Family Resemblances (Wittgenstein)

Today I want to write about a very interesting idea in philosophy that gets misunderstood a lot, so to do my guy Ludwig Wittgenstein some justice, here's my take on his notion of Family resemblances.

Part 1: The Quest of Philosophy

People have to make judgements to survive. 'This' is good, 'that' is bad. 'This' sounds reasonable, 'that' sounds idiotic. This - theoretical physics - is science, that - astrology - is not. This - Michelangelo's David - is art, that - my MS Paint drawing - is not.

But, those claims beg the question: what is good? What is science? What is art?

Ideally, we would like to find one condition, the essence of being good, or of being a science, or art. That's basically what Socrates tried to do when he went around asking questions like: "what is justice?"; "what is good?"; "what is duty?", …

Socrates’ idea was that there’s ultimately one property that the thing we label as “good” have in common. That would be the essence of good. But Socrates never arrived at any such “essence” and his dialogues, written by his pupil Plato, almost always end in aporia, the acknowledgment that no one knows the answer.

Before Socrates, Wittgenstein often remarked, people went on with their days, completely capable of talking about justice, duty, good and so on. They didn’t need a clear definition and the knowledge of “essences” to engage with such concepts. And all that Socrates’ inquiry really did, was to confuse people.

And people, mainly philosophers, remained confused for two millennia, thinking that they have to provide some clear definition of a concept, an essence, in order to engage with it. Wittgenstein said that his whole philosophy could be summarized with being the opposite of Socrates’. His goal is to get rid of confusion and diffuse the fascination that philosophers have with misleading analogies between similar structures of expression.

 

Part 2: Helping the Fly out of the Bottle

Thorough history, language consistently misled thinkers. A tool with which to express ideas, it often ended up influencing those ideas with its accidental grammatical structure. One supposition that always surrounded it, was the idea, that it logically and consistently categorizes the world around us.

In analogy with set theories, we imagine concepts to have clear definitions with no borderline cases. We all know that this is a chair and that this is not, but what about that? And that?

For Wittgenstein, concepts are fuzzy, with no clear borders and even no real essences. He explains this idea with the concept of game. What is a game?

Let’s look at a list of games:

• kicking a ball into a wall;
• football;
• volleyball;
• tenis;
• ping pong;
• poker;
• solitaire;
• cross-word;
• reading out loud;
• doing a performance;
• theatre play [in german: Spiel-game]

What do all of those instances of games have in common? Certainly there’s some things that football has in common with volleyball, and volleyball with table tenis, and table tenis with poker (games that involve a table), and poker with solitaire. But what does football have in common with solitaire?

Okay, now what do all of those instances have in common? Is there one single thing that would describe all of those, excluding the fact that we call them games?

For Wittgenstein, language advances with extrapolating existing uses unto new ones. I call thing X a game, then I call thing Y a game because of it’s similarity to X, then I call Z a game because of Y, even though X and Z don’t share this similarity anymore.

Because language is alive and organic, it doesn’t have a structure of a logical system, where strictly defined categories would form neat sets and subsets. Our concepts are messy and there’s no deep logic that would govern their use. There simply isn’t an “essence of game”. Games are games for different reasons.

(In recent years, developments in cognitive science have provided remarkable evidence in favour of the idea, that people actually categorize things with regards to its similarity to some singular exemplar - see Dean, J. „The Nature of Concepts and the Definition of Art.“ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61, 2003: 29-35.)

 

Part 3: The Demarcation Problem

Some branches of philosophy concerns themselve with defining human projects, such as “science” and “art”. If your government has limited resources, it’s useful to make sure its funds go to proper scientific research and no pseudo-science. Likewise, we want to support real art and not to be scammed by pretentious artists.

We want to differentiate real science, like theoretical physics, from pseudo-science, like astrology. Real art, like the Mona Lisa, from worthless things such as my MS Paint drawing:

"Essence of Things" by Bebeflapula

The historical approach was to always look for the “essence”, the one thing all of the instances of art, or science, have in common. But, let's just look at art, for example. What could literally all of the different artworks have in common?

Moreover, what is the defining characteristics of all science? What do mathematics, experimental psychology and geology all have in common?

At this point you’re probably wondering that there’s certainly at least one thing that all of the artworks have in common, and even all the sciences. All sciences go about analyzing the world systematically. And all artworks were intentionally created by humans. And all games are fun.

That might be true, but it’s important to note that if we’ll just define games as “something that is fun”, watching TV, sex, physical fighting and snorting cocaine count as games. If we define science as “something that systematically explores the world”, then astrology and phrenology will count as proper sciences. If we define art as anything that was “created by humans”, then every piece of furniture in your house is an artwork. But surely that’s not what we mean when we say art. Or science. Or games. We mean something else.

Phrenological chart of the mind.

So, our definition has not only to include all of the instances of a thing, it has to also exclude all of the things which are not. As we said, we want to define science to differentiate it from pseudo-science. We want to define art to differentiate it from things that are undeserving of this title.

But just like Socrates' dialogues end in aporia, so does the demarcation problem in science and art prove to be a seemingly impossible task to deal with. At least, as long as we contend that there's an "essence" governing our use of concepts.

Part 4: Family Resemblances

Taking up Wittgenstein's ideas about language, many thinkers have proposed a "fuzzy" definition of things like science or art. In that view, there's no singular thing that would make a thing an art or science, but rather a list of properties of which at least some of them have to apply to a thing in order for us to legitimately conceptualize it as proper science, or art.

Such attempts have often been misunderstood. Nevertheless, some authors contend, there still has to be a thing that makes art art, or science science. Yes, but Wittgenstein’s thought is that this isn’t one thing, one condition, since the way we structure linguistic concepts is not as one-dimensional as an analogy with basic set-theory would suggest. Rather, the way we conceptualize things is governed by a complex web of associations, one that’s irreducible to the notion of essences. There isn’t one thing that makes a game a game.

 

After we’ll stop idealizing language and take it for what it is – an organic and fuzzy web of associations – we’ll be able to solve the problems of philosophy. That’s why Wittgenstein wants us to drop the notion of “essences” and take up his notion of “family resemblances”.

There isn't one particular biological trait that you and all of your family share, yet it would exclude everyone that is not part of your family. Rather, you being similar to them consists in a web of resemblances - the fact that on average you share more biological traits with your family than strangers. It's not about a single essence. It's about the totality of things.