THE CONTEMPORARY UNDERSTANDING OF LANGUAGE AND MEANING IN WITTGENSTEIN'S PHILOSOPHY

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 –1951) was considered one of the 20th Century's most important philosophers. He was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is regarded as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century which identifies the relationship between language and reality. It is an attempt to state in a general way the essence of all languages and the essence of the relation between language and reality. He is not at all concerned with the language of daily life and its connections with the empirical world. His focal attention is on the underlying essence of language which has been covered by its superficial appearances. Essence therefore, is the logical structure of language. It is evident that search for something essential and search for something ideal are not different but same. For Wittgenstein, language is a practical human activity - a form of social practice. In this sense language has got some extra linguistic characteristics. The focal attention of the present discussion is to illustrate how these characteristics of language are ultimately determined by practice. The paper focuses to show language and meaning through language-game. Language practiced in different contexts, such as, story-telling, translating, quarreling, advising, ordering and so on are different from one another and none is identical with mere description. Explanations of one practice of language overlooking a whole host of other uses make our approach to language grossly one sided and highly unrealistic and artificial. According to Wittgenstein, the more narrowly we examine actual language; the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. To consider that language has only one use seems to be a myth if we look at the various uses of language. Language performs innumerable functions which cannot be accommodated into one category of any kind