Ludwig Wittgenstein (Investigations-era)
1929-1951 · Philosophy of Language · Household name
In his later work Wittgenstein turned on his own first book, the Tractatus, and its theory that a sentence pictures a fact. Stop asking what a word means and watch how people use it inside a language-game. Games share no single feature, only a family likeness, and so do most of our concepts. His Philosophical Investigations treats philosophy as a cure for confusions we talk ourselves into.
Signature
The position Late Wittgenstein is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Universals
- leans Nominalism
- Language
- Language-Game / Semantic Inflation
Positions on the 1 axes the sources answer
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
19 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Late Wittgenstein refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Agnosticism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Perception
- Gestalt Perception / Symbolic Forms
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Pragmatic Test
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Other
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Language
- Language-Game / Semantic Inflation
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Human Nature
- Socially Constructed
What is human nature?