Abstract

Wittgenstein comes up with his model simply through starting with the assumption that language can be an accurate picture of the world, and realizing the failings of that idea. This makes him a rather odd outsider in the sociology and politics of modern philosophy. He’s a trained engineer. A soldier. An architect. A logician (including being the guy who invented Truth tables for logic). In other words, a total geek. He’s still part of the analytic tradition, dismissed and rejected by many in the continental tradition. But he ends up saying the kind of things that drive your average conservative culture warrior harrumphing about \"post-modernism\" and \"relativism\" up the wall. Simply because he’s thought about it a lot. The other thing that’s striking is how much he is an \"anti-philosopher\". Always running away from philosophy to do other things in his life. And his work is often intended as \"therapeutic\" not trying to \"solve\" philosophical problems so much as \"cure\" us of worrying about them. He emphasizes that philosophical \"problems\" are often just misuses and misunderstandings of words rather than deeper issues. In his first philosophy, many problems come from us not understanding the meaning of the words well enough. If only we could pin them down better, the problems would disappear. In his second, the fact that we have a word for something doesn’t mean that the world really has that thing. And many philosophical problems, he asserts, are nothing but trying to take words that have a \"function\" in a particular context and abstract them out and using them in a different context where they have no useful function.