Michael: Alright Kevin, before we dive in, let's play a quick game. I'll say a famous philosopher, you give me their imaginary self-help book title. Ready? Plato. Kevin: Easy. The Cave You Fear to Leave Holds the Shadows You Love. Michael: Ooh, deep. Okay, Nietzsche. Kevin: That Which Does Not Kill Me Is Probably Just Postponing the Inevitable: A Guide to Existential Dread. Michael: That is bleak. I love it. Last one, the man of the hour: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Kevin: Oh, that’s the final boss. His would be titled: How to Win Arguments by Proving Language Itself Is Broken, and Other Fun Party Tricks. Michael: That is hilariously, and surprisingly, not far off. He’s got this reputation for being impossibly dense, the kind of philosopher people name-drop to sound smart. But the book we’re talking about today, Philosophical Investigations, is actually trying to do the opposite. It’s trying to make things simpler. Kevin: Simpler? From Wittgenstein? That feels like a contradiction. This is the guy who basically defined a whole era of 20th-century philosophy. Michael: Exactly. And what makes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s story so compelling is that he did it twice. He wrote a hugely influential first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was all about logic and rigid structure. Then, years later, he effectively wrote Philosophical Investigations to show why his first book was wrong. Kevin: Wait, hold on. He became famous for one thing, and then dedicated the rest of his life to tearing it down? That takes some serious intellectual courage. Or he was just very good at arguing with himself. Michael: A bit of both, probably. And that epic intellectual reversal, published after he died in 1953, all starts by attacking an idea about language so fundamental, so baked into our thinking, that we almost never even notice it’s there.

Kevin: What idea is that? When I think of language, I think of words pointing to things. I say ‘cup,’ you picture a cup. Seems pretty straightforward. Michael: That’s it exactly. That’s the starting point. Wittgenstein pulls this idea from the writings of St. Augustine, this picture of how a child learns language. An adult points to an object, says its name, and the child makes the connection. A word is a label. A sentence is a string of labels. Kevin: Okay, but… isn’t that how we learn? I mean, that’s how I taught my toddler what a ‘dog’ is. I pointed at dogs and said ‘dog.’ What’s the problem? Michael: The problem is that this simple model is like a key that only opens one door, but we try to use it on the entire house. It works fine for simple nouns. ‘Dog,’ ‘table,’ ‘chair.’ But what about the word ‘hello’? What object does that name? Or ‘but’? Or ‘maybe’? Kevin: Huh. Right. They don’t name anything. They’re… doing something else. Michael: They’re doing something else! And that’s the crack in the foundation. Wittgenstein gives this great, simple example. Imagine I send you to the store with a shopping list that just says: "five red apples." Kevin: Okay, I’m with you. I go to the store. Michael: Now, think about what you actually do. To understand "apples," you might go to the fruit section. To understand "red," you might look at a color chart or compare the apples to other red things. To understand "five," you have to perform an action: you have to count. One, two, three, four, five. Kevin: Wow, okay. I never thought about it like that. Understanding that simple phrase isn’t just about knowing names. It’s about knowing how to perform a whole series of actions. Counting, comparing, locating. It's a procedure. Michael: It’s a procedure! The Augustinian picture of language, the simple naming theory, has no room for that. It can't explain it. It assumes all words work like the word ‘apple,’ when in reality, most of our language works like ‘five’ or ‘red.’ It’s tied to doing things. Kevin: So the big mistake is taking a small part of language—naming concrete objects—and creating a universal theory from it. We’re using a children’s picture book model to explain a supercomputer. Michael: That’s a perfect way to put it. We get enchanted by this simple picture, and according to Wittgenstein, that enchantment is the source of countless philosophical problems. When philosophers ask "What is Knowledge?" or "What is Justice?", they are often treating these words as if they must name some single, pure ‘thing,’ like ‘apple’ names a fruit. Kevin: And they spend centuries searching for this one essential thing that isn't there, because the word doesn't work that way in the first place. They're asking the wrong kind of question. Michael: Precisely. They've been trapped by a primitive picture of language. And Wittgenstein’s solution was to throw out the picture entirely.

Kevin: So if meaning isn't about naming, what is it? Where does it come from? Michael: This leads us to his most famous statement, the heart of the entire book. He says: "For a large class of cases… the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Kevin: Its use. What does that actually mean? Michael: He asks us to imagine language not as a dictionary, but as a toolbox. Think about a toolbox. You have a hammer, a screwdriver, a wrench, a measuring tape, some glue. Kevin: Okay, got it. Michael: Are they all the same? No. Do they have one single, essential function? No. But we call them all ‘tools.’ Their meaning, their identity as a tool, comes from what you do with them. You hammer with a hammer, you measure with a tape. Their function is their meaning. Wittgenstein says words are the same. The words ‘hello,’ ‘help,’ ‘water,’ and ‘wow’ are as different from each other as a hammer is from glue. Kevin: That’s a great analogy. You’d never try to turn a screw with a hammer, even though they’re both tools. And you wouldn’t use the word ‘ouch’ to ask for a glass of water. Their meaning is defined by the job they do in a specific situation. Michael: Exactly. And to make this crystal clear, he introduces another key concept: the ‘language-game.’ He asks us to imagine a very primitive language, used by two builders on a construction site. Let's call them Builder A and Assistant B. Kevin: I like this. A philosophical sitcom. Michael: Their language consists of only four words: ‘block,’ ‘pillar,’ ‘slab,’ ‘beam.’ That’s it. Builder A shouts "Slab!" and Assistant B goes and gets the stone we call a slab and brings it over. A shouts "Block!", B brings a block. Kevin: So in that world, the word ‘slab’ doesn't just mean the object. It means the entire activity: ‘Bring me a slab.’ The meaning is the action, the context, the whole game they are playing. Michael: You’ve got it. That entire system of communication—the words and the actions they are woven into—is a language-game. And our real, complex language isn't one giant system, but a vast city of overlapping language-games. There’s the language-game of telling a joke, of giving a scientific report, of asking for directions, of praying, of comforting a friend. Kevin: And the rules change depending on the game. The word ‘sick’ in the language-game of talking to your doctor means something very different from the word ‘sick’ in the language-game of watching a skateboarder land a trick. Michael: Perfectly said. And this is where he connects it to an even bigger idea, the ‘form of life.’ He says, "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life." These games aren't abstract; they are part of the fabric of what we do as human beings. Our language is inseparable from our practices, our culture, our shared existence. Kevin: That’s why he said if a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him. The lion’s form of life—hunting, sleeping, being a lion—is so alien to ours that its words would have no shared context for us. We wouldn't be playing the same game. Michael: Exactly. So meaning isn't some mystical property attached to a word. It's public. It's observable. It's rooted in the shared, practical world of what we do together.

Kevin: Okay, this is all intellectually fascinating. Dismantling language, rebuilding it as a series of games… but why does it matter to anyone who isn't a philosopher or a linguist? What's the ultimate point of all this? Michael: The point, for Wittgenstein, is liberation. He saw philosophy not as a discipline for building grand theories, but as a form of therapy. He famously wrote, "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Kevin: The bewitchment of our intelligence. That’s a powerful phrase. What does he mean by that? Michael: He means we get tricked by our own words. We take a word from one language-game, let it wander into a place where it doesn’t belong, and then we get hopelessly confused. He gives this incredible metaphor: "What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." Kevin: The fly-bottle. I love that. So the fly is us, or our thinking? Michael: The fly is our intelligence, buzzing around frantically inside a glass bottle, bumping into the walls over and over, unable to find the way out. It sees the world outside, but it can't get there. The bottle is the linguistic confusion we’ve built for ourselves. Kevin: And the way out is usually simple, right there at the top, but the fly is too panicked and confused to see it. Michael: Exactly. The job of the philosopher isn't to build a new, better bottle. It's just to show the fly the way out. It’s to dissolve the problem, not solve it. Kevin: Let me see if I can connect the dots. So when philosophers get stuck for centuries on a question like "What is Truth?", with a capital T, Wittgenstein would say they are a fly in a bottle. They've taken the word 'true'—which has a perfectly good use in everyday language-games, like saying 'it's true that it's raining'—and they've treated it like it's a 'slab.' They're looking for a single, concrete object called 'Truth.' Michael: That is a perfect summary. They are bewitched by the noun form. They think it must name a sublime, mysterious thing. Wittgenstein’s therapy is to say: "Stop looking for the thing. Look at how you use the word. In what language-games does the word 'true' do its job?" Once you do that, the buzzing stops. The philosophical "problem" just disappears. Kevin: Wow. That’s so radical. It’s also why he was so controversial, isn't it? I remember reading that his old mentor, the great logician Bertrand Russell, was deeply disappointed with this book. He thought it was trivial. Michael: It was incredibly polarizing. Think about it. The entire tradition of Western philosophy was about building systems, finding ultimate foundations, answering the big questions. And here comes Wittgenstein, arguably the most brilliant philosophical mind of his generation, saying that those big questions are mostly just symptoms of a linguistic illness. He’s not playing the game; he’s telling everyone the game itself is the problem. Kevin: He’s like a master chess player who, instead of making a move, just tips over the board and says, "Let's talk about why we're even moving these little wooden pieces around in the first place." Michael: That’s it. He’s not providing answers. He’s providing a method for clarity. The goal is to see the world aright, to stop being tormented by questions that arise only from a misunderstanding of our own tools—our words.

Michael: So when you step back from Philosophical Investigations, the big takeaway isn't a new theory of meaning that you can memorize. The book itself is the therapy. It’s a series of exercises designed to retrain your attention. Kevin: It’s not about learning a fact, like ‘meaning is use.’ It’s about developing a skill—the skill of noticing which language-game you’re in at any given moment. Michael: Exactly. He says the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. They are always right in front of our eyes. The whole point of his work is to help us see what's been there all along: that language works beautifully when we use it in its proper context, and it creates intellectual chaos when we don't. Kevin: That’s a profound shift. It turns philosophy from this grand, intimidating quest for hidden truths into something incredibly practical and personal. It’s about tidying up your own mind by tidying up your own language. Michael: It’s a kind of intellectual hygiene. The goal is simply clarity. To stop being a fly in a bottle. Kevin: It really makes you wonder, what ‘fly-bottles’ are we all trapped in in our own lives? What are the words we use every day—like 'success,' 'happiness,' 'purpose'—that we treat like they’re simple objects, when really they’re part of a complex game we might not even understand? Michael: That is the question he leaves us with. And it’s a powerful one. We’d love to hear what our listeners think. What are some of the words that you feel create these kinds of fly-bottles in your own life or work? Let us know. Kevin: It’s a challenge to see what’s right in front of you. But after this conversation, I feel like I’ve at least been shown where the opening in the bottle is. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.