Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist view of meaning attacks the scientific and mathematical model of language that has dominated philosophy since Descartes and Hume—a model that lies at the heart of modern analytic philosophy. Colin McGinn and Thomas Hurka both claim, however, that Bernard Suits has shown that “game” indeed has a simple essence and that therefore Wittgenstein is wrong when he famously claims that there is no feature common to all games. This paper argues that both Hurka and McGuinn are wrong, and that so far no one, including Suits, has produced a common element to all games. Furthermore, we argue that Hurka, Suits and McGuinn are mistaken, and that Wittgenstein is right, about the nature of definitions and, more generally, what it means for language to mean something. Their common mistake leads to a significant misunderstanding of Wittgenstein’s views on meaning. They wrongly think Wittgenstein is “anti-definitional” when in fact much of his Philosophical Investigations focuses on what definitions are and why they are important. The claim that Wittgenstein is anti-definitional is rooted in their too narrow (and in Suits’s case, question-begging) idea of what a definition must be. What they fail to notice is that the meanings of many words lack clear boundaries. Wittgenstein is no subjectivist, however; he argues, instead, that the “family resemblance” model of definitions is a perfectly appropriate alternative to the quasi-scientific approach—an approach which assumes that each word is capable of a precise, essentialist definition.