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"Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us."

Wittgenstein thinks of philosophy as a means of clarifying the different uses of words so that we do not confuse grammatical similarity for semantic similarity. That is, he wants people to avoid the common trap of allowing one form of expression to influence our understanding of another form of expression. We should not hear the sentences, "A has a gold tooth" and "A has a toothache" and assume that both sentences are talking about similar things. That is, we should not give in to the impulse to think of a toothache as something that can be looked for, investigated, and analyzed in the same way as a gold tooth, which is a physical object as a toothache is not, and so cannot be analyzed as a toothache can. Philosophy must help us to appreciate the different uses of different words, and make us wary of assuming that what holds in one case must necessarily hold in others.

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