Wittgenstein’s Concept of Linguistic Confusion: How Language Games Dissolve Philosophical Problems

Last updated: October 19, 2026

For Ludwig Wittgenstein, linguistic confusion is where many, perhaps most, philosophical problems come from: we get stuck on the way our words work and mistake that for hard facts about the world. In the Philosophical Investigations (published in 1953, two years after his death) he calls philosophy “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (§109, in G.E.M. Anscombe’s translation) and sums up its aim in one image: “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (§309). His tools for the job were language games, the idea that meaning is use, and a lot of patient attention to how we actually talk.

That is a bold claim, and the meme captures how it can look from the outside: a smug cartoon face behind a desk sign that reads “Professional philosopher”, captioned “Me after referring to a philosophical problem as linguistic confusion”. Wittgenstein’s critics said much the same thing, only less politely. Whether he was right depends on what “linguistic confusion” means, how language games work and which problems actually dissolve under close inspection.

Seeing Nobody on the Road: What Linguistic Confusion Means

Linguistic confusion (sometimes called language confusion) is a misunderstanding caused by language itself: an ambiguous word, or a grammatical form that suggests something false about the thing being described. Wittgenstein’s claim was that many of philosophy’s deepest puzzles are confusions of exactly this kind.

The simplest examples are jokes. In chapter seven of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Alice says, “I see nobody on the road,” and the King replies that he wishes he had such eyes, “To be able to see Nobody!” The sentence “I see nobody” has the same grammatical shape as “I see Bob”, so the King treats “nobody” as the name of a very hard-to-spot person. Nobody is harmed, because everyone sees the trick. Wittgenstein’s suspicion was that philosophers fall for subtler versions of the same trick without noticing, and then spend centuries looking for the thing a word seems to name. The Carroll example is ours, but Wittgenstein would have recognised the move: in §111 of the Investigations he asks why a grammatical joke strikes us as deep, and answers that this is the depth of philosophy.

A classic illustration comes from Augustine. In the Confessions (XI, 14), Augustine says that he knows what time is as long as nobody asks him, but once he is asked to explain it, he no longer knows. Wittgenstein quotes the passage in §89 of the Investigations and points out that nobody would say this about a question in natural science, such as the specific gravity of hydrogen. We use the word “time” perfectly well: we ask what time it is, complain that time flies and agree to meet in an hour. The puzzle only appears when we ask “What is time?” and expect the answer to name an object, the way “What is gold?” does. In the Blue Book, dictated to his Cambridge students in the early 1930s, he says that questions like “What is length?” and “What is meaning?” “produce in us a mental cramp”.

One of Wittgenstein’s own words for this was Verwirrung, confusion. In §132 of the Investigations he writes that the confusions which occupy philosophers arise “when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work” (in G.E.M. Anscombe’s translation; the German text of the Investigations is freely available from the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project). Earlier, in §38, he puts it more cheerfully: philosophical problems arise “when language goes on holiday”. Words that do honest work in everyday life get taken out of that work and asked to carry metaphysical weight they were never built for.

The Young Wittgenstein Thought He Had Solved Philosophy

The early Wittgenstein already blamed philosophy’s problems on language, but his cure was logic: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German 1921, English 1922) tried to show the hidden logical structure that every meaningful sentence must have, and to rule everything else out as nonsense.

The preface says so directly. The book, Wittgenstein writes, shows that the way philosophical problems are formulated rests on “the misunderstanding of the logic of our language”. In proposition 4.003 he adds that most philosophical propositions and questions are “not false, but senseless”, and in 4.0031 that “All philosophy is Critique of language”. Philosophy, by 4.112, is not a theory but an activity, the clarification of thoughts. The famous last line, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, ends this programme and points beyond it. What cannot be said may still show itself, and Wittgenstein calls it “the mystical” (6.522). Even the book’s own sentences, he admits in 6.54, are a ladder the reader must throw away after climbing it. We have looked at the nearby line about the limits of language in our post on Wittgenstein: The limits of language are the limits of my world.

Wittgenstein took his own result seriously. The preface declares that the problems “have in essentials been finally solved”, adding in the next breath how little is achieved by solving them. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy and became an elementary school teacher in rural Austria, where his methods were strict, unpopular and apparently effective. The job ended badly. According to The Paris Review, after about six years of teaching he hit a sickly pupil named Haidbauer, who collapsed; Wittgenstein resigned before a hearing cleared him, and years later he confessed to friends that he had lied at it.

Language Games: Why Wittgenstein Treated Words as Tools, Not Labels

A language game is any activity in which language is used, together with the actions it is woven into. Wittgenstein first used the term in the Blue Book and made it the core of his later philosophy of language in the Investigations, and it marks the clearest difference from his early work: the Tractatus treats language as one hidden logical structure that mirrors the world, the Investigations as a crowd of practices with no single essence.

He returned to Cambridge in 1929, as the IEP puts it, recognising that he had more work to do. The Investigations opens with a quotation from Augustine describing how a child learns language: adults point at objects and say their names. Wittgenstein’s first move is to take that picture at its word. In §2 he imagines a builder and an assistant whose whole language consists of four words, “block”, “pillar”, “slab” and “beam”. The builder calls out a word, the assistant brings the matching stone. For this little language, Augustine’s picture works. For ours, it covers a small corner at best. In §7 he gives the term its definition: he will call “the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” the language game.

In §23 he lists what else we do with words: giving orders, describing an object, reporting an event, making up a story, play-acting, guessing riddles, telling a joke, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. The point of the word “game”, he says, is to stress that speaking a language is part of an activity, “or of a form of life”. A form of life is the shared background of activities, needs and agreements in which a language is at home, which is why §19 says that to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

In §11 he compares words to the tools in a toolbox: hammer, pliers, saw, screwdriver, ruler, glue pot. Their functions are as varied as the tools’, but words look alike on the page, and that uniform appearance is what misleads us. In §27 he makes the same point with exclamations: “Water!”, “Away!”, “Ow!”, “Help!” Calling these names of objects would be strange. Think of “Water!” shouted in a desert, by a waiter or at a house fire: three different moves in three different games.

The word “game” was chosen with care, because games are his best example of a concept without a single essence. Board games, card games, ball games and the Olympic Games share no one feature that all of them have and nothing else has. Some involve winning, some luck, some skill, some none of these. Instead, Wittgenstein says in §66, we find a network of similarities that overlap and criss-cross, and he tells the reader “Don’t think, but look!” In §67 he names this pattern “family resemblance”, after the way members of a family resemble each other in build, eye colour or gait without sharing one defining trait. If you go looking for the essence of “game”, “art” or “knowledge” and cannot find it, the lesson may be that there is nothing to find, not that you have looked badly.

Meaning Is Use, in Most Cases: “The Meaning of a Word Is Its Use”

One of Wittgenstein’s best-known sentences comes from the Investigations, not the Tractatus: for a large class of cases, though not all, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (§43). Meaning is the role a word plays in our practices, with no extra object attached.

The qualification is easy to skip and important. Wittgenstein is not offering a general theory of meaning; the IEP stresses that §43 should not be read that way, and he explicitly limits it to “a large class of cases”. In the same section he adds that the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer. What he is rejecting is the picture in which every word stands for something, the way a name stands for its bearer, and understanding a word means knowing what it stands for. On his view, you understand “checkmate”, “hello” or “five” when you can use them correctly in the relevant game.

The very first section of the Investigations makes the point with a shopping trip: someone hands a shopkeeper a slip reading “five red apples”, the shopkeeper counts up to five and takes out an apple at each number, and when the imagined objector asks what the meaning of the word “five” is, Wittgenstein answers that no such thing was in question, only how the word is used.

Applied to philosophy, the slogan becomes a test. When a word like “time”, “mind” or “meaning” starts producing puzzles, look at how it is actually used, in the places where it works without trouble. In §116 he describes the method in one sentence: we bring words back “from their metaphysical to their everyday use”. The puzzle about time does not get an answer this way. It loses its grip.

The Beetle in a Box: Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument

The beetle in the box (§293) is Wittgenstein’s thought experiment against the idea that words for sensations, like “pain”, get their meaning from a private inner object that only the speaker can see.

Imagine that everyone has a box with something in it that they call a “beetle”. Nobody can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says they know what a beetle is only by looking at their own. It could be that everyone has something different in their box, or that the thing keeps changing, or even that a box is empty. And yet the word “beetle” works perfectly well in their conversations. Wittgenstein’s conclusion is that the thing in the box plays no part in the language game at all: whatever it is, it “cancels out”. If we model the grammar of sensation words on “object and name”, he says, the object drops out as irrelevant. That does not turn the sensation into nothing. In §304 he insists it is “not a something, but not a nothing either!” His target is the picture of a private label stuck onto an inner item, and the meaning of “pain” is learned and checked in the shared game of wincing, complaining, comforting and treating.

This passage belongs to the so-called private language argument (roughly §§243 to 315). In the related diary case (§258), someone writes “S” in a diary whenever a certain sensation recurs, but whatever seems right to them is right, which means there is no “right” here at all. As the IEP summarises it, such a “language” turns out to be no language at all. The argument has produced a large secondary literature, surveyed in the SEP entry on private language. Saul Kripke’s influential 1982 book argued that the real argument lies earlier, in the sections on following a rule, and read it as a sceptical paradox with a sceptical solution; the IEP calls this ingenious but doubtful as an interpretation of Wittgenstein. It is also easy to overstate. Wittgenstein does not deny that people have sensations; he denies that their words get meaning by pointing at them privately.

Philosophy as Therapy: Showing the Fly the Way Out

In the later Wittgenstein, philosophy does not build theories. It describes how language is used until the confusion that produced a problem disappears, and he compares this to therapy.

The Investigations says this in several short, much-quoted sections. Philosophy is a battle against bewitchment by language (§109). Its results are the discovery of plain nonsense and of “bumps” the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language (§119). It may not interfere with the actual use of language and, in the end, “leaves everything as it is” (§124). The clarity it aims at is complete, but that only means the problems “should completely disappear” (§133). There is no single method of philosophy, he adds in the same section, but there are methods, “like different therapies”. And in §255: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.”

The fly-bottle of §309 is the best summary. A fly trapped in a bottle with an open neck keeps buzzing against the glass, because the way out is the one direction it does not try. On this view, the philosopher’s job is to show the trapped thinker where the exit was all along, by what §127 calls assembling reminders for a particular purpose. For Augustine’s puzzle, the reminders are the ordinary sentences in which “time” works without trouble. That is also why the meme’s smugness misses something. Done properly, the therapy is slow and specific, case by case, and it takes the problem seriously enough to trace exactly where the language went on holiday.

Whether the early and later Wittgenstein are really two different philosophers is itself disputed. The traditional view sees a sharp break between the logic of the Tractatus and the language games of the Investigations. A newer “resolute” reading, discussed in the SEP, argues that the therapeutic aim was already there in the early book. Most readers on both sides accept one continuity: philosophy as a critique of language.

Smug or Right? The Case Against Dissolving Problems

Wittgenstein’s critics argued that calling problems “linguistic confusion” can be a way of avoiding them, and some of their objections still land.

One confrontation was loud enough to get its own book, David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s Wittgenstein’s Poker (2001). In October 1946 Karl Popper read a paper titled “Are there Philosophical Problems?” at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge, where Wittgenstein was chairman. According to Popper’s account in his autobiography Unended Quest (1976), Wittgenstein brandished a poker, demanded an example of a moral rule, and Popper answered: “Not to threaten visiting speakers with pokers.” Wittgenstein left the room. Other witnesses remembered it differently, some credit the quip to Russell, and the University of Cambridge’s history of the club notes that opinion is still divided over exactly what happened. The question in the title of Popper’s paper is the serious part: Popper held that there are genuine philosophical problems, not just puzzles about language.

Bertrand Russell, who had championed the Tractatus, was harsher. In My Philosophical Development (1959) he wrote that the later Wittgenstein “seems to have grown tired of serious thinking” and invented a doctrine that made it unnecessary. The same year, Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things attacked linguistic philosophy as a whole, from Wittgenstein himself to the ordinary language philosophers at Oxford around Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin, who tried to settle philosophical problems by close attention to how words are used in everyday speech. Russell wrote the preface, and when Ryle, as editor of the journal Mind, decided not to have the book reviewed, Russell protested in The Times, setting off a long exchange of letters and an editorial in the paper.

There is a fair case on both sides. Some problems arguably do dissolve under Wittgenstein’s treatment: the hunt for the one essence of “game”, and, for many readers, the worry about how we can know what “pain” means in someone else’s mouth. Others, critics reply, are not made of words alone. Whether we have free will or what we owe to strangers does not seem to go away once we have described how “free” and “owe” are used. The IEP notes that ordinary language philosophy has fallen somewhat out of favour and that Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical stance has made him rather unfashionable in parts of the profession. Even so, plenty of philosophers who reject his conclusions still borrow his test: before trying to answer a deep question, check whether the question itself is well formed. Wittgenstein’s reply to the smug-face meme might be that this check is the hard part, and that nobody gets to skip it by printing a desk sign.

For the bigger question of whether the words we have shape the thoughts we can think, read How Language Shapes Thought: Exploring Wittgenstein’s Philosophy and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.