Wittgenstein spent years demolishing the book he was famous for
The philosopher who said language pictures reality decided, in middle age, that this was precisely backwards.
When Ludwig Wittgenstein published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, it arrived with a brash conclusion: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Language, he argued, works by mirroring the logical structure of facts. Propositions that cannot picture something real are not just false — they are meaningless.
He was so confident the problem was solved that he left philosophy for nearly a decade to teach elementary school in rural Austria.
When he returned to Cambridge in 1929, he discovered he had been wrong. Words, he came to see, do not work like photographs. They work like tools. A hammer is not a small saw. A question is not a bad assertion. The meaning of a word is its use — and use changes entirely depending on which language-game is being played.
'How are you?' at a funeral and 'How are you?' on a medical form are the same four words doing entirely different work.
This revised view, developed in his Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953), dismantled half of Western philosophy's assumptions about meaning in one move. Many of the deepest confusions in philosophy, Wittgenstein now thought, come from words being taken out of the game in which they function — made to work in a context where they simply produce nonsense.
He didn't quite call his earlier self a fool. But he came close.