The Later Wittgenstein: Meaning as Use and Language Games

Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929 and, over the following two decades, developed a body of ideas that repudiated central tenets of the Tractatus, delivered mainly through lectures and unpublished manuscripts and dictations, notably the "Blue Book" and "Brown Book" (dictated to students in 1933–1935) and the Philosophical Investigations, compiled from work spanning roughly 1936 to 1949 and published posthumously in 1953, two years after his death, by his literary executors G.E.M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees, and G.H. von Wright. Where the Tractatus had modeled meaning on a static picture-relation between an isolated proposition and a possible fact, the Investigations opens (section 1) by quoting and criticizing Augustine's Confessions on how children learn language by simple ostensive association of words with objects, using this "Augustinian picture" as a foil for a fundamentally different account: that the meaning of a word is, for a very large class of cases, constituted by its use in the language (Investigations, §43), rather than by some object, mental image, or abstract entity it names or pictures.