Wittgenstein, music, and the philosophy of culture

Garry L. Hagberg

pp. 61-95

in: Garry L. Hagberg (ed), Wittgenstein on aesthetic understanding, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Language, for Wittgenstein, is anything but a stable and fixed set of names for things; the simple model of ostensive definition as the sole determinant of linguistic meaning does not survive the first section of Philosophical Investigations. Language, rather, is a myriad network of possible and actual actions that take place in particularized contexts, where the interconnecting relational linkages that emerge or reside within those contexts, those language-games, constitute in large part the meanings of our words and they constitute the preconditions for our verbal actions. This context-sensitivity applies to art and music as well as to language: art that we see or hear or read is in considerable part constituted by those relational interconnections. Thus the idea of a stable and fixed work of music or art, directly analogous to the model of the stable word given invariant meaning by direct reference or ostensive definition, is equally attractive to a mind seeking organized simplicity—and equally mythical.

Cited authors

Wittgenstein Ludwig