Blue and Brown Books

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Summary

Brown Book, Part I, Sections 1–17

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Summary Brown Book, Part I, Sections 1–17

Having shown us that different words do different things, Wittgenstein shows that gestures and word order can often do for us what words do. Not do different kinds of words share nothing in common, but there is nothing about words that makes them distinctive from other forms of communication. Wittgenstein uses these and other examples to break down our idea that there is an "essence" to language. In the language games, words are used in all sorts of different ways to achieve all sorts of different ends. If we try to say that all words share something in common, or that all words are learned in the same way, we are simply generalizing about a particular case that has caught our attention.

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