Simple answer: Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who studied with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge University during the 1930s, producing his first major work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He was followed by other thinkers such as A.J. Ayer in England and Rudolph Carnap in Austria, who focused on the “verificationist” theory of meaning. After World War Two Wittgenstein finally returned to Cambridge to develop and introduce his entirely fresh approach to the questions surrounding linguistic meaning, often called “ordinary language philosophy” and published posthumously in his Philosophical Investigations (1953). Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has continued in one form or another to dominate English speaking philosophy.
Longer answer: Wittgenstein’s later philosophy pivots on the idea that meaningful language is embedded in our everyday embodied activity. The meaning of any linguistic expression is, in his terms, a “function of the use to which it is put” in its natural context. For instance, the term “March” gets its meaning from the use to which it is put as an order in the military, or its place in a list of the months of a year, or perhaps the name of someone’s favorite pet. This same contextual approach to ascertaining the meaning of any expression in any language, according to Wittgenstein, is always operative. Meaning is a function of use, even and especially when the context is complex. After his repeated leaving the front door open when he came in from the outside, I said to my eight-year-old son “The door is open,” whereupon he looked at the door and replied “You are right Dad, the door is open.”
The point is that in this context my son pretended to take my statement as a description rather than as an implicit request for him to close the door. If when seeking to indicate that a student is always welcome to drop by my office the statement “The door is open” takes on quite a different meaning. Or, if I am trying to encourage a friend to seize an opportunity, the statement “The door is open” means something quite different yet. My overuse of this example in class eventually resulted in my students using it in a wide variety of inappropriate contexts just to invoke a laugh. In each of the above cases the meaning of the expression “The door is open” was a function of the context and use to which it was put.
The jokes revolving around this principle abound in everyday discourse as well. In fact, situation comedies are often based on it. The “Who is on first?” routine made famous by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello is a perfect case in point, as is Noel Coward’s infamous remark after accidentally falling into a swimming pool: “I need to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini” also clearly illustrates this principle. The use to which we put words directly determines their meaning. J.L. Austin’s study of what he called “performative” utterances clearly demonstrates the role played by context and use in determining the meaning of any given linguistic expression. He focused on, indeed “discovered” the role the immediate context and specific use of an expression plays in determining its meaning. “I pronounce you husband and wife”, “I christen this ship the “Queen Mary” and “I am very sorry” all serve to illustrate the performative character of certain utterances and their contexts. Wittgenstein likened language to a tool box full of different tools designed to perform different tasks.
Clearly, as well, the notion of the truth of a given statement is largely dependent on the degree to which we ascertain the context and purpose within which that statement was uttered, and such considerations are relative to the wider context where they are used. Thus, meaning is a direct function of use. Moreover, truth, too, then is a function of use in context. Wittgenstein tirelessly focused the many different ways these two factors, use and context, determine both meaning and truth. As one of my graduate school professors put it: “After Wittgenstein, none of the traditional ways of thinking about meaning and truth are any longer viable.” It should also be mentioned that Wittgenstein’s ways of teaching his fresh approach were as unfamiliar as the approach itself. He did not give lectures as such, but rather sought to engage his students in helping him think through the implications of concrete linguistic uses. According to their own testimonies, they found it almost impossible to follow or be of any help in his investigations. Norman Malcolm’s little book Ludwig Wittgenstein is very helpful in providing insight and examples in this regard. Justus Hartnack’s book Wittgenstein is also useful, along with Ray Monk’s magnum opus: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.
My own work in the philosophy of religion has also been greatly influenced by Wittgenstein’s insights. In particular, I have followed the work of Ian Ramsey who sought to explore the logic of religious language from a Wittgensteinian point of view. In fact, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Ramsey’s work, and actually was privileged to study briefly with him at Oxford. Ramsey sought to see the uses of language in religious and theological contexts in terms of what he saw as their unique logic. More pointedly, he suggested that religious language often follows a two-fold pattern in which one term is grounded in ordinary everyday speech and the other serves to qualify or alter the normal meaning in such a way as to call attention to the special, off-beat meaning often characteristic of religious speech.
For instance, Ramsey suggested that terms like “heavenly”, “eternal”, and “almighty” actually function as what he called logical “qualifiers” which are used to suggest that descriptive terms like “life”, “Father”, and “Jesus” are actually to be used as “model” terms grounded in experiential, historical reality. The qualifier terms are used in order to suggest a different meaning from anything literal. The qualifiers serve to make it clear that the model terms are not to be taken literally. So, in the expression “Heavenly Father” the term ‘Father’ serves as a model and ‘Heavenly’ serves not to describe what Father Is being referred to but to note that the term ‘Father’ is being used differently, perhaps analogically. Thus, when Jesus spoke to the woman at the Samaritan well about “eternal life” he was using the term ‘life’ literally but the term ‘eternal’ he was using as a way to qualify the model term ‘life’ so as to suggest that the life he was talking about was qualitatively different from regular human life.
It was this two-fold pattern of “model” and “qualifier” that Ramsey suggested as the sort of thing Wittgenstein had in mind when he sought to track the logic of ordinary language in order to show its complex and many-layered nature. In short, he claimed that religious language is every bit as complex as is ordinary language. See his Religious Language and Models and Mystery, along with my own Ian Ramsey: To Speak Responsibly of God.