Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889–1951)

Austrian philosopher. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) postulated the ‘picture theory’ of language: that words represent things according to social agreement. He subsequently rejected this idea, and developed the idea that usage was more important than convention.

The picture theory said that it must be possible to break down a sentence into ‘atomic propositions’ whose elements stand for elements of the real world. After he rejected this idea, his later philosophy developed a quite different, anthropological view of language: words are used according to different rules in a variety of human activities – different ‘language games’ are played with them. The traditional philosophical problems arise through the assumption that words (like ‘exist’ in the sentence ‘Physical objects do not really exist’) carry a fixed meaning with them, independent of context.

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna and studied in the UK at Cambridge, where he taught in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming professor 1939. His Philosophical Investigations 1953 and On Certainty 1969 were published posthumously.