PEIRCE TO STRAWSON As examples of language-games Wittgenstein lists obeying and giving orders, describing the appearance of objects, expressing sensations, giving measurements, constructing an object from a description, reporting an event, speculating about the future, making up stories, acting plays, guessing riddles, telling jokes, asking, cursing, greeting, and praying Each of these language-games, and many others, need to be examined if we are to understand language We can say that the meaning of a word is its use in a language-game—but this is not a general theory of meaning, it is simply a reminder that if we wish to give an account of the meaning of a word we must look for the part it plays in our life The use of the word ‘game’ is not meant to suggest that language is something trivial; the word was chosen because games exhibit the same kind of variety as linguistic activities There is no common feature that marks all games as games, and likewise there is no one feature that is essential to language—there are only family likenesses between the countless language-games Wittgenstein never abandoned his early view that philosophy is an activity, not a theory Philosophy does not discover any new truths, and philosophical problems are solved not by the acquisition of new information, but by the rearrangement of what we already know The function of philosophy, Wittgenstein once said, is to untie the knots in our thinking This means that the philosopher’s movements will be complicated, but his result will be as simple as a plain piece of string We need philosophy if we are to avoid being entrapped by our language Embodied in the surface grammar of our language there is a philosophy that bewitches us, by disguising from us the variety of ways in which language functions as a social, interpersonal activity Philosophical misunderstanding will not harm us if we restrict ourselves to everyday tasks, using words within the language-games that are their primitive homes But if we start upon abstract studies—of mathematics, say, or of psychology, or of theology—then our thinking will be hampered and distorted unless we can free ourselves of philosophical confusion Intellectual inquiry will be corrupted by mythical notions about the nature of numbers, or of the mind, or of the soul Like the positivists, Wittgenstein was hostile to metaphysics But he attacked metaphysics not with a blunt instrument like the verification principle, but by the careful drawing of distinctions that enable him to disentangle the mixture of truism and nonsense within metaphysical 62