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While Wittgenstein repeats that ordinary language is fine as it is, he also identifies the misuse of that language as the source of much philosophical confusion. Language is suited to its everyday business of facilitating communication between people. Philosophers make the mistake of abstracting language from its ordinary contexts to understand the essences of things. For example, when people talk about knowing things, in most contexts it is perfectly obvious what they mean. But despite the fact that we can talk about what we know without complication, we are puzzled when confronted by a question like, what is knowledge?
Immediately we are faced with an abstract concept, “knowledge,” divorced from the contexts in which this concept is used. When philosophers get confused over the question of what knowledge is, they are not confused because the essence of knowledge is difficult to identify. Rather, they are confused because they have abstracted a word from the contexts in which it has a function and find that, outside these contexts, the word loses its meaning. If philosophers were careful about how they use language, Wittgenstein believes, philosophical confusion would cease to exist.
