Langland Wittgenstein and the Language Game, Wittgenstein and the Language Game

This article advances Ludwig Wittgenstein’s model of the language game from the Philosophical Investigations as a means of making sense of the deliberate discontinuities in PPl ‘s episodic structure, claiming that L shows words being used and re-used in proprietary and separate senses among ever-changing groups of speakers, each of which is engaged in an ontologically and practically autonomous language game. Will is not existentially committed to any of these groups (e.g., friars preaching, penitents confessing) and so lacks their ‘kynde knowyng’ of what words mean as they are generated in the context of each game. Hence he is shunted from speaker to speaker with little accumulation in meaning unless and until he can figure out what kind of game is satisfactory and proprietary to him, which is tantamount to ascertaining what kind of speaker he is. (ST)