Do Words Actually Mean What You Think They Mean?

 

Try to define the word "game" without using an example. Not chess, not football, not a phone game, just the abstract concept itself, a definition that captures everything we'd call a game and excludes everything we wouldn't. Most people start confidently, something like "an activity with rules and competition done for fun," and then immediately remember solitaire, which has no competition, or ring-around-the-rosy, which barely has rules, or professional sports, which people don't always do for fun. Every attempt to nail down a single common feature shared by every game runs into an exception within seconds.

This exercise sounds like a party trick, but the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein used it to make a much bigger claim about how language actually works, one that overturned a lot of earlier assumptions philosophers had held about meaning itself.

The Old Assumption: Words Point to Fixed Definitions

For a long stretch of philosophical history, the dominant view was that words work like labels attached to clearly defined categories. The word "chair" refers to the category of objects meeting some precise definition, a certain number of legs, a certain function, a certain shape, and any object either fits that definition or it doesn't. Under this view, understanding a word means grasping the exact conditions something must meet to count as an instance of it, the way a shape either does or doesn't meet the definition of a triangle.

This picture works reasonably well for narrow technical terms. It falls apart almost immediately for ordinary words, and "game" is exactly the kind of word that exposes the problem. There's no single feature shared by chess, solitaire, professional football, and children chasing each other around a yard, and yet all of these get called games without anyone feeling confused about the label.

Wittgenstein's Alternative: Family Resemblance

Wittgenstein proposed something different. He argued that the things we group under a word like "game" don't share one essential common feature. Instead, they overlap with each other the way members of a family resemble one another, not through one trait everyone shares, but through a network of overlapping similarities. One sibling has their mother's eyes and their father's height. Another has the father's eyes but a completely different build. No single feature runs through the entire family, yet nobody has trouble recognizing them as related.

He called this "family resemblance," and argued this is how most ordinary concepts actually function. Chess and solitaire share rules and a sense of structured play. Solitaire and children's tag share the absence of formal competition but retain a sense of play. Professional football and chess share formal rules and organized competition, but neither shares much with a toddler bouncing a ball against a wall, which we'd still call playing a game of sorts. The category holds together through this web of partial overlaps, not through a single defining thread running through everything.

This might sound like a small technical point about vocabulary, but it quietly undermines a huge amount of earlier philosophy, which had often assumed that clear, fixed definitions were sitting underneath ordinary words waiting to be discovered through careful analysis. Wittgenstein's later work argued a lot of philosophical confusion comes from exactly this mistaken assumption, philosophers demanding a precise definition for concepts like "knowledge," "justice," or "beauty" that were never built to have one in the first place, the same way demanding a precise definition of "game" sends you chasing something that was never there.

Meaning as Use, Not Meaning as Reference

Wittgenstein pushed this even further with another idea that reshaped how philosophers think about language. Instead of asking "what does this word refer to," he argued we should ask "how is this word actually used." Meaning, in his later view, isn't a fixed thing a word points at. It's something that emerges from the practical role a word plays within a shared activity, what he called a "language game," a specific context of use with its own implicit rules.

The word "water" used by a chemist in a lab, used by someone asking for a drink at a restaurant, and used by a poet describing grief, isn't doing the exact same job in each case, even though it's the identical word. Understanding what someone means requires understanding the activity they're participating in when they say it, not just decoding a fixed dictionary definition and applying it mechanically.

This has a strange and somewhat humbling implication. It suggests a huge amount of confusion, in relationships, in arguments, in negotiations, comes not from people disagreeing about facts, but from people using the same word inside two different language games without realizing it. Two people arguing about whether something is "fair," for instance, might not actually disagree about the underlying situation at all. They might simply be using "fair" according to two different implicit rulebooks, one shaped by a language game centered on equal treatment, the other shaped by a language game centered on earned reward, and mistaking that mismatch for a genuine disagreement about facts.

Why This Matters Outside a Philosophy Seminar

This isn't just an abstract academic point. It shows up constantly in ordinary miscommunication. People argue past each other about words like "respect," "success," "commitment," or "loyalty" without realizing they're not actually disagreeing about the situation at hand. They're using the same word to play two different language games, each internally coherent, each drawing on a different set of implicit associations and contexts.

It also offers a genuinely useful move in an argument that's going in circles. Instead of continuing to argue about whether something "really is" fair, or respectful, or a genuine commitment, it can be more productive to ask what each person actually means by the word in that specific context, what activity or expectation they're drawing the term from. Often the disagreement dissolves entirely once both sides realize they were using overlapping but distinct versions of the same word, the way two family members can look at the same photo and each correctly point out a resemblance to a different relative.

A Word Without a Foundation

There's something a little destabilizing about this idea, once it sinks in. Words we use constantly, with total unreflective confidence, might not be resting on the solid, fixed definitions we assume are underneath them. They might instead be held together by loose, overlapping resemblances that work well enough in practice but collapse the moment someone tries to pin them down with total precision.

That's not necessarily a problem. Wittgenstein wasn't arguing language is broken. He was arguing it was never built the way philosophers assumed it was built in the first place, and that expecting rigid definitions from words that were only ever meant to function loosely, through use and context, is where a lot of unnecessary confusion originally came from.