Family Resemblance and Skeptical Solutions

Family Resemblances and Skeptical Solutions

We all remember Wittgenstein’s famous sections on games and family resemblance; I won’t repeat them. The point I want to make is that they can be construed as providing a skeptical solution to a skeptical problem. Not that Wittgenstein saw them this way; on the contrary, he had no notion of this kind of dialectic in the Investigations (contrary to certain interpretations of his text). But this idea occurred to me while remembering those sections; I don’t offer it as my own view of the matter (or anybody’s). It’s just an idea that someone might have (I have never seen anyone defend it in its own right). It runs as follows: we want to know what a game is, so we hunt for a common essence, focusing on observable qualities of games. We fail to find one after much diligent searching. We then conclude, in a skeptical spirit, that games are indefinable: there is nothing that they are, no common essence. But then, there can be no such thing as games—games don’t exist, though a bunch of unrelated activities are called games. We are under a kind of conceptual illusion. Games are like magic tricks: there are no magic tricks, not really, though there are tricks of sleight-of-hand (just not magical). This is the “skeptical paradox”. But then it occurs to our imaginary philosopher that he can use Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance to fashion a skeptical solution: games have no essence, but they can be united by family resemblance. There are games, but they are not constituted by a common essence, rather by loose family resemblances. We just need to give up our assumption that all concepts are defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. Maybe this is a bit of a wrench, a conceptual shock, but it saves the concept from elimination. We hoped for more, but we can settle for less. A straight solution would be Bernard Suits’ definition in terms of freely adopting unnecessary obstacles, but our imaginary philosopher has never heard of this definition, or has but doesn’t like it. He therefore opts for a skeptical solution. He is an essence skeptic about games but not a meaning (use) skeptic.

Once he has satisfied himself with respect to games, his ambition grows. Maybe some other problematic concepts can be similarly treated. Thus, the irreducible diversity of meaning is no proof of the incoherence of the concept of meaning: names, quantifiers, and prepositions have nothing semantically in common, but they do have a family resemblance to each other. The same for rules. There is a class of meanings and a class of rules, but there is nothing that unites these classes except family resemblance. You may not like it, but you had better lump it, if you are not to fall prey to semantic skepticism. With meaning taken care of, you move on to existence and consciousness, two notoriously problematic concepts. The class of existing things is united only by family resemblance not by a single feature they all share. Existents are like games. Or again, you might introduce the concept of a paradigm case: to be a game is to be similar to a paradigm case of games, and likewise for existence. We all accept that football is a game; well, all games resemble football to one degree or another, but the resemblance is loose and family-like. Similarly, we all know that the Empire State Building exists; well, all existing things bear some family resemblance relation to the Empire State Building. Similarly, we could define consciousness as anything resembling, family-wise, a paradigm case of consciousness, say, a sensation of pain. Consciousness is unified by family resemblance not common essence. We can’t give a straight solution to these problems of definition, but we can give a skeptical solution by invoking the concept of family resemblance. Whether this is an adequate definition is a separate question, which I won’t discuss here (I think not). My point here is that family resemblance offers a way to respond to skeptical challenges by suggesting a skeptical solution. If you were in the business of rejecting traditional straight definitions in favor of skeptical definitions, this would be a way to implement your program. Skeptical paradoxes could be defused (to some extent) by advocating family resemblance as a skeptical solution. True, there is no such property as being a game (or existence or consciousness), but there can still be a meaning to these words, underpinned by family resemblance.[1]

[1] Actually, this whole way of proceeding is alien to me, since I think we can give a straight definition of games (see my Truth by Analysis), following Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper. I am here offering another type of philosopher a new tool in his or her toolbox. Good luck with it! Also, this take on family resemblance provides a new way to try to interpret Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, by combining Kripke’s Humean apparatus with Wittgenstein’s treatment of games. It’s not the skeptical paradox about rule-following that powers the argument but the skeptical paradox about definition exemplified by games. I leave this to others to work out (I think it is rubbish).