Playing Games with Wittgenstein

Abstract

S TATEN'S ESSAY first offers his own characterization of Wittgenstein, and then attempts to show that my own use of Wittgenstein (in my book The Theory of Literary Criticism) is not consistent with his account; but in so doing he misreads both Wittgenstein's arguments and my own. It is clear enough is at the root of these misreadings: Staten wants to make Wittgenstein seem very much like Derrida.' Whether this does justice to Derrida I leave others to judge; my concern here is with the misrepresentation of Wittgenstein. Staten's initial assertion that Wittgenstein thinks we can all theory and purely describe will surely jolt anyone familiar with the Philosophical Investigations. On its face, that assertion is inconsistent with Wittgenstein's move away from the world of logical atomism and positivism, from Russell's theory of descriptions as well as Ayer's basic experiential propositions, to a quite different one in which language has a more active and varied role than the word description would allow. His notion of language-games, for example, is introduced in part to show that much more is involved in language than describing, and at one point he says quite explicitly that what we call 'descriptions' are instruments for particular uses.2 That is not the utterance of a man who thinks we can banish all theory and purely describe, and a major part of the importance of the Philosophical Investigations lies surely in its being among the most important arguments which attack that belief.