The Life of Concepts: Wittgenstein and the Morphology of Meaning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4396/20260609Keywords:
Wittgenstein, grammar, morphology, variation, mutationAbstract
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy can be read as treating language less as a fixed logical structure than as a historically sustained practice of use. This paper offers a morphological reading of that shift. Meaning persists not through timeless form but through adaptive repetition within practice. Variation names drift within an existing grammar; mutation names the point at which such drift stabilises as a new rule of use. Through readings of the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, the paper argues that grammar is sustained by the interplay of natural reaction, training, and historical sedimentation. On this view, description tracks the continuity of concepts through alteration. Wittgenstein’s later method thus presents language as dynamic without relativising it, historical without historicism, and rule-governed without reducing it to fixed abstraction.
Downloads
References
Canguilhem, Georges (1943), Le normal et le pathologique, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1966 (The Normal and the Pathological, trans. by C. R. Fawcett, Zone Books, New York 1989).
Cavell, Stanley (1979), The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Diamond, Cora (1991), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
Foucault, Michel (1969), L’archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, Paris (The Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. by A. M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, New York 1972).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1790), Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, Ettinger, Gotha (Metamorphosis of Plants, transl. by D. Miller, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2009).
Kripke, Saul A. (1982), Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
McDowell, John (1994), Mind and World, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1921), Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, Verlag Unesma, Leipzig (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, transl. by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, Routledge, London 2001).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953), Philosophische Untersuchungen, Basil Blackwell, Oxford (Philosophical Investigations, transl. by G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed., Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1967).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958), The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969), Über Gewißheit, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main (On Certainty, ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, transl. by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1974).
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Works published in RIFL are released under Creative Commons Licence:Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
