I’ve written two articles on Wittgenstein lately - one on mind, one on language - but his most important idea is perhaps best understood by contrasting it with what many Wittgenstein fans still get wrong. Here’s a summary.

One story goes that the world consists of human-independent objects - ones which are manifest to us, like tables and chairs and flowers and fire - but there’s some sort of difficulty with language latching onto them. We see these things, but we can’t refer to them directly (as if sticking name labels on them) because the social aspect of language is just a bit weird.

Note that this is not about such objects being physically fundamental, it’s just about there being emergent objects at all, which appear to us as objects that we feel like we name but technically don’t.

So (the story continues), Wittgenstein’s use theory of meaning says that we come at the problem sideways, grasping onto objects via our practical intentions towards them. ‘Table’ arises at the intersection of all sorts of practical intentions, sure - it’s the thing we sit at and eat at and argue at and so on - but once we’ve got that intersection, we’ve got the table itself, trapped like a rabbit in a net.

But this story encapsulates the very reifying impulse which Wittgenstein wanted to undermine. It follows him to the edge of the abyss, looks down, then chickens out. The whole point of the use theory of meaning is that there’s nothing in the net.

“What do you mean, when we see the table right there in front of us and speak about it, even if indirectly?” Because language doesn’t start with words gripping onto things we see, it starts with what we see.

Already as we speechlessly interact with the world, we’re constructing the conceptual limits of language. The table as we see it is already a bundle of practical intentions - we see it as that which we could sit at and eat at etc. - and if we could somehow strip away all of our personal motives, there would be no neutral residue of an ‘object’ left to name.

The ‘meaning’ in the ‘use theory of meaning’ ranges over our entire way of life, not just the sounds we make with our mouths. It says that you don’t live in a world of objects, you live in a world of actions, and every attempt to separate language from knowledge collapses as just another language game.

From Plato down to Kant and on to the logical positivists, the feeling of a Form or of a thing-in-itself or of a sense impression is just your monkey brain sifting and separating the environment into opportunities for action. It doesn’t find objects as if they’re already there, it constructs them as a memory of past experience, each one a theory of its own behaviour projected onto existence.

Take away the behaviour and you take away the world.