Learning Language
In the philosophy of language, a separation has traditionally been made between the semantics, syntax and pragmatics of language. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s thinking went through a quite radical transformation as he moved from the Tractatus into Philosophical Investigations.
The “later” Wittgenstein was strongly polemic about the conventional way to understand language as a combination of names. One of his best-known examples was St. Augustine’s story about learning language as a child. St. Augustine seems to state that he learned the meaning of words from the way adults used words by pointing at objects (ostensio) and making sounds in different ways. He learned to understand how individual words were the names of certain objects. Learning a language was thus based on naming.According to Wittgenstein, the learning of language does not normally follow St. Augustine's thought. Instead, the learner is like a person who enters a foreign land and tries to discover the rules of the language used in this land that is strange to him. The visitor already knows some language, and on the basis of this knowledge he or she has a facility for understanding the foreign one. A small child learning a language is in a different position. What is taught to him is more about thinking than individual words. One who does not want to be master of any language can at most repeat the words after the teacher. This becomes clear once we think about the way in which some animals can “learn a language”. Here the matter is purely about imitation. We cannot say that an animal has control over that language. Wittgenstein puts his idea in the words “One must already know something before one can ask its name”.
Nothing prevents anyone using a language where words truly represent certain objects. After all, this method is used in language labs, for example.
Nonetheless, this is not a representative example of the way language works and the way one learns a language. What is integral is the meaning of expressions, and this is only revealed in the practical use of language. Thus, the meaning of expressions is the use of them in language. This turns the attention to a new direction (Hertzberg 1976, 126). The important thing is no longer the semantic (or syntactic) function of language, as it was in Tractatus, but the pragmatics of language.In this direction, new problems are obvious. It seems to be impossible to say anything conclusive about language in itself. As mentioned above, language seems to conceal itself in a mist. Nor is it possible to figure out the parts language is comprised of and then reconstruct them “back together”. Faithful to his style, Wittgenstein poses a question: What are the simple parts that constitute a chair? The pieces of wood, of which it is made, or molecules and atoms? “Simple” means that it is not constructed out of anything, and therein lies the problem. “Constructed” in which way? There is absolutely no sense in talking about the simple parts of a chair.