CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN RESOLUTION OF PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE IN PHILOSOPHY

ABSTRACT

The body of metaphysical language hindered the understanding of concepts in the late modern and early contemporary period. This attracted several reactions and channeled philosophy into the linguistic turn-turning the focus of philosophy from metaphysics to language for the purpose of meaningfulness of concepts. But to do this, several questions abound; what is language? What can be spoken of? Are unseen realities linguistically meaningful? How can meanings be arrived at in philosophy? The objective of answering these questions and resolving this problems became the interest of Ludwig Von Wittgenstein in his Tractatus-Logical Philosophicus where he argued that language is a picture of reality hence meaningful when and only when it pictures reality and the Philosophical Investigations where language gain its meaning from its use and functionality in a language game. The extent to which these theories resolved the problem of language is the interest of this study. This work adopts the critical analysis method and concludes that the Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Von Wittgenstein aptly reconciles and resolves the problem of language in philosophy.