Language on Holiday

Section 38 of Philosophical Investigations contains a sentence that is quoted, remembered, and cited on its own far more often than the paragraph around it: "philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." The book was assembled from Wittgenstein's notebooks and published in 1953, two years after his death, so the sentence reached print without further explanation of what "holiday" was supposed to mean. The image did the explaining instead. A word on holiday is a word away from its job: still there, still recognizable, but not doing what it was employed to do. The paragraph that sentence closes is about a picture of language Wittgenstein takes from Augustine's Confessions : a child learns language by watching elders name things while moving toward them. Wittgenstein's own comment on this picture names the class of words it fits: nouns like "table," "chair," "bread," and people's names, the kind learned first, with the names of actions and properties treated as something that "will take care of itself." Generalize the picture built from those cases and a whole theory of meaning falls out of it: every word names an object; a sentence is a string of names; understanding a sentence means knowing which objects the names pick out. Read narrowly, for the class of words it was drawn from, the picture succeeds. The trouble starts one step later, when the picture is stretched to cover words that never worked that way to begin with ("time," "good," "self," "this"), and stretched further still, to cover those words used with no object anywhere in the room. Wittgenstein's own example is the word "this." He points back to an earlier scene in the book: a builder ordering stones from an assistant, where "this" and "there" are used together with a pointing gesture to say which stone and where to bring it. Point to a slab and say "this," and the word does a job: it picks that stone out for the assistant to bring. Say "this" in a philosophy seminar, addressing no…