Abstract

Wittgenstein's illustrative comparison of linguistic activities with games, his defence of a single term for items having no more than a ‘family resemblance’ and not even one common distinguishing feature, and his objections to any proposal seeming to imply an unshareably private language appear to have been accepted as interesting and important if not always as persuasive in English language philosophy. But these themes, and others introduced along with them are most often taken as separate items, belonging to distinct compartments of philosophy, and justice is not done to their inter-connections and coherence