Hermeneutics and Meaning in Wittgenstein’s Language Game Theory

What does a word really mean? The instinctive answer is that it means whatever it refers to – an object in the world, a concept in the mind, a fixed definition in a dictionary. But Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, rejected this entirely. In his later philosophy, particularly in Philosophical Investigations (1953), he proposed something far more grounded: that the meaning of a word is simply its use in a language. This deceptively simple claim – “meaning as use” – carries profound implications. It doesn’t just reframe how we think about words; it transforms our understanding of meaning itself. And when placed alongside the tradition of hermeneutics, especially the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, it reveals a remarkable convergence: that understanding language is inseparable from participating in it.

From pictures to practice: Wittgenstein’s philosophical turn 🔗

To appreciate how radical Wittgenstein’s later position was, it helps to understand what he moved away from. In his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein had argued – in the tradition of Frege and Russell – that language derives its meaning by mirroring reality. A proposition was understood as a “picture” of a fact, with names in language corresponding one-to-one with objects in the world. Meaning, on this view, was referential and structural: a word meant what it pointed to.

By the late 1920s, Wittgenstein had come to see this as deeply inadequate. Less than a decade after completing the Tractatus, he concluded that his earlier framework had overlooked the very essence of language by treating it apart from the human activities in which it is actually embedded. Language, he now saw, is not a static logical system mirroring facts. It is a living practice – fluid, contextual, and socially embedded. In moving away from ideal logical structure, Wittgenstein replaced the goal of capturing meaning through generalizations with the directive to simply describe use: “Don’t think, but look!”

What are language games? 🔗

To capture the diversity and activity-oriented nature of language, Wittgenstein introduced the concept of the language game (Sprachspiel). A language game refers to simple examples of language use and the actions into which language is woven, with meaning arising only from the “rules” of the game being played. Crucially, these rules are not rigid or universal – they are the shared conventions of specific communities and practices.

Consider the word “Water!” Depending on context, the utterance could be an order, the answer to a question, an exclamation, or a warning. The word doesn’t carry a fixed meaning in isolation – its meaning is entirely determined by how and where it is used. The same logic applies to sentences: a sentence like “Moses did not exist” can mean several different things, and independently of a particular use, it doesn’t say anything at all.

Wittgenstein identified language games as encompassing a vast range of human activities – giving orders, describing appearances, making jokes, translating, requesting, thanking, cursing, and praying, among many others. Each of these is a language game, governed not by a single overarching set of rules but by the shared understandings of those who participate in them. Words and sentences do not have meanings in themselves; they have the meanings that people give them through use.

Forms of life 🔗

Language games don’t exist in isolation. They are interwoven with broader human activities and shared practices, which Wittgenstein called “forms of life.” To understand a language, one must participate in – or at least understand – the form of life in which it operates. This means that meaning is inherently public and social. There is no private language in the Wittgensteinian sense, because meaning requires shared practice for its very existence.

This also explains why philosophical confusion often arises when language is removed from its practical context. Wittgenstein held that philosophical problems arise when language goes “on holiday” – when it is isolated from the practical situations that give it life. His solution was not to replace one theory with another, but to redirect attention back to ordinary language as it is actually used.

Family resemblance 🔗

A key concept supporting the language game framework is family resemblance. Wittgenstein rejected the philosopher’s “craving for generality” – the drive to find a single essence common to all instances of a concept. Take the word “game.” Board games, card games, sports, and word games share no single defining feature. Instead, they form a web of overlapping similarities – much like the shared but non-identical features of members of a biological family. What this shows is that an exact definition is neither possible nor required for a word to carry meaning. Use, not essence, is what grounds meaning.

Hermeneutics: understanding as participation 🔗

Hermeneutics – the philosophical tradition concerned with interpretation and understanding – arrives at strikingly similar conclusions from a different direction. Originally confined to the interpretation of biblical and legal texts, hermeneutics was extended by Martin Heidegger beyond texts to all forms of human understanding. His student Hans-Georg Gadamer then developed this into a comprehensive philosophical hermeneutics in his landmark 1960 work, Truth and Method.

For Gadamer, understanding is not a method we apply to texts or the world – it is a mode of being. Hermeneutics is not a process in which an interpreter finds a pre-existing, fixed meaning, but rather a philosophical effort to account for understanding as the fundamental process of human existence. This is a decisive point: Gadamer was not trying to tell us how to understand correctly. He was trying to describe what understanding always already is – a historically situated, participatory, and dialogic event.

The fusion of horizons 🔗

One of Gadamer’s most important concepts is the fusion of horizons. Each person approaches a text, a conversation, or any experience from within their own “horizon” – the range of vision shaped by one’s history, tradition, and cultural situatedness. When an interpreter engages with a text, their horizon meets the horizon of the text. Understanding occurs not by erasing one’s own horizon, but by a productive merging – a fusion – of the two. This fusion does not mean the interpreter now possesses some objective meaning; rather, it is an event in which a world opens itself to the interpreter.

Crucially, this process is never complete or final. Gadamer saw dialogue – rooted in an openness to the truth claim of the other – as the model for all genuine understanding. Meaning is not extracted from a fixed source; it emerges through the ongoing conversation between interpreter and interpreted. Philosophical hermeneutics shows that all experience is conditioned by history, and different investigations of the same subject can reach different conclusions.

Prejudice and historicity 🔗

Gadamer also rehabilitated the concept of prejudice – not as a bias to be overcome, but as an enabling condition of understanding. Prejudice, for Gadamer, is simply a judgement rendered before all elements of a situation have been examined – and being embedded in tradition does not limit understanding but rather opens it up. Our historical situation is not an obstacle to truth; it is the very condition that makes engagement with meaning possible. Understanding is essentially a historically effected event – shaped by the tradition we are “thrown into,” to use Heidegger’s term.

Where Wittgenstein and Gadamer converge 🔗

The parallels between Wittgenstein’s language games and Gadamerian hermeneutics are not merely coincidental – they point to a shared philosophical insight about meaning, use, and understanding.

Both reject the idea that meaning is something fixed and independently existing, waiting to be discovered by a neutral observer. For Wittgenstein, meaning arises from use within a shared practice. For Gadamer, understanding arises from participatory engagement in a historically situated dialogue. In both cases, meaning is not found – it is made, through ongoing human activity. Wittgenstein sought to show that the “speaking” of language is part of an activity or form of life – that words are not merely descriptive labels, but deeds performed within a social world.

Both thinkers also resist the scientific aspiration to reduce understanding to method. Gadamer affirmed, following Aristotle, that all philosophy starts from praxis, and that hermeneutics is essentially practical philosophy – knowing must not remain on the purely theoretical level but must emerge from our practical quest for meaning. Wittgenstein, similarly, embraced ordinary language as it is, arguing that the aim of philosophy is therapeutic – to help us overcome the “bewitchment of language” and return words to their everyday use.

The role of context and community 🔗

Perhaps the most significant convergence is the role of context and community. For Wittgenstein, to participate in a language game is to share a form of life – a community of practice bound by convention, not logic alone. What we do with language, we do in a world with others. For Gadamer, the dialogue between interpreter and text is always mediated by tradition – a shared inheritance of meaning that makes communication across time and culture possible. In both frameworks, understanding is irreducibly social and contextual. There is no Archimedean point outside of language and practice from which meaning can be surveyed neutrally.

Implications: a practice-based theory of meaning 🔗

Together, Wittgenstein’s language game theory and Gadamer’s hermeneutics constitute a powerful practice-based approach to meaning – one with wide-ranging implications.

First, they challenge the traditional referential view of language associated with philosophers like Frege and the early Russell. Where Frege and Russell saw propositions as independently meaningful structures corresponding to reality, Wittgenstein came to believe that meaning cannot exist separately from the human activities that animate it. The “meaning is use” principle is not just a theory of language – it is a critique of the entire enterprise of finding context-free semantic foundations.

Second, both frameworks have profound consequences for how we understand communication across cultural and historical boundaries. If meaning is always embedded in a form of life or a historical horizon, then translation and cross-cultural understanding are not merely technical challenges – they require genuine participation in another community’s practices and traditions. Gadamer’s hermeneutics explores the meaning of individual experiences in relation to understanding human interpretation – a process that demands awareness of the intersubjective nature of all meaning-making.

Third, both positions resist the idea that philosophical problems have solutions in the traditional sense. Wittgenstein thought they should dissolve when we attend carefully to ordinary use. Gadamer thought that genuine understanding is always open-ended – the fusion of horizons is an event, not a terminus. For Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings of language use; once returned to their everyday context, they cease to puzzle us.

Criticisms and limitations 🔗

Neither framework is without its critics. Wittgenstein’s language game theory has been challenged for its lack of systematic rigor. Bertrand Russell criticized Wittgenstein for abandoning the logical clarity of the Tractatus in favor of an approach he considered too ambiguous, while Hilary Putnam argued that the absence of a clear definition of what constitutes a language game makes the concept difficult to apply empirically. Noam Chomsky, from a different angle, argued that focusing on use ignores the innate cognitive structures that make language acquisition possible in the first place.

Gadamer, too, has faced criticism – most notably from Jürgen Habermas, who argued that philosophical hermeneutics is insufficiently critical of the traditions it inhabits. If all understanding is embedded in tradition, the concern goes, how can we ever critique the very traditions that shape us? Gadamer’s response was that openness to dialogue – including dialogue that challenges our own prejudices – is built into the hermeneutic process itself.

These are serious objections. But they don’t undermine the core insight shared by both thinkers: that meaning is not a property of words or texts in isolation. It is something that arises – and continues to arise – through active, situated, communal use. Language is not a tool we stand outside of and deploy; it is the medium within which we already live.

What do you think? If meaning is always shaped by the community and context in which language is used, does that mean there are no universal truths – only locally valid ones? And if understanding always depends on a shared form of life or historical horizon, what becomes of our attempts to genuinely comprehend experiences and texts from radically different cultures or eras?

References

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