Context and Meaning

Learning Objectives

By completing this book, you will be able to:

1. Explain the transition from the early to the later Wittgenstein and why the abandonment of the picture theory of meaning was a turning point in the philosophy of language.

2. Articulate the thesis that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, and apply it to diagnose misunderstandings in which the parties use the same words with different meanings.

3. Analyze communicative situations as language games with specific rules, roles, and purposes that determine what counts as a valid move.

4. Apply the concept of family resemblance to explain why many key concepts lack an essential definition, and how to operate productively with that indeterminacy.

5. Identify when a disagreement is linguistic (the parties use the same words under different rules) and when it is substantive (the parties disagree about facts or values).

6. Diagnose the contextual gap between human communication and interaction with AI, and design strategies for reducing it without losing the richness of natural language.

1. The Two Wittgensteins: A Revolution Against Himself

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the only philosopher in history who produced two complete and opposed philosophies, and the second was a deliberate refutation of the first. Understanding this turn is essential because it illuminates an intellectual temptation into which we fall constantly: the temptation to believe that language works in only one way and that there is an essence hidden behind the words waiting to be discovered.

1.1 The Early Wittgenstein: Language as Mirror

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the young Wittgenstein proposed a picture theory of meaning: propositions are logical pictures of facts. Language works because its structures mirror the structure of the world. Each name corresponds to an object; each sentence represents a possible state of affairs. Meaning is the fixed relation between the sign and what the sign represents. It is an elegant, rigorous, and profoundly mistaken vision—as Wittgenstein himself would come to acknowledge.

The picture theory is the sophisticated philosophical version of an assumption that seems like common sense: words have fixed meanings, like labels stuck to things. ‘Chair’ means chair, ‘table’ means table, ‘red’ means red. Learning a language is learning which label goes with which thing. Misunderstandings occur when someone uses the wrong label. The solution is to define words precisely.

This assumption pervades interaction with AI. The idea that if we found the right words—the perfect prompt—the system would understand exactly what we want is the picture theory applied to prompt engineering. The later Wittgenstein demonstrates why this idea is fundamentally insufficient.

1.2 The Later Wittgenstein: Meaning Is Use

The Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) is the most devastating self-criticism in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein systematically dismantles the vision of the Tractatus and proposes something radically different: the meaning of a word is not the object it represents but its use in the language.

The analogy Wittgenstein uses is extraordinarily illuminating: think of words as tools in a toolbox. A hammer, a screwdriver, a ruler, a pot of glue. What do all the tools have in common? Only that they are tools—that they are used to do things. But what each one does, how it is used, what it is for, is radically different. To ask ‘what is the essence of a tool?’ is a badly formed question. In the same way, to ask ‘what is the essential meaning of a word?’ is to look for something that does not exist.

“The word ‘game.’ What do chess, football, roulette, hide-and-seek, word games, war games, video games, the Olympic Games, and a tea set have in common? To try to find a common essence—something they all share and that defines them as ‘games’—is to chase a phantom. Some have rules, others do not. Some are competitive, others cooperative. Some use a ball, others a board, others nothing. There is no single property present in all of them and absent from the non-games. What there is, is a network of partial, overlapping, criss-crossing similarities.”

2. Language Games: Language Has Multiple Uses

The central concept of the Philosophical Investigations is the language game (Sprachspiel). Wittgenstein uses it to capture a crucial idea: language does not have a single function but multiple functions, each governed by different rules, with different purposes, in different contexts.

A language game is a concrete linguistic activity, inseparable from the practice in which it occurs. Giving orders, making descriptions, reporting events, speculating, telling jokes, greeting, praying, cursing, thanking, apologizing—each is a different language game, with different rules about what counts as a valid move, who can play, what response is expected, and what constitutes success or failure.

“Imagine the word ‘sharp’ in three contexts: (1) A sergeant asks the platoon: ‘Look sharp?’ The game is military; ‘sharp’ means ready for action; the only valid answer is ‘Sir, yes sir!’ or silence; there is no room for ‘more or less.’ (2) A mother says to her child: ‘You're very sharp.’ The game is educational-affective; ‘sharp’ means intelligent; the expected response is to smile or to continue the praised behavior. (3) A colleague says in a meeting: ‘Very sharp, what you did there.’ The game may be ironic; ‘sharp’ can mean cunning with a negative connotation; the response depends on whether the irony is detected. Three uses of the same word. Three different games. Three incompatible meanings. The dictionary does not help you; context does.”

2.1 Rules of the Game: Explicit and Implicit

Every language game has rules, but most of the rules are neither written nor explicit. They are learned by participating, observing, making mistakes, and being corrected—exactly as the rules of a children's game are learned. A child does not read a manual on ‘how to play hide-and-seek’; they join the game, imitate the others, are corrected when they break a rule, and gradually internalize the practice.

Wittgenstein insists that following a rule is not a private activity, nor a purely mental one. You cannot follow a rule in private, because following a rule implies the possibility of following it incorrectly, and that possibility requires a community that establishes what counts as correct and incorrect. The rules of language are social practices, not mental representations.

“In the language game of a corporate meeting, there are implicit rules nobody states: do not interrupt the boss directly; frame criticisms as ‘suggestions’; when you say ‘interesting’ you may be saying ‘terrible’; ‘we're going to consider it’ frequently means ‘no’; and ‘we need to get aligned’ means that somebody disagrees and the conflict has to be resolved. A new participant who does not know these rules can say the semantically correct words and violate the game pragmatically. The same happens with an AI system that produces formally correct corporate language but does not ‘play the game’ appropriately.”

3. Family Resemblance: Not Everything Has an Essence

One of the most profound consequences of the later Wittgenstein's thought is the concept of family resemblance (Familienähnlichkeit). The idea is that many concepts we use every day—and that we believe we understand clearly—have no essential definition, no set of necessary and sufficient properties shared by every member of the concept. Instead, the members of the concept are connected by a network of partial and overlapping similarities, just as the members of a family share features without any single feature being present in all of them.

“Observe the members of a large family: some share the nose, others the eyes, others the build. Ana has her grandfather's nose and her mother's eyes. Pedro has his grandfather's eyes and his father's build. María has her mother's nose and her grandfather's build. There is no feature they all share, yet they resemble one another. In the same way, ‘game’ has no single essence. Chess and poker share competition but differ in chance. Poker and roulette share chance but differ in skill. Roulette and solitaire share being playable alone but differ in the presence of an opponent. And yet all of them are ‘games.’”

This idea has enormous consequences for Intention Architecture. Many of the concepts users employ in their requests—‘innovation,’ ‘quality,’ ‘agility,’ ‘efficiency,’ ‘strategy,’ ‘leadership’—are family resemblance concepts. They have no single definition shared by everyone who uses them. When a user says ‘we need to be more innovative,’ they are not using a term with a precise meaning; they are invoking a diffuse concept that means different things in different contexts.

3.1 Consequences for Communication

Family resemblance explains a phenomenon every professional has experienced: two people argue heatedly using the same words and discover, too late, that each understood something different. It was not a disagreement about facts or values; it was a linguistic disagreement disguised as a substantive one. Wittgenstein gives us the tools to diagnose this situation.

“An executive team debates whether the company should ‘prioritize quality.’ Everyone agrees. But ‘quality’ for the product director means a fluid and intuitive user experience. For the engineering director it means robust code with 95% test coverage. For the finance director it means reducing returns and complaints to a minimum. For the marketing director it means premium perception in the market. They all say ‘quality’; none of them says the same thing. The consensus is illusory because the concept has family resemblance, not a common essence.”

The Wittgensteinian solution is not to look for the correct definition of ‘quality’ (there is none) but to make the different uses explicit: ‘When you say quality, what specifically would you observe if we had it?’ This question operationalizes the family resemblance concept and connects directly with the correct formulation of problems from Module II.

4. Forms of Life: The Ultimate Context

Language games do not float in a vacuum. They are embedded in what Wittgenstein calls forms of life (Lebensformen): the patterns of activity, custom, institution, need, and convention that constitute the existence of a community. Language is not understood separately from these practices; it is a constitutive part of them.

This sentence is perhaps Wittgenstein's most quoted and most misinterpreted. It does not refer to a linguistic barrier—if the lion spoke English, we would still not understand him. The reason is that the meaning of language depends on a shared form of life, and a lion's form of life is so radically different from ours that his words would lack the anchoring necessary to be comprehended. We share no needs, habits, social relations, institutions, or history with a lion. Without that shared basis, words are sounds.

This observation is directly relevant to AI. An AI system processes language without participating in a form of life. It has no needs, no body, no history, no social relations, no mortality. It can manipulate linguistic symbols with enormous sophistication, but the experiential basis that anchors those symbols to lived meanings is absent. This does not mean AI is useless—it means that the gap between the meaning the user assumes and the ‘meaning’ the system processes is a structural phenomenon, not a bug that will be resolved with better models.

4.1 Professional Contexts as Forms of Life

Every profession, every industry, every organization constitutes a partial form of life with its own language games. Medical vocabulary, legal, financial, technological, military—each works as a language game with its own rules, and mastering that vocabulary is not learning definitions but learning to play the game.

“The word ‘performance’ in different professional forms of life: For a software engineer: latency, throughput, memory consumption. For an investment manager: return on investment, alpha, beta. For an organizational psychologist: workplace productivity, engagement, satisfaction. For a sports coach: records, times, power output. Each use is legitimate. Each creates a different language game. An AI system that receives ‘we need to improve performance’ without professional context will respond to the wrong game—or to a generic game that serves nobody.”

Here we connect with the epistemology of Module II: what Schön calls ‘knowing-in-action’—knowing how without knowing what, tacit knowledge, embodied expertise—is exactly what Wittgenstein would describe as mastering a language game: not knowing the rule but knowing how to follow the rule in practice. The expert professional does not consult definitions; they play the game.

5. The Private Language Argument and Meaning as Social Practice

One of the most celebrated and debated arguments of the Investigations is the argument against the possibility of a private language. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine someone attempting to create a language for describing their inner sensations—sensations only that person can experience. This person decides to call a particular sensation they have ‘S.’ The next time they have the sensation, they call it ‘S’ again. But how do they know it is the same sensation? They can only compare their present memory of the sensation with the present sensation—like someone who buys several copies of the same newspaper to verify whether the news is true.

Wittgenstein's point is not that private sensations do not exist. It is that the meaning of a word cannot be grounded in a purely private experience, because there would be no independent criterion of correctness: you could not distinguish between ‘using the word correctly’ and ‘believing you are using it correctly.’ Meaning requires the possibility of external verification, and that requires a community of speakers with shared practices.

5.1 Consequences for the Formulation of Intention

The private language argument has direct consequences for Intention Architecture. When a user says ‘I know what I want’ but cannot articulate it, they may be falling into the trap of private language: they have an inner experience (an intuition, a vision, a desire) that seems clear to them but which, not being anchored in shared practices, cannot be communicated effectively.

“An entrepreneur says: ‘I want the app to feel premium.’ ‘Premium’ here functions as a quasi-private term: the entrepreneur has a concrete aesthetic and emotional experience when he thinks of ‘premium,’ but that experience is his own. For the designer, ‘premium’ can mean serif typography and dark colors. For the developer, it can mean smooth animations and fast loading. For the end user, it can mean exclusivity and a high price. The concept has no shared meaning until it is operationalized: ‘what would you observe in an app that feels premium? Give me three concrete examples.’”

This connects with Module I: declared vs. real intention. Frequently, the gap between what the user says they want and what they really want is not an act of dishonesty but a limit of private language: the inner experience of the intention is richer and more ambiguous than any linguistic formulation. To articulate an intention is to translate a private experience into a public language, and that translation always loses something.

6. To Understand Is to Know How to Go On

Wittgenstein offers a definition of understanding that dismantles the conventional view. To understand is not to have a correct mental representation. To understand is to know how to go on—to know what to do next in an appropriate way within the practice.

“What does it mean to ‘understand’ the sequence 2, 4, 6, 8…? It is not having the formula ‘2n’ in your head. It is being able to continue: 10, 12, 14. Someone who says ‘the formula is 2n’ but then writes 10, 13, 17 does not ‘understand’ the sequence, even though they have the correct formula in some sense. And someone who cannot state the formula but always writes the correct number does understand it. Understanding is a practical capacity, not a mental state.”

This reformulates the fundamental question of human-AI interaction. The question is not ‘does the AI understand meaning?’ (a question about internal states, which is unresolvable and perhaps incoherent). The Wittgensteinian question is: ‘does the AI know how to go on appropriately?’ And this is a practical, verifiable, and useful question.

Observe the consequence for Intention Architecture: your objective is not for the system to ‘understand’ your intention in some deep and mysterious sense. Your objective is for it to know how to go on in a way that serves your purpose. And that depends not on the right words but on providing sufficient context about the language game for the system to play its turn appropriately.

7. Practical Application: The Contextual Gap in Interaction with AI

7.1 Case Study: Three Forms of Life, One Word

Marcos, VP of operations at a logistics company, calls a meeting with three directors and announces: “We need to digitize our operations.” He then takes the same request to an AI system.

What Marcos says: ‘Digitize operations’—an apparently clear phrase.

What Marcos wants: To reduce operating costs by 20% within 18 months—a concrete end he does not mention because he assumes that ‘digitize’ implies it.

What the directors understand: The IT director understands: migrate to the cloud, implement APIs, automate manual processes—her language game is technological. The warehouse director understands: IoT sensors, automated picking, real-time inventory—his game is logistical. The HR director understands: training in digital tools, resistance to change, management of the impact on jobs—her game is organizational.

What the system understands: It processes the locution ‘digitize operations’ and, without the context of a form of life, generates a generic response mixing technological, logistical, and organizational elements without prioritizing any specific language game.

Wittgensteinian analysis of the communicative failure:

‘Digitize’ is a family resemblance concept. It has no common essence across its uses. Migrating to the cloud, installing sensors, and training staff are activities so different that calling them by the same word obscures more than it illuminates.

Each director operates in a different language game. The rules of what counts as ‘digitizing,’ which metrics matter, which risks to prioritize, and what counts as success are different in each game. The verbal consensus masks the practical divergence.

The real end is never articulated. Marcos wants to reduce costs by 20%, but he uses ‘digitize’ because he believes it is the means—an ends-means confusion from Module II, encoded linguistically. Marcos's form of life (a VP of operations under pressure from the board) determines what ‘digitize’ means for him, but that form of life is not shared by his interlocutors.

The AI system lacks the necessary form of life. It has no experience of what it means to run a logistics company, what constraints it has, what has been tried before, what organizational culture prevails. Without that background, it generates coherent text disconnected from real practice.

“Wittgensteinian reformulation: instead of ‘digitize operations,’ Marcos should specify: ‘I need to reduce operating costs by 20% within 18 months. Currently, 60% of our warehouse work is manual, we have 3 data systems that do not communicate with one another, and our clients are asking for real-time tracking that we cannot offer. We have an IT team of 8 people, an approved budget of $500K, and a union that opposes automation if it means layoffs. What specific interventions do you recommend, prioritized by cost impact and feasibility given these constraints?’ This reformulation translates the private intention into an operationalized public language, makes the language game explicit, and provides sufficient context about the form of life for the continuation to be appropriate.”

7.2 A Contextual Analysis Protocol

1. Identify the language game. In which game is the user communicating? Is it technical, strategic, emotional, exploratory, a negotiation? The rules of the game determine what the words mean.

2. Detect family resemblance concepts. Are there key terms that can mean different things to different people? If there are, operationalize: ‘what would you observe if this were fulfilled?’

3. Reconstruct the form of life. Who is the user? What professional, organizational, or personal practice gives context to their request? What pressures, constraints, histories, and expectations configure what their words mean for them?

4. Evaluate the contextual gap. How much context is missing for the continuation to be appropriate? Is the available context sufficient to play the game, or does it need to be completed?

5. Make the implicit explicit. Translate private language into public criteria. Convert family resemblance concepts into operational specifications. Articulate the rules of the game that are assumed but not stated.

6. Calibrate the continuation. The response must be appropriate to the specific game. Not a generic response that could serve any game, but one that demonstrates competence in the game being played.

8. Glossary of Key Terms

9. Final Reflection and Self-Assessment

Before advancing to the next topic (Semiotics and Metaphor), verify that you can apply Wittgensteinian thinking as a tool of contextual analysis.

10. Bibliography and Recommended Readings

Essential Readings

• Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen). Blackwell.

• Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. [To understand what the later Wittgenstein is reacting against]

• Hacker, P.M.S. (1996). Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy. Blackwell.

Complementary Readings

• Kenny, A. (2006). Wittgenstein. Blackwell. [An accessible introduction]

• McGinn, M. (1997). Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations. Routledge. [A reading guide]

• Kripke, S. (1982). Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Harvard University Press. [An influential and controversial interpretation]

• Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason. Oxford University Press. [Wittgenstein and the human condition]

• Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. Basic Books. [Connects with tacit knowledge, Module II]

Next Topic

The next book closes Module IV with Semiotics and Metaphor: how signs construct meaning beyond verbal language (Eco, Peirce) and how metaphors are not ornaments but cognitive structures that determine how we think and act (Lakoff and Johnson). If Wittgenstein showed you that meaning depends on use within concrete forms of life, Lakoff and Johnson will show you that many of those uses are governed by conceptual metaphors operating below the conscious level—and that the metaphor you choose to frame a problem determines which solutions you can see.