Who Was Ludwig Wittgenstein and Why Does He Keep Following Me Around?

Wittgenstein was a philosopher who made a lot of waves in the forties and fifties that are still felt today. He focused on solving the classic problems of philosophy using an analysis of the language of those "problems".

Wittgenstein shewed [archaic english spelling] how the act of using language is analogous to playing a series of games. In these language games we play, the meaning of a word can only be determined by how it is used. Problems in philosophy arise when two or more similar-but-distinct language games get all jakered up together.

An easy example is the old question posed by Bishop Berkeley, "If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?" (He was playing this particular game to argue for the existence of god PS.) Here the whole thing is sort of an obvious canard, in that it hinges upon how the word "sound" is used. Berkeley was using the word in a way that was different from how it is normally used. It was almost like he was using lingo.

Wittgenstein's method would include conducting an investigation into all the different ways the word "sound" was used. He would walkaround it over and over and get a perspicacious view of it. He could then percieve that Berkeley's use of the word amounted to a kind of sleight of hand.

In this way he managed to largely dismantle the entire enterprise of philosophy. You don't hear much about the philosophers these days. These days philosophy is all about how to evaluate arguements. But no one's actually making any arguaments. I mean, people used to be really worried about wether we exist or not. Nobody's worried about that anymore. The problems of philosophy largely just dried up and blew away, and it was Wittgenstein doing a lot of the blowing. It was like he gave philosophy a huge chiropractic adjustment/really good Rolfing sesh.

So god bless Ludwig Wittgenstein for being a language pioneer and one of the patron saints of the Language Destandardization movement. In pareticular we appreciate his observation that a word's meaning is in its use. We here at Destandardize Language would shoehorn spelling inthere too somehow, couldn't agree more, and we say use them and spell them however you want, however you want....