary facts, it must also include within itself the possibility of elementary facts. In other words, “if I know an object, I also know all the possibilities of its occurrence in elementary facts.”27 What makes it possible for an object to be part of an elementary fact is the form of the object. So, it could be said that objects are the substance of the world.
Furthermore, Wittgenstein went on to note that the way a fact is made is dependent on the structure of its elementary facts. Since the world is the totality of all the elementary facts, it thus determines those elementary facts which are not in existence. “The existence and nonexistence of elementary facts is reality.”28 So, the world is the sum total of reality.
Wittgenstein, however, stated that the structure of language corresponds to the structure of reality, and it is pictured for us by language. A sentence is a model of reality as we think it is. A sentence, basically pictures reality because if it is understood, then the fact which it represents or pictures is thus known. “A sentence determines reality to the degree that one only needs to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to it and nothing more to make it agree with reality.” 29 He also added that a sentence or language in general constitutes reality “with the help of logical scaffolding, so that one can actually see in the sentence all the logical features of reality if it is true…. One understands the sentence if one understands its expression.”30
When language pictures reality, it pictures is in their elementary facts. If the elementary proposition is true then the elementary facts exist, and if the elementary proposition is false, the elementary facts does not exist.31 In addition, Wittgenstein went on to say that elementary proposition provides the foundation to understanding other kinds of proposition. Elementary proposition could be tautologous or empirical. When it pictures mathematical approve facts, it is tantologous, but when it pictures concrete facts, it is empirical. The truth or falsity of a proposition could be based on how it pictures reality both in its tautologous and existential form. So, any proposition that is not classified under any of the above cannot be said to be true. That is to say that metaphysical and ethical propositions, since they are neither tautologous nor empirical, they are thus, false and apparently nonsensical. They cannot be put into words or propositions because they are transcendent.32 He also noted that metaphysical postulations failed to give any meaning to certain signs in their sentences.
To wrap up his philosophical postulations in his Tractatus, Wittgenstein posited that the only right method for every philosophical investigation is to say nothing except that which can be said with the usage of sentences of natural sciences. This is because, according to him, to understand whatever someone has said, one must understand the sentences. It is only through this we can really capture correctly the reality which the sentences tried to picture.

WITTGENSTEIN’S LATER THOUGHT: THE GAME THEORY OF MEANING.
About 1933 Wittgenstein experienced what might be called an Intellectual break through that led to a philosophical about-face. The most basic assumption of his great work now seemed to him wrong, not just slightly wrong, but entirely wrong. He under went a complete reaction against his own ideas as well as against the Logical atomism and guruship of his mentor, Bertrand Russell.33

Having rejected his early philosophical thought in his Tractatus as non-sensical, Wittgenstein gave a new philosophical postulation as a replacement to his previous thought. This new thought he expounded in his book titled ‘Philosophical Investigation’.
The basic thought in Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigation is his game theory of meaning. In this theory, Wittgenstein laid much emphasis on how language is used in our everyday life. He likened language to tools in a toolbox. According to him, “think of the tools in a toolbox; there is a hammer, pliers a saw, a screw driver, a mile, a glue pot, glue, nails and screws. – The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.”34
Accordingly, Wittgenstein asserted that every language is like a game. As every game has a rule which governs how it is to be played so also language. Wittgenstein made it glaring that Wittgenstein outlined several usages of language, for instance;
Giving orders, and obeying them – Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements…. Reporting an event-speculating about an event – forming and testing hypothesis…. Making up a story and reading it …. Translating from one language into another – Asking, thanking, curing, greeting, praying. 35

Accordingly Wittgenstein classified the ways in which languages are used under the term ‘Language-Game’. According to him, “… the term language-game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”36 He also made it glaring that just as there are different kinds of games with distinct rules so also, there are different kinds of languages with rules governing them. He, however, noted that although we have games like card, board, ball, Olympic, and so on, there must be something common to all these which make them to be called ‘games’. Although there is no visible denominator of the above things which are called games, they only have similarities or relationships. Some of the similarities he identified are that in each of the games, they are played by skill and luck, there is always winning and losing, there is amusement or entertainment, and so on. For him, there is no better to characterize these similarities than family resemblances; for the various resemblances between of a family; build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. over lap and crisscross in the same way. “And I shall say: ‘game’ form family.37
As there are similarities in game so also there are similarities in language that is why they are called language. Since there is no game which is private so also there is no private language. Every word has meaning within the context in which it is used in language. To understand how a word is used in language, however, requires understanding the rules of that particular language. Our knowledge of anything, thus, is how it is expressed in our everyday usage of language.
Wittgenstein further stated that it is non-sensible to put all the various usage of language into one absolute structure as he did in the Tractatus. Language cannot be understood from its abstract natures because to say that language pictures reality is to make a metaphysical assertion. The main task of language is
….to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use …. When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge; “being, object, “” I, “” proposition, “name” – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?38

From the above, Wittgenstein clearly pointed out the basic function of philosophy as it concerns our everyday use of language. For him, philosophy should never in any way interfere with the actual use of language nor claim any foundation for it. Philosophy neither gives us any absolute knowledge of the world nor does it add new knowledge to what is already known. The basic task of philosophy is to describe how we use language in our everyday activity, that is to say, “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.”39 What this means is that philosophy helps in describing our everyday use of language so as to end the misuse of language.

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