Wittgenstein, Language and Information: “Back to the Rough Ground!” by David Blair. Ann Arbor, MI: Springer, 2006. 358 pp. ISBN Wittgenstein, Language and Information represents a progression of discussion from David Blair’s 1990 work, Language and Representation in Information Retrieval. While Language and Representation focused on how language philosophy, especially the ideas presented by Ludwig Wittgenstein, is an appropriate realm from which to explore meaning in language, Wittgenstein, Language and Information more explicitly examines Wittgenstein’s works and philosophies to understand their relevance to information retrieval. Blair has four aims for this work: to provide an overview of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, to give a detailed explanation of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy of language and mind, to establish the relevance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to problems in information retrieval, and to provide a series of detailed footnotes. The first three aims frame the main sections of the book and build upon one another as Blair takes the reader deeper and deeper into Wittgenstein’s philosophies. The first section gives a basic overview of Wittgenstein’s philosophies, from early to late; the second provides a more thorough grounding in his ideas about language and mind; and the third section brings Wittgenstein’s philosophies together with information retrieval to see how they might elaborate on some of the issues inherent in the latter. Blair does an excellent job providing the introductory information necessary for understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophies. In the second section, his more detailed treatment of Wittgenstein’s later beliefs draws a logical thread through a number of works that cover similar topics yet often read more as a stream of consciousness than an academic treatise. Wittgenstein’s own writing does not follow a formal structure so that each chapter covers its own topic, but tends to bend and flow as he follows one idea until inspiration strikes to follow another. Blair pulls his reader along, providing as straightforward a treatment of Wittgenstein as possible. In the culminating section, Blair examines information retrieval in light of a Wittgensteinian perspective. According to Blair, information retrieval has a number of inherent problems that boil down to the following: while information retrieval systems are quite good at providing access to data, they are not as good at providing access to intellectual content. Information retrieval systems are created by determining a more precise logical use of language than would be used in everyday life. Because the systems require very precise language, they are removed from everyday use and they are thus also removed from the wealth of context from which much of our everyday language is formed. Essentially, the more precise we get with our definitions, the less we are actually talking about the world in which we live. Words acquire much of their meaning from context— how they are used—and context is what is missing in information retrieval systems. The strengths in information retrieval to date have been due to the