One might use the word as an order to have someone else bring you a glass of water.

Another way Wittgenstein makes the point is that the word 'water' has no meaning apart from its use within a language-game. The meaning of the word depends on the language-game in which it is used. Wittgenstein also gives the example of 'Water!', which can be used as an exclamation, an order, a request, or an answer to a question. These are all different uses of the word 'games'. We speak of various kinds of games: board games, betting games, sports, and 'war games'. Wittgenstein lists the following as examples of language-games: “Giving orders, and obeying them” “escribing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements” “onstructing an object from a description (a drawing)” “eporting an event” “peculating about an event.' The famous example is the meaning of the word 'game'. For Wittgenstein, his use of the term language-game 'is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life-form.' A central feature of language-games is that language is used in context and cannot be understood outside of that context. Wittgenstein develops this discussion of games into the key notion of a language-game. Norman Malcolm credits Piero Sraffa with breaking the hold on him of the notion that a proposition must literally be a picture of reality by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part, followed by Sraffa's question, 'What is the logical form of that?' Themes Language-games The Blue and Brown Books, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934, contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language and is widely read as a turning point in his philosophy of language. Many of the ideas developed in the Tractatus are criticised in the Investigations, while other ideas are further developed. That 'old way of thinking' is to be found in the only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In its preface, Wittgenstein says that Philosophical Investigations can be understood 'only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking'. Ī survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy.

Philosophical Investigations is divided into two parts, consisting of what Wittgenstein calls, in the preface, Bemerkungen, translated by Anscombe as 'remarks'.

Philosophical Investigations ( German: Philosophische Untersuchungen) is a work by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, published posthumously in 1953.

Wittgenstein genius