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In thePhilosophical Investigations Wittgenstein rejects this oversimplification andargues the opposite $ that language is a vast collection of different activitieseach with its own logic. What the theory of the Tractatus offers in effect is abadly distorted view of language. Wittgenstein is there committed to saying thatlanguage is the sum total of propositions, where by %propositions& he means whatis asserted by declarative sentences like %the table is brown&, %it is raining&,that isstatements of fact. But to think that language is employed exclusively to makestatements is to ignore a host of other uses of language, such as questioning,commanding, exhorting, warning, promising, and much else besides. None ofthese uses can be explained in terms of the Tractatus's account of languagestructure and the way sense attaches to propositions by means of the picturingrelation.

Wittgenstein goes on in the Grammar to investigate the crucial notions ofthinking and understanding themselves, doing so in ways which closelyanticipate the Investigations, particularly in his arguing that there are manydifferent kinds of understanding, linked not by their common possession of a setof essential or defining characteristics but by a general relationship of similaritywhich he calls family resemblance. This concept also plays an important role inthe Investigations. It appears first in the Grammar, and then more explicitly in

The Blue Book. In this latter there is another significant development for the laterphilosophy and in particular the theory of meaning as use: Wittgenstein says thatinstead of asking, What is the meaning of a word? we should ask, What is it toexplain the meaning of a word? How is the use of a word learned?

if we had to name anything as the life of the sign, we shouldhave to say that it was its use

A strikingfeature of the transitional works is that the topics they address are very muchthose of the Tractatus, the proposition and its sense foremost among them, and

this remains true throughout the later work; but increasingly there appears,together with these concerns and as a necessary adjunct of Wittgenstein's newway of dealing with them, discussion of psychological concepts such asunderstanding, intending, experiencing, and others. The reasons why willbecome apparent shortly.

Thepicturing relation itself rests, at bottom, on a denotative link between names andobjects; names mean objects. The argument of the Investigations is based onan explicit rejection of this view. Here Wittgenstein says that there is not one

logic of language, but many; language has no single essence, but is a vastcollection of different practices each with its own logic. Meaning does not cons

istin the denoting relation between words and things or in a picturing relationbetween propositions and facts; rather, the meaning of an expression is its usein the multiplicity of practices which go to make up language. Moreover,language is not something complete and autonomous which can be investigatedindependently of other considerations, for language is woven into all humanactivities and behaviour, and accordingly our many different uses of it are givencontent and significance by our practical affairs, our work, our dealings with one

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another and with the world we inhabit a language, in short, is part of the fabricof an inclusive form of life.

This harks back to the Tractatus's description of philosophy aselucidation 2 another case of continuity between Wittgenstein's early and lateroutlooks 2 but in the Investigations the method is intimately connected with theviews advanced, in that the content of those views just is, in a sense, thatmethod at work: for what Wittgenstein's remarks about method come down to isthe claim that in philosophy we should not seek to explain but only to describe(explaining amounts to constructing further theories), for we are not trying todiscover new information but, quite differently, to organize properly 2 and by sodoing to make ourselves understand properly 2 what we already know about ourlanguage and thought.What

What lies open to view#, Wittgenstein says, is the fact that language is not oneuniform thing but a host of different activities. We use language to describe,report, inform, affirm, deny, speculate, give orders, ask questions, tell stories,playact, sing, guess riddles, make jokes, solve problems, translate, request,thank, greet, curse, pray, warn, reminisce, express emotions, and much elsebesides (compare especially P 23 and, for example, P 27, 180, 288, 654). All

these different activities Wittgenstein calls language-games#. Earlier, in TheBrown Book, he had used this notion to mean a simplified fragment of language,inspection of which tells us something about the nature of language proper. Inthe Investigations the label takes on a more general signification; it means anyofthe many and various language-using activities we engage in: the term:language-game; is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking oflanguage is part of an activity, or of a form of life#

Consider & the proceedings we call games. I mean board-games,cardgames, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common tothem all? ) Don't say: There must be something common or they wouldnot all be called +games,, but look and see whether there is something

common to all, for if you look at them you will not see something that is incommon to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them atthat & And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated networkof similarities overlapping and criss-crossing & I can think of no betterexpression to characterize these similarities than family resemblances; forthe various resemblances between members of a family: build, features,colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc., overlap and criss-cross in thesame way. ) And I shall say: games form a family. (P 66)7)

Instead of producing something common to all that we calllanguage, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in commonwhich makes us use the same word for all, ) but that they are related to oneanother in many different ways

the meaning of a word is its use in the language

The model adopted by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus todescribe the normative character of language was that of a calculus, that

In the case of

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language the outcome is meaning: one understands the meaning of anexpression when one has mastery of the rules for its use. This conceptionWittgenstein does not deny in the Investigations, of course, for the laterphilosophy turns on it; what he denies is that the rules in question form a single,rigid underlying system and, even more importantly, that they are in some wayindependent of us, as the Tractatus had implied. In other words, Wittgensteinrejects the notion of a calculus and replaces it with that of a language-game: inthe Tractatus there is a single, strictly uniform calculus underlying the wholeoflanguage; in the Investigations there are many different language-games whose&grammars' lie open to inspection.

Rule-following is not a mysterious innerprocess of grasping something like a calculus which objectively imposesstandards of correctness; rather, it is a practice embedded in the customs andagreements of a community and as such is essentially public. RulesIn