Philosophy and pragmatics: A language-game with Ludwig Wittgenstein

The major objective of the present project is a critical assessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language use in view of the claims of modern holistic, non-Cartesian pragmatics. The most important of Wittgenstein's ideas discussed in this paper are the following: language-games, rule-following, family resemblance, forms of life, the inner versus outer dichotomy, meaning as use, grammar and grammatical rules, the private language argument, and essentialism. In addition, we consider Wittgenstein's stand on the issue of Cartesian dualism, the innateness hypothesis, as well as his account of holism and the problem of communicative certainty versus uncertainty. Finally, this article evaluates Wittgenstein as (1) a pragmatician, (2) an anti-mentalist/anti-cognitivist and social constructionist, and (3) a holist in his approach to pragmatics. New ideas suggested in the paper include ‘language-game certainty,’ the gradability of rules, the overruling of rules, multiple articulation of the linguistic sign, among others.