CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background of Study
Two important questions in 20th century analytic philosophy have been asked are” How we are able tom say or mean anything with signs, symbols and sounds?” What exactly is the meaning of these signs, symbols and sounds?.
But why in the word would philosophies become so focused on language and meaning? One reason perhaps is that an enormous range of issues are touched by looking at language and important philosophical insights can be won by doing this. Another reasons is the immense influence a number of philosophers who were interested in language and on everyone else doing philosophy especially in Britain and America1.
Language plays an enormously important role in our interactions with other people and with the world. We employ various words and concepts to talk about objects ( tables and flowers), properties ( colour and shapes) and relations ( the flower is on the table, the pain is in my aim). We express Feelings ask questions, give commands, tells jokes tell stories, song and so on. How is that we re able to do all of these things with language? . How is it that certain signs, symbols and sounds are meaningful and what exactly is their meaning? Is the world “cat” meaningful and what exactly is their meaning? Is the world “cat” meaningful because of what it refers to namely those furry, meowing fleabags some of us have as pets? Further, does the world determine what our concept are to be? That is with language do we simply try to mirror the various kinds of objects, properties, and relations that exists or is he word “gen” to different ways of conceptualizing it?
Such questions as these vexed Wittgenstein. He tried to answer them in his first work, “the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus” he later came to see a number of shortcoming in that work” answer. He expressed his changing ideas in a variety of note books and unfinished manuscripts which were eventually published in the decades after his death. The best known is the philosophical investigation, a book he was preparing for publications at the time of his death in 1951.
The Crux of Wittgenstein argument is that language pictures reality and that the limit of his language is the limit of his world and that most philosophical problems rest on misunderstanding engendered by language.
This project is therefore an attempt to have an insight into Wittgenstein theories of language. This is with a view to separating sense and Nonsense. It is against this background that this project is being carried out.
1.2Statement of Problem
For the analytic philosophies , language issue is always a problematic one, and there are quite some good dose of them here.
In the first place, we shall grapple with the problem of Wittgenstein’s understanding of language . Wittgenstein’s claims that the limit of his language is the limit of his world can not picture reality holistically because reality encompasses language. It is not true that there is one to one correspondence with reality.