The Picture Theory of Language

John Roscoe, B Sc 1970

Roscoe's novel claim that the only route to a radical understanding of Language is the construction of a language and not of a model of language is justified in the Preface as follows:

“... we have only understood what we ourselves have made and even then only to the extent that we really have made it with, as it were, our own hands. Thus the child hardly understands its building-blocks, or the industrial complex that manufactured them, or the economic one that put them into its hands, but what deficiency could there be in its understanding of the building-block castle or whatever else it builds with them? No understanding could be more than a how-the-building-blocks-are-put-together grasp of what has puzzled us; our understanding is complete all the way down to the blocks themselves. When we are puzzled by something not assembled by us — and that includes, of course, the natural world, ourselves and everything else of interest to the philosopher — the best we can do is to imitate the puzzling thing with an artefact that is all our own work. We will then have understood it to the degree our construction is like its original. Likeness is a question of the use to which our artefact can be put: the toy-castle, for example, is like a castle in that tin-soldiers can be garrisoned within it or made to strut along its parapets, safe from peas that might be shot at them if not from marble cannon-balls rolled across the floor, but is unlike it too in that it could hardly have served as a refuge for, say, Richard Crookback during the War of the Roses.”

The building-blocks can only be items of natural meaning, which is what is intended by “pictures.” The process of building can only be understood as the playing of certain games. What is meant by “game” is explained in the following way: “What the philosopher intends by game is precisely a competitive rule-governed activity. Taken in this unrestricted way the word will be recognized as naming a feature of our human form of life, for we readily play games with whatever we have to hand and compulsively do so when the serious matters from which mere play is distinguished do not press upon us.

My interest in games is not unworthy of a philosopher, for often quite the best way of explaining us to ourselves is to discover compartments of relatively self-contained activity and compile for the human agents implicated in each the book of rules they can seem to be following. In particular this has widely been thought to be true of Language.”

These games are not language-games in the familiar Wittgensteinian sense but rather language-making games. This is explained as follows: “What [Wittgenstein’s] philosophical activity could not do was to contribute an explanation of how it is we can do anything with Language at all and that seems to me to be not just another philosophical problem but the most urgent of them all. This is so because philosophizing — including in particular our discussions of language-games — is itself a game we play with Language.

Rather than endlessly describing this game and all others that may attract our attention what Philosophy calls for is a description of the language-making games that first bring into being the language with which we play. What we seem to need, then, is what we plainly cannot have, viz. a description of these games that is not itself a language-game. What can be done, however, is this: we can show how a language is made by taking up games played with pictures as language-making games. This is what is attempted here.”

The philosophical significance of the language constructed in the book is explained in these terms: “Our English language is opaque in the sense that we make use of it without, even in the most mundane of contexts, grasping how its words have the meanings they do. The particular virtue I claim for the analogue of our English language I call Picture-Writing (whether it really is an analogue of English is, of course, a question decided by the language-games that can be played with it) is its transparency: when this language is taken into use, even in that most elevated of contexts that philosophizing is, it is transparent in the sense that we can trace the meaningfulness of our pronouncements back to simple pictures and games we can play with them—back, then, to what is so simple a manifestation of our human form of life that we cannot reasonably expect any explanation of it.”

The reader of The Picture Theory of Language finds, then, the rules of a collection of games which together lead from the making of pictures to the writing of texts. One way that human language might historically have emerged and evolved is accordingly demonstrated and thereby conditions which are at least sufficient for this to happen. To the degree these conditions are also necessary—and only the construction of a language which did not fulfil them could constitute an argument that they are not—they represent capacities which are ultimate features of human endowment.

ISBN: 978-0-7734-4829-2