Form of Life
Thus the problem of meaning is always brought up in social practice, in a “speaking situation”. There cannot be language without its use, so it is not possible to talk about meanings without a language community in which the language is used.
Hence, it is perfectly impossible to think that every member of the legal community could have a personal and private secondary language. For these reasons, language cannot be separated from the form of life. On the contrary, language as an activity is only meaningful when connected to the form of life that supports it. Speaking language is the same as participating in a form of life.All this helps us to understand the learning of a language in general, as well as legal language as a specific part of it. Linguistic interaction is possible if, and only if, the speakers share a common cultural background, a form of life in the meaning meant by Wittgenstein and Charles Taylor, who separates two notions, “common” and “general”. What is our common (life) world stands in sharp contrast to that what exists in all individual worlds (Taylor 1976, 220; von Wright 1974, 55).
The example of understanding a foreign tribal community can be interpreted in this way. If an outsider approaches a community and hears its members saying “Grh”, this can be interpreted as a welcoming gesture, an expression of hostility or a sign of complete lack of interest. The answer to these questions is revealed to the outsider once he grasps the background connection, the form of life that supports the expression. If the form of life is completely foreign, a near-unsolvable problem appears: How can we understand a completely foreign culture? (Sandbacka 1987,21).
The foreign culture can only be opened if we manage to get acquainted with its language-games, and this becomes possible if we have a general idea of the way language-games are played.
One cannot be fully detached from the unknown culture but must at least know something before “asking a name”. Further, once one knows something about the alien culture, one can adopt the “internal point of view” and gain an “entrance” to the language of that culture. Metaphorically speaking, the internal point of view presupposes that the language-games must be overlapping, at least to some degree. Things being so, one gradually grows to be involved in the new form of life, which makes it possible, first, to understand the foreign languagegames, and second, maybe, to accept them. Understanding always prevails over acceptance. If one is a member of a certain culture, he or she not only understands and accepts the carrying rules and principles intertwined with that culture, he or she is also committed to them.Language-games are layered in countless ways. A primitive language-game is joined by a first-degree secondary language-game, while this one is joined by a language-game needing further explanations, and so forth (Hintikka 1996a, 339). This “upward” process forms a vast and complex network of language-games that is both horizontal and vertical and family-resembling in both relationships. We gain more and more skills in a language as we learn new language-games that have a family resemblance to the ones we know in advance. We “grow into language” - even though we also “create” language in a limited sense.
As individuals, we cannot create and shape language in a significant way, but the community we are a part of does renew it by creating new language-games and removing old ones. Forms of life change, and we change along with them.
Yet, when referring to the form of life, what does it mean to say that I know things are so - in our case, law having this and that content. This question invites us to the next challenge, which, following Wittgenstein, I call the problem of certainty.