"nonlinguistic" - 1 õppematerjal

Keelefilosoofia raamat

To emphasize all this, Wittgenstein coined the term "language-game," as in the meeting and greeting language-game, the wedding language-game, the arithmetic language-game, and so on. Wittgenstein offers a further analogy (1953: 2): A builder and his assistant have just four kinds of building stones that they use. They speak a little primitive language that has just four corresponding words in it: "block," "pil- lar," "slab," and "beam." They build things, engaging in their nonlinguistic activities aided by a certain primitive sort of linguistic activity: the builder says "slab," and the assistant brings a stone of the appropriate shape. Now, someone might say, "Of course, that word `slab' bears the referring relation to a block of this shape, and its meaning is the proposition that the assistant is to bring such a block to the builder." But according to Wittgenstein this would be missing the point. In this little primitive language-game, the word