Abstract

Throughout the corpus of the later Wittgenstein we find a profound concern with the nature of predicative generality--of what justifies the application of the same general term to a potentially indefinite number of particular things. The philosophical investigation into the nature of real generality is traditionally known as the problem of universals. For Wittgenstein, both sides of this long debate, the realist and nominalist are wrong. I argue that what has been called "Wittgenstein's anti-essentialism" is a successful attempt to disprove the realist principle that what whenever we correctly apply the same general term to a number of things, that term must be the name of some entity which all the particular things subsumed under that term have identically in common. Looking at all of the things and activities we call "games", we don't find universal of essential properties that all particular games must have identically in common, and this in no way hampers our full understanding of the general term 'game'. I argue, along with Wittgenstein, that the justified uses of almost all the terms of language are grounded as the term 'game' is, not in virtue of the presence of universals or essences, but rather on a loosely associated, value and interest-laden, contingent, and historically conditioned connection between family resemblances, language-games, and socio-cultural linguistic praxis. ;Against the nominalist, however Wittgenstein argues that neither objective resemblances alone, nor mere logico-linguistic convention cannot account for what we classify things the way we do, and hence why we use the same term to designate all members of that class. Wittgenstein also criticizes the belief that rules can stand as infallible guides to predicate application. Wittgenstein's critique of rules and rule-following develops and expands the critique of essentialism in that what, for earlier philosophers essential natures were thought to provide, modern philosophers thought the correct rule could offer, i.e., the infallible ground that stands as the ultimate justification for all of our predicate attributions. On a Wittgensteinian account, what grounds the use of our general terms for things is a complex, multi-faceted, albeit heterogeneous matter of drilling, conditioning, training, enculturalization, institutionalization, socio-cultural inculcation, not the intuition and/or cognition of necessary and sufficient conditions of identity of essence structure