Semantic games

The 'language game' metaphor has unfortunate overtones. It suggests triviality, and also that we might play the game in other ways - that we can make up rules any way we like. It also has another disadvantage, that is more directly related to Wittgenstein's exposition of it -

The 'pieces' in Wittgenstein's game - the words, sentences etc. - are caricatured as 'tokens', whose 'meaning' is given by their role in the game. This is fine, so long as we realise that this is a metaphor, and that it can' t be pushed too far.

If we're playing chess, it's easy to see how we might swap certain pieces - use the piece normally used as a knight as a bishop, and vice versa - and still be playing the same game (or one which is only trivially different). This is because we can usually identify the pieces separately from their role in the game. Someone completely unfamiliar with the rules of chess could learn the correct names for the pieces and be able to use them in our conversation (although in a specifically limited way). They could pick the right pieces from the box in response to appropriately worded requests, or they could make a list of 'all the chess pieces', or they could weigh them and come up with the same results as someone who could play chess etc.

This is not the case with language in general, even if it seems to be the case for some restricted games like chess (but see below).

We might think of a parenthesised or quoted word as a token - "word" or "knight" - for instance, and imagine a certain way of identifying it that doesn't take account of its 'meaning' (role in the game). This is necessary, for example, if we are to programme a computer to process strings which encode linguistic moves. My computer does not 'understand' what I am typing, but it must be able to reliably distinguish some strings of characters from others in order to function as an appropriate channel for our communication. The routines developed to achieve this can also be enhanced to do spell checking and even some translation.

Notoriously, we can also, to the point of practical incoherence, swap these pieces between roles without altering the 'meaning' of what we are saying.

What we cannot do is give an account of language use completely in terms of tokens and rules - even if we enhance this ('syntactical') account with a mechanical account of how certain tokens are related (in a functional, non-ambiguous way) to certain features of 'reality'. This is because (OQA) this account itself depends upon the correct 'intepretation' of the tokens which are used to encode it.

While we might demonstrate that some games (e.g. versions of chess in which token allocations are different) are 'isomorphic' in some important way, we can only give an account of this isomorphism, itself, within a playable language game. The syntactic/mechanical story says, roughly, that our whole language (and all intertranslatable with it) is isomorphic with some general set of syntactical rules and semantic/mechanical allocations and that it can be used to state these rules and define these allocations.

The 'game' is not like this - it is irreducibly semantic. If the rules of chess only defined playable moves in terms of the names of the pieces (without descriptions), the actual bits of hardware could look like anything at all, so long as they could be matched to the names - and the 'meanings' of the names would be given entirely in terms of the rules of play. In this circumstance, a non-player could not name the actual pieces - pieces in a box, and not on a board (in play), would not even have names, because the could be used to fill whatever 'logical' role we liked. And if a possible move in chess was to (re-)define how a piece could move ...