Introspections on Wittgenstein and real life situations

After reading the first half of Philosophical Investigations, a lot of the ideas stuck with me and I started thinking about how meaning relates to words and how we communicate every day. A lot of his ideas seem obvious now but that’s what makes them good to me.

After summer I noticed I’ve become a lot sharper than before noticing the flow of conversations and following what the different parties are discussing.

I have two friends whose world models are different, which leads to different communication styles. It is always entertaining to watch them discuss something or argue. I remember distinctly we were talking and let’s call them P1 and P2. P1 told me something and used a word not how it’s usually used. I understood immediately what he meant, but he didn’t know that’s not how it’s used. So P2 immediately reacted and I knew exactly he took it as the conventional meaning. I interjected and started explaining to both by saying to P1 that’s not how the word is used and to P2 what he actually meant.

I started noticing a lot of similar situations where I immediately see the disconnect.

The family resemblance idea and realizing we can’t have fixed definitions for certain things is a lot of help. Sometimes the best thing we can do is to use different concepts to draw an image of what we want to describe.

I must note I found myself careful when I use relative words like: good, bad,… . As different people have different axioms they use, and using these relative words would just cause confusion.

I want to end this with one Wittgenstein quote:

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations