Pragmatic language-games from Peirce to Wittgenstein
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Pragmatism is the American method of philosophy serving as a socially engaged theory of meaning to lead to the distinctive, reasonable, and assertible theory of truth. The history of pragmatism was first developed by semiotician Peirce in the pragmatic maxim of 1878 and following manuscripts. Universal pragmatism was made concrete in the semiotic (or semioticized) work of different American thinkers of science, art, law, and religion: Oliver Holmes Jr., William James, John Dewey, and others. Peirce’s general version of pragmaticism was grounded on the interactive meaning(s) of the three categories, while Wittgenstein’s pragmatism widens the American outlook into the new analysis of philosophy of language in the European tradition. While Peirce concentrated on meaning, Wittgenstein focused on the different “uses” of truth and untruth. Both studied the development of logical with the non-logical elements. Wittgenstein’s work started with certainty and ended with accepting the uncertainty of linguistic words and propositions. Is the postmodern fashion of uncertainty the emblem for the future of philosophy?
Wittgenstein (1889-1951) gave no real definition of the strategy of language, so that clear definitions of the “language-game” and the underlying “forms of life” are not open to direct scrutiny. The study of the language-game is an empirical idea: its possible definition can be extrapolated from the source of Wittgenstein’s own writings, tracing out the meaning from his examples. Here viewed from a semiotic standpoint, Wittgenstein is boosted as a semiotic philosopher of language, moving in the conceptual development from Saussure’s interpreted-signs to Peirce’s interpretant-signs, as argued here. The history of Wittgenstein’s language-game and forms of life create linguistic-and-cultural (lingüicultural) forms of play-acts. Wittgenstein liked “engineering” examples of do-it-yourself language-games, such as the carpenter’s box and building the wall. The “bricks” of the reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s language-games are employed in the examination to allow not only to produce various conjectures of a cognitive and creative game, but actually applying them for solving the specific practical problems in understanding the “building” message of language-games.