Tool 1 is the simplest and, I think, the most important: “Look and see.”

When a philosophical question starts to feel deep, Wittgenstein’s first move is often to stop, and look at how the words are actually used in ordinary situations. Instead of guessing that there must be some hidden thing the word refers to, he'll point out what we already know how to do with it.

What it’s for, it’s for breaking the spell of abstract pictures. A lot of philosophy starts when we take a word that works perfectly well in our everyday life, remove it from its normal setting, and then demand an explanation of what it really is.

Think about the word game. Most people assume that a concept must have a strict definition. So, they ask, what is the essence of a game? But if you actually look, you find board games, card games, Olympic games, children’s games, solitaire, chess, tag, etc. There isn’t one feature shared by every case, and that discovery isn’t a defect. It’s a reminder that our concepts don’t always work by strict definitions, they often work by overlapping similarities (family resemblances).

Take the philosophical example, “What is meaning?” It can sound like we’re asking for a hidden object, a mental item, or a thing attached to a word. Wittgenstein’s move is to say, don’t posit anything yet. Instead look at what we call meaning in real life. We explain a word, we correct someone’s misuse, we translate, we follow an instruction, we misunderstand and then get it right, we use a word in a new context and people either accept it or reject it. The meaning isn’t a ghostly extra. It shows itself in the role the expression plays in our shared practices (forms of life).

If you want a quick test for whether “look and see” is needed, try the following: when you ask your question, do you immediately feel pulled toward a hidden mechanism or a deep entity that must be behind the scenes? If you do, you’re probably in Wittgenstein’s territory. The next tool, the grammar check, is what he uses to say exactly where the question goes off the rails.

Tool 2 - the grammar check, and grammar here in Wittgenstein’s sense, not in the schoolbook sense. He doesn’t mean punctuation or sentence diagrams. He means what are the rules of use for an expression, what role does it play, what counts as a sensible move, and what counts as a category mistake.

You take a philosophical statement, and ask, what kind of sentence is this supposed to be? Is it reporting a fact, giving a rule, expressing a commitment, giving a standard, drawing an inference, or doing something else? Sometimes philosophical trouble comes from treating one kind of sentence as if it were another.

It’s for spotting when a statement only looks like it’s saying something, when it’s really the result of our words getting detached from the contexts or settings that give them their point. You can also think of it as a way of asking, what would count as understanding this claim? What would we do with it?

For example, suppose someone says, “I’ve got a pain in my foot.” That’s not something you normally verify by looking for evidence in the same way you’d verify “there’s a nail in my shoe.” You might ask where it hurts, or whether it’s sharp or dull, or you might offer help. Imagine someone says, “I know I’m in pain because I observed it.” Such a sentence has the wrong grammar. It treats pain like an object discovered by inner observation, and it makes the person’s relation to their pain look like the relation to something external. You can feel the temptation, but the sentence is already sliding into a picture that isn’t expressing how we actually talk and respond.

Consider a philosophical example, “I know the external world exists.” It looks like an ordinary knowledge claim, like “I know there’s a tree in the yard.” But if you run a grammar check, you’ll ask, what would count as checking it, what would count as correcting it, what would count as evidence for or against it, and what would it mean to doubt it in the ordinary ways we doubt things? This is exactly where On Certainty starts to bite. Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that the proposition is false. It’s that in many contexts it doesn’t behave like a normal empirical claim at all. It’s closer to something that stands fast in the background of inquiry, the kind of thing you don’t typically confirm because it’s part of what makes confirmation possible.

A grammar check asks whether we’re trying to do philosophy with a statement/proposition that’s outside it's normal use. It looks like a straightforward statement of fact, but it’s functioning more like a rule, or a framework commitment, or a hinge. And once you see that, much of the philosophical pressure is dissipates.

An admirable approach.

Thanks

Tool 3 is language games, this is where Wittgenstein gets concrete. If the Wittgenstein's grammar asks, “What role does this sentence play?” the language game asks, “In what human activity does it actually play that role? (very important)”

A language game is the use of words inside a practice, viz., asking, answering, commanding, measuring, accusing, thanking, joking, praying, bargaining, teaching a child, doing math, doing science. The point isn’t that language is a literal game. It's that meaning lives in use, and use lives in activities with rules, training, and standards of correction.

It’s for resisting the idea that words get their meaning by pointing to hidden objects, inner items, or metaphysical entities. It helps with a very common philosophical error, i.e., taking a word out of one setting or context where it works perfectly well, then forcing it into another setting or context, and getting a mystery as the result.

For example, think about the word know. In one language game, “I know” is basically a way of saying, “I’m sure (like a conviction),” or “stop worrying,” or “I’ve got this.” In another game, “I know” is a claim that you can back up with good reasons or evidence, “How do you know?” Mixing these games can cause confusion. A person might say, “I know my spouse loves me,” and if you treat that as if it’s the same kind of claim as “I know there’s a cafe on that corner,” you’ll start demanding the wrong kind of evidence and acting as if intimacy is an empirical hypothesis. The trouble isn’t with love; it’s with forcing the sentence into the wrong game.

A skeptic says, “How do you know you’re not dreaming right now?” That question can be asked in some special contexts, like waking up disoriented, or in a movie, or as a thought experiment. But global skepticism tries to make the question applicable everywhere. Wittgenstein’s reply isn’t “here’s the proof that you’re not dreaming.” His reply is, what language game are you playing when you raise that doubt? What would count as settling it? What would it look like to live with that doubt as a genuine doubt? In On Certainty the punchline is that radical doubt isn’t the purest form of inquiry, it’s often a sign that the words doubt, know, and certain have been pulled from the very practices that give them their sense.

This is also where you see why “it’s all about language” is misleading. Language games aren’t just words. They’re words plus action, viz., training, correction, agreement in judgment, shared reactions, the whole backdrop of human life in which our expressions make sense.

Here's the test, when you feel a philosophical problem coming on, ask yourself, “What would people actually do with this sentence in real life?” If the answer is "nothing," or “I can’t picture it,” that’s a red flag. You may be looking at a propostion that’s been detached from any workable language game.

Tool 4 is criteria, and it’s one of the best ways of keeping philosophy honest. If you’ve asked what language game you’re playing in, the next question is: what counts as getting it right, and what counts as getting it wrong?

A criterion isn’t just evidence. It’s what we count as settling, or at least strongly supporting, a claim in a given context. Criteria are built into how we use words. They are seen in what we count as a justified assertion, what we count as a misunderstanding, and what we count as a correction.

Criteria helps to avoid two extremes that generate philosophical problems. One extreme treats everything as a private inner thing that only the subject can access. The other extreme treats everything as if it must be checked by scientific measurement. Wittgenstein’s point is that our everyday concepts already have standards of application, and those standards aren’t mysterious. They’re seen in how we teach, learn, correct, and respond.

For example, take “He’s angry.” How do you know? You don’t usually run a brain scan. You point to tone, posture, what he says, what he does, the context, how he reacts when challenged. Those are the criteria in the language game. Notice the philosophical temptation, “But how do you know he’s really angry inside?” The criteria tool helps you see the problem. The concept angry isn’t mainly a label for a hidden object in an inner theater. It’s a concept with public criteria that we’ve learned to apply in everyday life. That doesn’t deny our inner life, it keeps the concept anchored to the practices that give it its use.

Another example, other minds. “How do you know anyone else is conscious?” Philosophers sometimes treat consciousness as a private object that can only be directly inspected by the subject. Then everyone else becomes an inference from behavior, and the whole thing starts to feel fragile. Wittgenstein’s criteria move isn’t to deny the inner life. It’s to remind us that the grammar of our mental concepts is tied to criteria in our shared practices. If you strip the criteria, the words stop having a stable use.

Now connect that to On Certainty. Skeptical doubt often asks for a kind of certainty that our everyday knowledge claims aren’t designed to deliver. Sometimes it demands absolute certainty, certainty in the sense of logical or moral necessity. Sometimes it demands an unrealistic epistemic certainty, certainty that would have to be defeater proof in every imaginable context. Wittgenstein’s point is that ordinary inquiry doesn’t run on that standard. More importantly, the background that makes inquiry possible isn’t usually a set of super claims that have been proven to the highest degree. It’s what I’d call hinge certainty, the arational bedrock that stands fast so that doubt and justification can get traction. If you try to doubt everything at once, you don’t achieve a purer form of inquiry, you undermine the very criteria that make doubt, check, and justify intelligible.

A quick question you can use whenever things get a bit abstract is: “What would count as settling this philosophical problem in this context?” If no answer is forthcoming then the question is probably detached from any practice, that’s a sign you’re not facing some deep metaphysical puzzle. You’re facing a concept being asked to do work it can’t do.

Tool 1 is the simplest and, I think, the most important: “Look and see.” — Sam26

Thank you for your new Thread.

A thought that I have had for a while about Wittgenstein.

If a person said “I am in xyz” and did nothing, the word “xyz” would be meaningless to any observer of that person. In practice, the word only has a use within a language game if that word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, not what they are subjectively thinking.

However, there is a danger in Wittgenstein's practical approach which dismisses any attempt at a deeper philosophical understanding. It could be called “Cargo Cult Thinking”, where an observed behaviour is imitated rather than trying to make any attempt to understand the cause of such behaviour, difficult that might be.

https://tapandesai.com/cargo-cult-thinking/
The Cargo Cult Thinking: Beware of Imitating Behaviors
During World War II, remote Pacific islanders watched in awe as foreign troops landed on their shores, bringing crates of food, medicine, and supplies, things the islanders had never seen before. The soldiers built airstrips, set up makeshift control towers, and went about their routines. Then, just as suddenly as they arrived, they vanished when the war ended, taking everything with them
But the islanders had a plan.
Believing that the airstrips had summoned the cargo, they built their own, meticulously crafting bamboo control towers and wooden headphones, hoping the planes would return. They mimicked the rituals of the soldiers, waiting for the magic to happen.
But the planes never came back.

Cargo Cult Thinking, because when a person says “I am in xyz”, for Wittgenstein, the word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, it does not refer to the cause of why they said “I am in xyz” in the first place.

I'll say thanks here for the grammar section in particular. I've never quite understood what Wittgenstein meant by this - not when reading Wittgenstein (only read excerpts, so that's probably to blame), nor when I read others talking about it. This is probably the clearest explication I've ever come across, and it fits nicely into what else I know about Wittgenstein. So: thanks again.

I do have a question: How does the grammer check relate to the language game. My intuition is to say you need to identify the language game before you ran the grammar check - or differently put: isn't the grammar just the structure of the language game? (I'll admit I find it confusing that he chose the term grammar.)

Tool 2 - the grammar check, and grammar here in Wittgenstein’s sense, not in the schoolbook sense. He doesn’t mean punctuation or sentence diagrams. He means what are the rules of use for an expression, what role does it play, what counts as a sensible move, and what counts as a category mistake. — Sam26

Language can be philosophically misleading as language uses figures of speech which within philosophical investigation should not be taken literally. For example, the expression “I see your pain” is a figure of speech which does not literally mean that I am literally able to see your pain.

Language uses figures of speech, and philosophy must be able to distinguish when an expression is being used as a figure of speech or literally.

As the expression “I’ve got a pain in my foot” suggests that pain is an object external to “I”, it is being used as a figure of speech rather than literally. A more literal expression would be “I am the pain in my foot”

As you say, the philosopher must also determine whether an expression is being used as an empirical observation or as a performative utterance, as described by JL Austin. For example, if I say “the postbox is red”, am I making an empirical observation that the postbox is red rather than blue, or am I making a performative utterance that the postbox, regardless of its true nature, is red. It may be that the true nature of the postbox is purple, but even so, within the language game It shall henceforth be called “red”. This is the question as to how names are initially attached to objects. Is the colour of the postbox red, rouge or rot?

When I make the statement that “the external world exists”, is this an empirical observation or a performative utterance that establishes the framework, the bedrock, on which everything else I say about the external world is founded. Once I have made the performative utterance that the external world exists, then I can talk about the mountains, elephants and oceans that reside within this external world.

Philosophy must distinguish between figures of speech such as “I’ve got a pain in my foot” and the more literal expression “ I am the pain in my foot”.

Philosophy must also distinguish between empirical expressions such as “the postbox is red” and performative utterances such as “the postbox is red”.

In this sense, as regards grammar, what Wittgenstein is pointing out is common sense.

However, there is a danger in Wittgenstein's practical approach which dismisses any attempt at a deeper philosophical understanding. It could be called “Cargo Cult Thinking”, where an observed behaviour is imitated rather than trying to make any attempt to understand the cause of such behaviour, difficult that might be. — RussellA

Errors will always occur in understanding, and the meaning is use model works by continued interaction within a community with error correction and even changes within words over time. That is expected. That is to say, Wittgenstein is not suggesting that every time people speak, the word usage is consistent, but instead that it is an ongoing process.

Even assuming the meaning is use model is completely flawed and that we instead gain meaning from reference to mental states, you still have errors, where the Cargo Cult would still be going about things in the wrong way. That is to say, under no model is it suggested that people always get meaning correct.

The question then becomes how do we go about our correction? Per Wittgenstein, use is the standard of correctness, and this use will define meaning. What you have pointed out is a mismatch in usage of terms, but that is the result of lack of correction within the community. It remains possible that this mismatch will be corrected, although your example seperated the communities of users and left each community with differing meaning of words, which would mean at this point they have differing langauges. The point though is potential of correction through usage.

Per a mental reference model, where meaning is attached to what mental images were within the solidier's mind, there would be no correction through comparisons of mental processes. The soldiers could not correct the islander's meaning of the terms by opening their brains and comparing them to the brains of the islanders to show them that they were wrong. The point is the lack of potential correction by reliance upon this model.

One issue that I think comes up very often in these discussions is the thought that Wittgenstein is trying to deny the mental states. He's not. The question regarding them is whether they underwrite the meaning to the terms and whether they offer explanatory power in terms of what is meant.

The meaning isn’t a ghostly extra. — Sam26

This is the critical line and hundreds of posts have centered around this confusion. This comment is often read to mean "there is no ghostly extra," asserting a metaphysical claim about what might exist in one's mind. That then results in accusations that the internal state is denied and that we are all p-zombies speaking in the Chinese Room. The point is that meaning does not rely upon the ghostly extra, but that is not to suggest anyone is saying anything about what that ghostly extra might be or not be. The point is that it's ghostly, offers no explanatory value, and cannot be meaningfully discussed. It's beyond what philosophy can treat as explanatory for meaning.

Thank you for your new Thread.

A thought that I have had for a while about Wittgenstein.

If a person said “I am in xyz” and did nothing, the word “xyz” would be meaningless to any observer of that person. In practice, the word only has a use within a language game if that word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, not what they are subjectively thinking.

However, there is a danger in Wittgenstein's practical approach which dismisses any attempt at a deeper philosophical understanding. It could be called “Cargo Cult Thinking”, where an observed behaviour is imitated rather than trying to make any attempt to understand the cause of such behaviour, difficult that might be.

https://tapandesai.com/cargo-cult-thinking/
The Cargo Cult Thinking: Beware of Imitating Behaviors
During World War II, remote Pacific islanders watched in awe as foreign troops landed on their shores, bringing crates of food, medicine, and supplies, things the islanders had never seen before. The soldiers built airstrips, set up makeshift control towers, and went about their routines. Then, just as suddenly as they arrived, they vanished when the war ended, taking everything with them
But the islanders had a plan.
Believing that the airstrips had summoned the cargo, they built their own, meticulously crafting bamboo control towers and wooden headphones, hoping the planes would return. They mimicked the rituals of the soldiers, waiting for the magic to happen.
But the planes never came back.

Cargo Cult Thinking, because when a person says “I am in xyz”, for Wittgenstein, the word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, it does not refer to the cause of why they said “I am in xyz” in the first place. — RussellA

You're welcome.

Thanks for your thoughts and the pushback. I think you’re right to be concerned about “just copying the surface,” but I don’t think that’s what Wittgenstein is recommending, and I also don’t think it’s right to say that a word only has use if it “refers to what they objectively do” as opposed to what they’re thinking.

First, if someone says, “I am in xyz” and there’s no shared life around xyz, no training, no examples, no circumstances where we’d say, “this is when you use that word,” then yes, it’s meaningless. But that’s not because nothing inner matters. It’s because there are no criteria for the word’s use. In most real cases the utterance itself is already part of the language game. “I’m in pain,” “I’m anxious,” “I’m confused,” “I’m remembering something,” can be perfectly intelligible even if the person is sitting still and doing very little. We might doubt sincerity in certtain contexts, but we still understand what they’re saying, because we’ve learned how those words function across a wide range of situations.

Now the cargo cult worry. Here’s the key point Wittgenstein is trying to keep us from blurring: criteria versus causes.

Criteria answer: “What would count as correctly applying this word here?”

Causes answer: “What produced this state or this behavior?”

Wittgenstein’s methods are mostly about the first question. He’s saying: don’t treat a conceptual question as if it were already a causal one. That’s not a dismissal of deeper understanding; it’s a refusal to do pseudo-science in the armchair. If you want causes, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and ordinary explanation are exactly where you should go. Nothing in Wittgenstein forbids that. He simply resists the move where we take a word, imagine it must name a hidden inner object, then demand a deeper explanation, which is just a picture we’ve smuggled in.

And notice, if anything, the cargo cult story is a warning about mixing up criteria and causes. The islanders copied what looked like the criteria for planes arriving, towers, headphones, rituals, but they mistook those things for the cause. Wittgenstein’s point is closer to don’t confuse the signs and rules that make a practice intelligible with the mechanisms that produce certain outcomes.

I would say that Wittgenstein isn’t telling us to imitate behavior instead of understanding it. He’s telling us to get clear on what we mean first, what would count as using the word correctly, and only then go looking for causes where causes are the right question. That’s not shallow. It’s often the difference between a real inquiry and a philosophical mirage.

If a person said “I am in xyz” and did nothing, the word “xyz” would be meaningless to any observer of that person. In practice, the word only has a use within a language game if that word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, not what they are subjectively thinking.

However, there is a danger in Wittgenstein's practical approach which dismisses any attempt at a deeper philosophical understanding. It could be called “Cargo Cult Thinking”, where an observed behaviour is imitated rather than trying to make any attempt to understand the cause of such behaviour, difficult that might — RussellA

You’re interpreting what Wittgenstein is doing as a behaviorist reduction, which treats outward regularities as suffficient and ignores inner causes. You’re assuming that unless we can point to a hidden causal mechanism behind language use, we’ve settled for a shallow imitation of understanding. But Wittgenstein rejects both the idea of hidden causes and behaviorism.
For Wittgenstein, ‘Xyz” doesn’t refer to a behavior, and it doesn’t refer to a cause. The intelligibility of “xyz” as a mood, a stance, a rule, or a commitment doesnt depend on a single episode of observable behavior, but on its place in a web of possible moves: what counts as evidence for being in xyz, what counts as pretending, what counts as withdrawing the claim, what follows from it, what licenses it. Someone can intelligibly say “I am in pain” or “I am in love” while lying motionless, because the grammar of those expressions doesnt require bodily movement.

Analyzing “I am in xyz” at a psychological or neurological level wont tell you what “xyz” means. It presupposes that you already grasp the concept. A brain scan might explain why someone reports pain, but it doesnt teach you what pain is, or how the word “pain” functions in our lives. To think otherwise is to confuse an explanation within a practice with an explanation of the practice.

I'll say thanks here for the grammar section in particular. I've never quite understood what Wittgenstein meant by this - not when reading Wittgenstein (only read excerpts, so that's probably to blame), nor when I read others talking about it. This is probably the clearest explication I've ever come across, and it fits nicely into what else I know about Wittgenstein. So: thanks again.

I do have a question: How does the grammer check relate to the language game. My intuition is to say you need to identify the language game before you ran the grammar check - or differently put: isn't the grammar just the structure of the language game? (I'll admit I find it confusing that he chose the term grammar.) — Dawnstorm

Thanks.

Excellent question, and I think your intuition is basically right, with a minor adjustment.

In practice, grammar check and language game don't refer to a fixed order. They’re two angles on the same problem, andoften we bounce back and forth between them.

The language game question is, what human activity is this expression part of? What’s going on here, asking, warning, promising, measuring, doubting, joking, praying, reporting, teaching, etc.

As for the grammar check question, given that activity, what role does this statement have, and what counts as a sensible move with it? What would count as evidence, correction, a challenge, a misuse.

So yes, you can say that grammar is the structure of the language game, in the sense that it’s the rules of use that make the game the game. But grammar check is the method of testing whether we’ve assigned the sentence the right role, or whether we’re placing it into the wrong game.

To see the difference, take the sentence, “I know I’m in pain.”

If we treat it as an ordinary knowledge claim, we’ll start asking for evidence or some verification. That’s one language game, and the grammar of know there are checks and defeaters.

But when “I’m in pain” is used as an avowal, or a cry, or a call for help, it’s a different language game. The grammar isn’t “I inspected an inner object and concluded,” it’s closer to “this is how we express pain, and this is how others respond.”

The language game helps you locate the setting. The grammar check helps you see whether the sentence is being shoved into a different kind of sentence than it really is. That’s why Wittgenstein can start from either end: sometimes you identify the game first, sometimes you notice a grammatical problem first and then realize you’ve got the wrong game.

On the term grammar, I agree it’s confusing at first. He uses it because he’s talking about rules of use, not about inner meanings or hidden entities. He could’ve called it “the logic of our concepts” or “the rules of the practice,” but “grammar” keeps reminding you that the norms are public in the sense that they’re learnable, teachable, and correctable within a practice, not private mental objects.

If I had to compress it into one line for the thread, I'd say language games are the activities, grammar is the rulebook, and the grammar check is how you catch yourself when you’re using the incorrect rulebook.