Ludwig Wittgenstein in his posthumous Philosophical Investigations 1953 criticized both the notion of language as merely naming objects or sense data and the notion of a purely private consciousness. Language isn't just ostention, which is every word standing for some object which the mind makes a picture of. The meaning of language is in how it is used. The meaning of a word presupposes how it is used. Thinking of the definition of games, there isn't one definition of game which would perfectly fit everything we consider a game, from chess to duck duck goose. According to Wittgenstein this doesn't matter since we use the word without having an ideal definition. Others understand what we are talking about when we talk about game in a given situation. For Wittgenstein meaning is intended to be social, for another person. There is no purely private language.
Wittgenstein's view is notably different than Plato's presented in Socrates' dialogues. Socrates criticizes those who think they know what something is without being able to provide an account or elaborate their knowledge of what it is. In the Socratic dialectic, a definition for something like justice is given and from a series of questions it is determined if there are contradictions in that definition which will lead to a better definition or at least dismiss the definition at hand. This for Wittgenstein would just be a language game. Wittgenstein encouraged students to do other things than philosophy since he saw it as having to do with language which people can understand without philosophy. I think this is the sad state philosophy got itself in when it became separated from the sciences as its own discipline. Certainly the use of language is very important when trying to answer answerable questions, the reason why Latin a dead language is still used in naming species. And so I don't read much philosophy past the early 20th century and instead learn from popular science writers.
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