So I’m currently reading a rather dense introduction to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Or maybe I’m the dense one. I’m not sure.)

I’ve known about him for years, and have always been interested in his phrase “the meaning is the use,” which I took to mean that a word’s meaning does not come from some academic dictionary, but from common parlance. So some pointy-headed professor can tell you that “phat” does not mean something rad or cool, but its use in society would dictate otherwise. (Do kids still say phat? I think not.)

But that’s a surface level reading of Wittgenstein. So I’m hoping this book will get into more detail.

So far, I’ve had these thoughts. Witty (as I affectionately call him) is really at the opposite end of philosophy from someone like Plato. Plato believed that categories are real, that the objects we interact with via our flawed senses are vague representations (shadows on a cave wall and all that) of things that exist in a metaphysical realm. Frankly, I’ve never understood this concept, but it was, apparently, Plato’s jam.

Witty did not believe in “real” categories. Rather, he would posit we have a material (and intellectual) world and our human brains seek to categorize everything in it with language.

I think of it this way. Currently, I am looking at a coffee cup. But if all humans died, and aliens came from other planets and stepped on earth, they would not see that object as a coffee cup. (Unless they had been studying us while we were alive.) To them, it would just be a weird cylindrical thing. Its “coffee cup-ness” comes from out of language and our uses of it.

So, in a sense, as writers, we are not just telling stories, we are defining reality and reinforcing the categories society uses (as well as occasionally destroying them when words become passe or politically incorrect.)

We are all powerful!

Now, of course, there’s a problem here. If categories aren’t real, then all meaning vanishes. Neither I nor Witty believe that, but that’s a topic for another day.