Wittgenstein's Pragmatic Argument Of Language

At first glance, there is nothing precisely political in the late Wittgenstein's works like Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty. However, the famous 'linguistic turn' in philosophy which he initiated both by the ideas expressed in Tractatus and by abandoning them later on did not impact only a realm of linguistics itself (with such notable followers like John Austin and John Searle, to name a few), but also the broad range of the philosophical divisions, political philosophy included.

Late Wittegenstein's texts are written in the very specific (one might even say poetic) language which affects further interpretations and provokes possible misunderstandings. He uses a variety of metaphors and remarkable examples to explain his position concerning a nature of language and human communication. Because of this peculiarity of style such concepts as the language-games and the forms of life that were introduced in Philosophical Investigations do not seem crystal

Wittgenstein's pragmatic account of language

What is characteristic of the Wittgenstein's late philosophical inquiries is that they hardly form any solid and complete theoretical framework in the same fashion as it is in the cases of Hegel or Husserl, for instance. Basically, it is really bold to claim that Wittgenstein built any theory whatsoever (at least in a strict sense). His 'dialogical' writing style that takes in a presentation of a great number of the mundane communicative situations evades a constitution of a coherent theory in favor of a description of how language is used in our everyday environment.

However, a range of the groundbreaking ideas expressed in his major later works Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty became a source of the further manifold interpretations that were integrated in the various theoretical accounts (like those of Habermas and Mouffe). But before turning to an analysis of the derived conceptions it is vital to study original Wittgenstein's