When we say we “understand” something, most of us assume something happened inside our heads – a mental click, an inner grasping of meaning. This intuition runs deep in Western philosophy. But Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most consequential thinkers of the 20th century, argued that this picture is fundamentally mistaken. For Wittgenstein, understanding is not a private mental event at all. It belongs to the public world – to language, action, and the communities we live in. This view, developed primarily in his Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953), dismantles centuries of assumptions about the mind and replaces them with something far more grounded: an account of understanding rooted in how we actually use language with one another.
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The standard view Wittgenstein challenges
The traditional account of understanding, inherited largely from Descartes, treats the mind as a kind of private theater. You receive words through your senses, and then – somewhere inside – a mental process occurs that constitutes understanding. The meaning of a word, on this view, is essentially a mental image or representation attached to it. When you understand the word “pain,” you allegedly access a private inner experience that gives the word its content.
This picture feels intuitively compelling. But Wittgenstein thought it was the source of deep philosophical confusion. His central objection: if understanding were really a private internal event, there would be no way to establish whether anyone had actually understood correctly, or whether the word meant the same thing to different people at all. The entire framework of shared language would collapse.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the later Wittgenstein – primarily in the Philosophical Investigations – took the more revolutionary step of critiquing traditional philosophy, including the conception of mind as an inner realm separable from public life. His new approach was anti-systematic, yet aimed at genuine philosophical clarity about problems like understanding and meaning.
Understanding as use, not inner process
Wittgenstein’s alternative begins with a deceptively simple claim: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. This is not a throwaway slogan. It is the cornerstone of his entire account of understanding.
As Wikipedia’s overview of Philosophical Investigations notes, Wittgenstein’s use theory holds that words are defined not by the objects they refer to or by the mental representations one associates with them, but by how they are actually used. To understand a word is not to conjure an image in the mind – it is to know how to deploy that word correctly across different contexts and situations.
This shifts understanding from the realm of inner experience to the realm of competent action. If you understand the word “checkmate,” you show it by using the word appropriately in chess contexts – by knowing when a game has ended, how to announce it, and what follows from it. As the Bishop’s Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy explains, to understand the word “queen” in chess is to know that a certain piece must be used in certain ways and not others. Understanding is demonstrated through practice, not revealed through introspection.
This means understanding is not a hidden accompaniment to behavior – it is the behavior. Or more precisely, it is the capacity to engage in the right behaviors within a given language practice.
The private language argument
The most technically rigorous piece of Wittgenstein’s case against private understanding is his famous private language argument, developed in sections §243-315 of the Philosophical Investigations. The argument targets the idea that a language could exist whose expressions refer to items only the speaker can access – such as immediate, purely private sensations.
To illustrate the problem, Wittgenstein asks us to consider a simple scenario: a person decides to keep a diary, writing the symbol “S” each time a particular sensation occurs. They try to fix the meaning of “S” by privately attending to the sensation and associating the mark with it. The question is: could this work? Could “S” become a meaningful sign this way?
Wittgenstein’s answer is no. As the Wikipedia article on the private language argument clarifies, the core problem is not about the reliability of memory – it is about the very intelligibility of correctness in a purely private setting. For a sign to mean something, there must be a distinction between using it correctly and merely thinking one is using it correctly. But in a fully private case, there is no independent standard to make that distinction. Whatever seems right to the person is right – which means the concept of correctness has been emptied of content. There is no rule being followed; there is only the illusion of one.
As 1000-Word Philosophy explains, Wittgenstein’s conclusion is that it is not possible to meaningfully use a term to refer to a private mental state in this way. Language requires public criteria for correct use. Since a private language has none, it is not really a language at all – and understanding grounded solely in private mental states is not really understanding.
Wittgenstein further illustrates this with his famous “beetle in a box” analogy. Suppose everyone has a box that only they can see into, and each person calls whatever is inside their box a “beetle.” Even if the contents differ from person to person – or even if some boxes are empty – the word “beetle” still functions perfectly well in conversation. This is because the actual content of the box is irrelevant to how the word operates. As noted in ResearchGate’s discussion of the argument, the thing in the box could be changing all the time, yet language still works – because meaning is determined by public practice, not by private contents.
Language games and forms of life
If understanding is not a private mental act, what is it grounded in? Wittgenstein’s answer brings in two interconnected concepts: language games and forms of life.
A language game refers to the various rule-governed ways in which language is used within particular activities and practices. According to Wikipedia’s entry on language games, Wittgenstein used this concept to show that a word or sentence has meaning only as a result of the “rules” of the particular game being played. The same word can function completely differently across contexts. “Water!” can be an order, a warning, an answer to a question, or an exclamation – the meaning is not fixed in the word itself but in the game in which it is used.
Wittgenstein envisioned a vast plurality of language games: giving orders, describing objects, reporting events, making jokes, praying, solving arithmetic problems, and countless others. As one educational resource on Wittgenstein’s language games notes, learning a language is not simply learning a set of definitions – it is learning to participate in the language games of a community. Understanding, then, is the ability to play these games competently. It is a skill, not a state.
These language games are embedded in what Wittgenstein calls forms of life – the shared practices, customs, and activities that constitute a community’s way of living. As Dallas Baptist University’s overview of the Philosophical Investigations explains, Wittgenstein suggests that using a common language requires something like a common life-form. Language is inseparably tied to how human beings live. Meaning does not float free of practice; it is woven into the fabric of communal life.
As a scholarly paper on Wittgenstein’s social theory of language at the Wittgenstein Archives points out, by discarding the notion of privacy of language, Wittgenstein brought language from the isolated regions of a speaker’s mind to the realm of social reality. Meanings are not constructed in the mind of individual speakers in isolation; they are continually generated through social interaction, and context is essential to determining what a word means in any given case.
Understanding is social and action-based
Putting all this together, Wittgenstein’s account of understanding has three closely connected features.
First, understanding is public, not private. As ScienceDirect’s overview of Wittgenstein’s philosophy notes, in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein grounded linguistic meaning in a sign’s role in social interaction. Relevant ways of using signs must be socially established. Meaning is essentially public rather than something locked inside a single mind.
Second, understanding is communal. As Humanities Commons summarizes, Wittgenstein argues that the meaning of words depends on their use within a shared community. A word understood by only one person is not really a word with meaning – because there is no community to provide the shared framework in which correct and incorrect use can be distinguished.
Third, understanding is action-based. To understand is not to be in a particular inner state but to be able to act in appropriate ways within a given language game. As the Thinking Prismatically blog notes in its discussion of Wittgenstein’s forms of life, the word “intention” – for example – is embedded in a particular pattern of human activity. When someone says “I intend to quit my job,” others adjust their behavior accordingly. The meaning of “I intend” is tied to the network of actions and reactions it generates. The word works because it operates within a shared social practice.
This means that even our talk about inner experiences – pain, joy, belief, desire – is not grounded in private inner items but in the public language games built around those experiences. As Wikipedia’s entry on Philosophical Investigations points out, for Wittgenstein, mental states are intimately connected to a subject’s environment, especially their linguistic environment. Conceivability arguments that try to sever mind from world entirely are, on this view, misguided.
Rule-following and the community view
One of the most discussed aspects of Wittgenstein’s account is his treatment of rule-following. He asks: what makes it the case that someone is following a rule rather than just acting randomly, or following a different rule that happens to produce the same outputs so far?
The problem is that any finite course of action can be interpreted as following countless different rules. So what fixes which rule I am following? Wittgenstein’s answer is that following a rule is a social practice. As the University of London’s overview of Wittgenstein’s theory of rules explains, the validation of our understanding and use of rules is rooted in a community’s acknowledgment – correctness is determined by communal agreement, not by some inner mental standard. There is no private fact about meaning that exists independently of how language is practiced in a community.
This has direct implications for understanding. When you claim to understand a mathematical rule – say, “add 2” – what makes that claim correct is not some internal mental state but your ability to continue the series in ways that accord with how the community uses that rule. Understanding is demonstrated in the continuity of practice, not guaranteed by an inner event.
Why this matters beyond philosophy
Wittgenstein’s account of understanding has had far-reaching consequences. As Humanities Commons notes, the Philosophical Investigations has influenced the development of ordinary language philosophy and has reshaped how scholars in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science approach the study of language and meaning. His emphasis on the pragmatic and contextual aspects of language has pushed researchers to treat language as fundamentally social.
In cognitive science, the view that meaning and understanding are grounded in communal practice rather than private mental representations challenges purely internalist theories of mind – including computational and representationalist approaches that treat the brain as a private processor of symbols. As the Wikipedia article on the private language argument indicates, Wittgenstein’s discussion bears directly on the methodology of cognitive science, the status of sensations and qualia in philosophy of mind, and the broader question of how we can know other minds at all.
In education, his account suggests that understanding cannot be reduced to passing a test or holding the right belief privately – it must be demonstrated through appropriate participation in practices. You do not understand a concept if you cannot use it in the relevant social contexts, even if you can recite a definition.
More broadly, Wittgenstein’s picture challenges the deeply individualistic model of the mind that dominates much of modern culture. Thinking, meaning, and understanding are not solo performances happening behind closed doors. They are achievements that take place in the open – within language, within community, within shared forms of life.
What do you think? If understanding is shown through action and social practice rather than private mental states, does that change how you evaluate whether someone – or even an AI system – truly “understands” something? And if meaning is grounded in communal forms of life, what happens to understanding when communities fragment and no longer share the same language games?
References
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations
- https://jamesbishopblog.com/2019/09/10/ludwig-wittgensteins-theory-of-language/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument
- https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/07/14/wittgensteins-private-language-argument/
- https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_significance_of_Wittgensteins_private_language_argument
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
- https://www.dalvoy.com/en/upsc/mains/previous-years/2014/philosophy-paper-i/wittgenstein-language-games
- https://www.dbu.edu/mitchell/modern-resources/wittgensteinoverview.html
- https://wab.uib.no/agora/tools/alws/collection-9-issue-1-article-6.annotate
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/wittgenstein
- https://hcommons.org/docs/the-philosophy-of-ludwig-wittgenstein-alexis-karpouzos/
- https://prismatically.blog/2021/07/28/wittgenstein-culture-and-value-language-games-and-forms-of-life/
- https://uollb.com/blogs/uol/wittgenstein-s-practical-theory-of-rules
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