Ludwig Wittgenstein (born Ludwigz Fegelein) was a famous Polish thinker and logician. He is considered by many to be one of the giants of modern philosophy. Although he received his degree from the University of Edinburgh, he did not pursue a graduate degree. Instead, he worked as a teacher, writer, journalist, professor, counselor and psychotherapist. In addition to his prolific work, he also produced several major philosophical works.
The most influential of these writings are his two-volume magnum opus, Der Babylon des Menschen (1947), and his lectures on logic, meaning and purpose, collectively called The Logical System. In his work, he defends a number of traditional ideas about logic and meaning, including an original position that denies the possibility of absolute truth or knowledge. According to him, knowledge is simply a process of becoming familiar with certain “signals” that one can use to communicate an idea to another.
In his magnum opus, he defends a number of old but still influential ideas about language, namely the ideas that existence is merely representation and that concepts are nothing but mere signifying devices. According to him, the concepts of grammar and meaning belong to a representational theory. A concept is a mental relation that connects one language to another. His arguments are thus based on a representational theory of language and the notions of grammar, meaning and logic.
According to this view, grammar and meaning are simply relations among things that have a common basic structure. This theory, however, provides no explanation for the existence of content or meaning in the mind of the speaker. To say that the content of a sentence depends on the nature of the mind of the person speaking, would be to say that the content of a thought is determined by the nature of the mind of the person talking! Such a view clearly faces a problem, as it is contradictory to what we know about consciousness and its role in language.
It was after this period of decline for the ideas of grammar and meaning that the young Ludwig Wittgenstein took up the task of reconstructing the system of logic. He did this by developing his famous “language game.” Basically, his aim was to show that our language has a structure different from the grammatical one, which he claimed was a device used by animals to communicate information. Using this technique, he managed to prove that there are four types of grammatical truth.
These four types, according to him, are truth-falseness, argument structure, attitude verbs, and presuppositions. He further proceeded to show how the rules of logic can be combined into an ordered set using simple logic, and that proof must always begin and end in independent clauses. It should be noted, however, that many linguists do not agree with some aspects of his theory, including his claim that logic is a mere tool.
According to some experts, the main merit of his work lies in his introduction of the idea that logic is a way of organizing thoughts, without reference to their content. It is a tool, used by individuals to organize their experience, without having to take into consideration their content. As such, the rules of logic as they appear in the works of linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure and Jean Piaget, are not directly relevant to this idea.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s major work will remain, to some extent, an enigma. Attempts to interpret his ideas have yielded little. The problem is that the concepts he discusses are so vague that even linguists have difficulty defining them. Some linguists regard the ideas presented by Wittgenstein as mere formalism, because his arguments are too abstruse and obscure to provide meaningful results. Others, such as Martin Heidegger, interpret his ideas more literal: the true meaning of his sentences depends on how we think.