Wittgenstein and contemporary theories of word learning

New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 275–287

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Wittgenstein and contemporary theories of word learningq

Katherine Nelson*

The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016-4309, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 3 June 2008

Keywords:Word learningWord meaningWittgensteinPrivate language

q This article has benefited substantially from thified numerous points in the original and in subsea much improved version of the general account o

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0732-118X/$ – see front matter � 2008 Elsevier Ltdoi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2008.04.003

a b s t r a c t

Wittgenstein’s positions on word learning, rules of use, and theimpossibility of a private language, as expounded in his Philosoph-ical Investigations, are examined in relation to issues of early childword learning. Current theoretical positions in the cognitivistmode are contrasted with the social cultural pragmatic approach,and each is compared to the principles that Wittgenstein ad-vanced. Bloom’s [(2000). How children learn the meanings of words.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] version of the cognitivist theory rejectsmost of the principles that Wittgenstein advanced, relying on in-nate cognitive endowments to explain children’s success in wordlearning, using the word-referent mapping paradigm. Nelson’s‘‘use without meaning’’ and Tomasello’s [(2003). Constructing a lan-guage: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press] social-pragmatic model of learningfrom use are presented as representative of Wittgensteinian prin-ciples that meaning exists in and is inferred from the uses of wordswithin communal activities (‘‘language games’’ in ‘‘forms of life’’).

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How children learn the meanings of words is today a ‘‘hot’’ topic in developmental psychology, buta clear explication of the process has not emerged from the research. In the dominant theories, childrenare assumed to learn the meanings of words on the basis of their reference through ostensive learning.This assumption carries with it the expectation that children possess concepts that incorporate mean-ings in use, and in turn map onto the meanings represented in a linguistic lexicon. That ostensive use

e comments of reviewers and of the editors, who have questioned and clar-quent revisions. Their contribution is greatly appreciated, and the result isffered here.

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K. Nelson / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 275–287276

cannot provide a basis for acquiring meaning in this way was among the arguments put forth by Witt-genstein (1953) in his posthumously published book Philosophical Investigations (PI). These ideas aboutthe nature and function of language, its uses and learning, are directly related to theories of children’sword learning. Thus Wittgenstein’s thinking would seem to be a natural touchpoint for theorists ofchild language. But this has not been the case; there are few in-depth attempts to connect the studyof child language with Wittgenstein’s philosophy.1 In this article I attempt to redress this neglect ofWittgenstein’s arguments, considering their relevance to a critique of the dominant assumptionsamong theorists of word learning, and, in contrast, pointing out the fit of his arguments to the positionof social-pragmatic usage-based theories of language acquisition.

1. Wittgenstein on word learning and private language

Norman Malcolm, a student and friend of Wittgenstein’s over the period from 1938 until the latter’sdeath in 1951, wrote a memoir of their relationship, including views of Wittgenstein’s work and phi-losophy (Malcolm, 1962). Therein Malcolm reported that upon returning to Cambridge after World WarII he once again sat in on Wittgenstein’s courses, held in the confined space of Wittgenstein’s quartersat Trinity College. Malcolm reported as follows:

1 Butyears a

2 In tlanguagMeanin(as in wvincedLanguagbook, thformallcontinuinforme

throughout the year I made a great effort to follow his [Wittgenstein’s] thoughts during thosemeetings, an exertion that left my mind utterly exhausted at the end of two hours. The classeswere even more exciting for me than they had been seven years before. I understood Wittgen-stein’s ideas better, although still not well, and the astonishing depth and originality of his think-ing was strikingly evident to me (Malcolm, 1962, p. 46, emphasis added).

This reticence to claim understanding of Wittgenstein’s ideas on the part of a close colleague, scholarand professor of philosophy necessarily gives pause to those of us who would venture to adaptWittgenstein’s written work to our own uses. Nonetheless, I proceed, but with caution.2

Wittgenstein’s main concern in his later work was the philosophy of mind (as framed in the 1930sand 1940s), which in his view was based on a fundamentally incorrect construal of the function of lan-guage. In PI he argued that language was a social system of conventions, incorporating conventionalrules for speaking about matters of interest in different contexts (different ‘‘language games’’). In hisview language (and related concepts or meaning) is neither true nor false, nor is it a ‘‘mirror of nature.’’People’s feelings, concepts, or theories about the nature of reality may be expressed in words, but thesemental entities do not determine the meanings of the words they use. It follows that learning newwords, whether by children or by adults, is not a process of mapping the new word onto a belief ora pre-existing concept or onto a given definition. Rather there is a constellation of uses of the wordthat implies conventional rules for use. The meanings of a word then emerge from its uses by a com-munity of users. The meaning may not be identifiable with any particular concept (public or private).Wittgenstein made this point with regard to the word ‘‘game’’ in the first part of the Investigations.There he pointed out that the many uses of the word reflect no set of features in common among itsdesignated referents, but rather overlapping features, similar to the overlap seen in the features offamily members, thus suggesting the coinage of the term ‘‘family resemblance category’’ (Rosch, 1975).

see Montgomery (2002). In contrast, the logician and behaviorist W. V. O. Quine has had a good run over the past 20s an alleged authoritative voice backing the need for built-in rules for word learning.he early 1980s Carol Feldman challenged me with the question ‘‘What about Wittgenstein’s argument against privatee?’’ relating to my discussion of word learning in my then forthcoming book ‘‘Making Sense: The Acquisition of Sharedg,’’ at that point my acquaintance with Wittgenstein’s ideas was confined to the idea of family resemblance categoriesords like ‘‘game’’) used by Rosch (1975). Thus began my struggle with the ‘‘Philosophical Investigations.’’ Later, con-

that Wittgenstein was saying important things about language, I consulted Kripke’s Wittgenstein: On Rules and Privatee, as well as Hardwick’s ‘‘Language Learning in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy.’’ Eventually I read Wittgenstein’s firste Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and several versions of Wittgenstein’s life story, but I have never studied Wittgenstein

y and claim no personal expertise on Wittgenstein’s meaning. However, I relate this history to indicate my own longing effort to understand how our current understanding of the social basis of language and language development isd by Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The present article grows out of this history.

K. Nelson / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 275–287 277

1.1. No private language

Wittgenstein’s position contrasts with the commonly accepted idea that an individual’s concepts,ideas, or feelings determine the meaning of a word in use. He argued (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 201)that relying on the private meanings of individuals was inconsistent with the requirement that usageaccord with conventional rules in effect within the community of language users. There is no check onprivate meanings; by virtue of being private (i.e., feelings, concepts, beliefs) they are inaccessible tochecking by others. Wittgenstein argues further that the correctness of a belief or meaning cannotbe checked by the individual user of the word simply by referring to his own belief. Thus a ‘‘privatelanguage’’ is not feasible (see e.g., Wittgenstein, 1953, pp. 271–274). The arguments against private lan-guage (to which Wittgenstein devotes a great deal of PI) do not necessarily deny the existence of ideas,feelings, concepts, or other mental states, although they rule out conscious awareness of these privatestates and their causal relation to the uses of language. In brief, language is a community matter, nota private matter. For Wittgenstein a private language (one used only by one person) makes no sense.3

Wittgenstein insisted that language could not be understood from the perspective of the individual butonly from the perspective of the community and its uses. That is, individual users of language cannot(like Humpty Dumpty) determine what a given term means. Nor is there a way of clarifying the mean-ings of language independent of its uses in specific contexts. Logical efforts in this direction, as in hisearlier Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1922), are doomed to failure.

Like Malcolm (quoted above) the eminent American philosopher Saul Kripke expressed reserva-tions about his own interpretation of Wittgenstein’s theories. In his 1982 commentary Kripke focusedspecifically on Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language, concluding that itrests on a skeptical paradox that ‘‘does not allow us to speak of a single individual considered by himselfand in isolation, as ever meaning anything’’ (pp. 68–69, emphasis added). This unsettling conclusion fol-lows (in Kripke’s view) from Wittgenstein’s observation that rules for the use of words (thus theirmeanings) reside in the uses of the community and cannot be discovered or defined by individualsin ways other than those uses. This position, as Kripke stated it, contrasts with the classical realistview expressed in Wittgenstein’s first book, Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1922) where linguistic proposi-tions were equated with pictures. The contradiction between the two theories was well-recognizedby Wittgenstein himself, who stated in the preface to the Investigations that the two books shouldbe considered together. In PI Wittgenstein argues that different activities give rise to different ‘‘lan-guage games’’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 7), within which different words may be appropriately asserted.Different language games emerge in different activities, leading to different rules for language use ineach such activity, a claim that appears coherent within social semiotics and cultural psychology butone that runs strongly counter to classic theories of meaning.

In Wittgenstein’s view language cannot be evaluated in terms of truth conditions but only in termsof assertability or justification conditions. As Kripke (1982, pp. 77–78) states it, in place of facts andtruth conditions Wittgenstein proposes that ‘‘someone means something when the circumstancesare such that they are legitimately assertable and that the game of asserting them under such condi-tions has a role in our lives. No supposition that ‘facts correspond’ to those assertions is needed.’’ Notehere the difference between ‘‘someone means something’’ and ‘‘words mean something.’’

1.2. Implications for word learning

Throughout PI Wittgenstein argues against the still generally accepted view that there is a uniqueway of understanding the relation between a word and its meaning, in particular that an ostensive def-inition (e.g., pointing to an object and uttering its name) has a special correct way of being understood.(This kind of ostensive learning is widely assumed to be the basis for word learning by children.) In-stead of assuming that pointing out a referent calls up an associated concept in the learner that

3 This claim inevitably raises a question as to whether it conflicts with Vygotsky’s notion of ‘‘private speech.’’ I think not, asthe idea expressed by Vygotsky is that the individual comes to use the public language in private thought. This is consistentwith current theory.


determines the meaning of the word used, Wittgenstein states that we attribute concepts to individ-uals when a ‘‘non-deviant’’ use of an appropriate word is observed in the appropriate context. On thisbasis ‘‘we take them [individuals] provisionally into the community’’ (Kripke, 1982, p. 95). This idea hasparticular relevance for studies of the development of language and cognition. Throughout the historyof developmental psychology researchers have attributed concepts to children on the basis of their useof words in ‘‘appropriate’’ ways. Indeed, current theories of word learning rest on the assumption thatchildren possess concepts to which they map words (Bloom, 2000). Thus the use of a word is taken asevidence of the existence of a concept (see following section).

Wittgenstein produced a persuasive argument precisely against this idea, around the concept of ‘‘þ’’ inmathematics. He argued that correct use of the term depends not on the private conceptualization by theindividual of mathematical operations such thatþmeans addition, but on the rules of use of the term bythe community. The individual must acquire the rules for use from the community’s practices. Theimplication is that the word learning process is necessarily one of social practice, not of individual privatecognition on its own, as assumed in the cognitive theories of word learning discussed in the next section.The success of the process of learning in the Wittgenstein conception appears to depend on the unifor-mity of the community practices. There must be agreement about what are appropriate uses of the lan-guage within a particular ‘‘game’’ or language context. This requirement implies a shared form of life. Thereis no brute fact such thatþmeans addition to ensure adherence, nor may an individual on his or her ownfollow a private rule, independent of the community’s use. Each person who has acquired the criteria foruse, thus for understanding the word appropriately, is checked by others to ensure conformity.

This position seems straightforward, in accord with common practice, for example in schools,although the source of legitimacy there is more likely to be attributed to brute facts about the meaningsof words to be found in dictionaries. This school-based presumption apparently holds that communityuses derive from acquaintance with dictionary entries rather than the reverse. But the idea of languagegames that prevail in different forms of life (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 19) – including those in different his-torical periods – undercuts such attempts at legitimacy, even as it implies that the community cancoalesce around a new use for an old term or invent a new term for an old use. Given the authorityof communal use over individual thought in the use of language forms, the question of the locationof meaning becomes an issue. In Hardwick’s (1971, p. 109) terms, semiosis goes on not ‘‘in the mindbut in the activities by means of which something is taken-into-account by individuals involved ingroup activity [thus] learning a language is a process of cognitive socialization.’’ He likens this positionto that of the social pragmatists Dewey and Mead.

It is important to note that Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language and related issues of mean-ing and concepts diverges in critical ways from the way these constructs are commonly used in psy-chology. Specifically, Wittgenstein states, after considering two different uses of the word‘‘understanding’’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 532):

Then has ‘‘understanding’’ two different meanings here?dI would rather say that these kinds ofuse of ‘‘understanding’’ make up its meaning, make up my concept of understanding.

For I want to apply the word ‘‘understanding’’ to all this.

Here he is unusually clear about the equivalence of meaning and even concept to the use of a word. Itfollows from his argument that when a child has learned the conditions for using a word we can saythat she has learned the meaning of the word, but there is no additional independent meaning orconcept to which the word is attached.

In contrast, psychology has traditionally assumed that categorization and concept formationprocesses take place in non-conscious areas of the brain or mind, and are attached to words, or calledup in response to words that express their meaning. This assumption lies behind the widespread ac-ceptance of the ‘‘mapping theory’’ of word learning described in the next section. That theory restson the now widely accepted presumption that young children and even infants establish categoriesof entities in the real world like those of adults, based on innate structures and pattern analysis, andconstruct concepts of things and events to which words can be mapped. More broadly still, young chil-dren are held to theorize about the world and to organize and re-organize their conceptual structuresaccording to their theories.


My own view, discussed later, has incorporated some of the general assumptions of the psycholog-ical framework, although I reject the cognitive mapping and ‘‘theory theories’’. I was an early propo-nent of the existence of pre-verbal concepts and categories in infants and young children (e.g.,Nelson, 1973, 1974), but have modified that view to the assumption that pre-linguistic non-consciouspersonal knowledge organization exists in some form. Developmental psychologists continue to speakof those forms as concepts and categories, although I among others recognize that both the form andthe content are certain to be different from, and specifically lacking most of, the concepts/meaningsthat are used by mature language speakers. Moreover there is no claim that infants and young childrencan reflect on their concepts so as to name them in a private language, which is what Wittgenstein ar-gued strongly against. Rather the private understandings of the young may aid them in participating ininteractive activities (e.g., ball-like objects are for throwing), subsequently leading to the use of wordsand other linguistic constructions in those activities, on the pattern of uses by adults. This developmen-tal view has been articulated in different ways in previous works beginning in the early 1970s (e.g.,Nelson, 1985, 1996, 2007; see references above and discussion in subsequent section on ‘‘meaningfrom use’’). In this article then, while I argue that private meaning in the sense of understanding existsI do not claim that it maps onto the public language directly. Nonetheless, it is an important part of theprocess of searching out the meanings that are displayed in the uses of the public language.4

1.3. Principles of word learning from Wittgenstein’s philosophy

Before turning to the contemporary theorizing about word learning by young children, I summarizehere the principles to be derived from Wittgenstein’s arguments on private language and rules of use.

I. Meaning depends on context of use (not on correct concepts, facts or truth conditions). Differentcontexts imply variable rules of use in different language games.

II. Rule following is determined not by the individual but by the community. No private rules candetermine how words are appropriately used.

III. The community attributes a concept to an individual so long as sufficient conformity to the behav-ior of the community is evidenced, which depends on the uniformity of community practices anda shared form of life.

IV. Criteria for use are inferred by individuals. A person who claims to be following a rule can bechecked by others.

V. Meaning is not a mental entity. This follows from the previous principles.

2. Contemporary word learning theories

Consider now the dominant cognitivist theories in psychology as they relate to Wittgenstein’s prin-ciples of word learning summarized above.5 Many variants of word learning theories have been pro-posed since the early days of the ‘‘cognitive revolution’’ in psychology and the Chomskyanrevolution in linguistics, which jointly ruled out behaviorist accounts of the process. All in this traditionassume internal concepts or categories as the basis for learning the meanings of words, including theoriginal theories of semantic domains based on semantic, perceptual or conceptual features, or onchildren’s interests and ideas. The mapping metaphor followed easily from this premise: ‘‘Successfulword learning involves mapping a novel word onto its correct referent’’ (Waxman, 1990, p. 143) andhas been widely adopted. The mapping metaphor assumes (in contrast to Wittgenstein) that language‘‘mirrors the world’’ (the referent), that there is a ‘‘brute fact’’ about what the word refers to, that truth

4 I am indebted to the editors of this issue for pointing out that the discrepancy between the views expressed here and Witt-genstein’s may rest on different meanings of the term concept. Considered as the difference between Wittgenstein’s use of con-cept and its use in psychology this comes down to its uses in different language games. Certainly, in psychology concept doesnot depend on language, as a long history of concept formation experiments with animals and young children testifies.

5 I refer primarily in this section to Bloom’s 2000 book because of its current prominence and goal of presenting a full over-view of the literature in the field. See also Golinkoff et al. (2000) for different approaches within this tradition.


lies in the correct mapping between the individual’s concept and the word. The problem as constructedby theorists then is only to discover the relations among the child’s mental entities (concepts, cate-gories, features, or associations) that make up the child’s meaning and that must also reflect the uni-versal meaning in the lexical component of the language. Uses of words do not enter into this problem,as context was not conceived as relevant to meanings: word meanings are held to apply across contextsof use. As Tomasello (2002) has argued, the mapping metaphor essentially rests on the associationbetween a word and its referent in an ostensive learning context; if it was the right explanation forthe learning of words, then many animals would be expected to learn them as well as human infants,but they do not.

Consistent with the assumptions of many theorists, Bloom (2000, p. 21) describes the meanings ofwords by children in terms of narrow content, its ‘‘internal psychological aspect’’ in contrast to what heterms broad content, the ‘‘external social and contextual aspect.’’ This specification makes the cogniti-vist vulnerable to Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Bloom expands the idea of the ‘‘meaningof a word’’ to include ‘‘knowledge associated with a word that is relevant to explaining people’s intuitionsabout reference and categorization’’ (Bloom, 2000, p. 21, emphasis in original). He explicitly rejects twoclaims related to the Wittgenstein position: first, the claim that concepts may be acquired from words.In contrast he claims that words are mapped to pre-existing presumably correct (also universal?)concepts. Although some word meanings may be learned by verbal definitions, the presumption isthat the underlying conceptual structure must be in place for this to be possible. Second, Bloom alsorejects claims that social uses of words have any bearing on word learning. Rather, he takes the positionthat children puzzle out the meaning of words regardless of their exposure to words in specificcontexts, or attempts to teach words by parents or others. This account is thus disconnected fromthe social world of language users, an abstract process of concept-word mapping that depends onword uses only to the extent of presenting a word for acquisition in the presence of a referent.

The mapping metaphor forms the basis for the common attribution of ‘‘fast mapping’’ by youngchildren: on hearing a new word they may quickly add it to their vocabularies based on its apparentmeaning in context. Children’s errors in this process are rarely analyzed for their content, however.Bloom (2000) apparently believes that children do not make errors in fast mapping, stating (p. 36):‘‘Young children can grasp aspects of the meaning of a new word on the basis of a few incidentalexposures, without any explicit training or feedbackdin fact, even without any explicit act of naming.’’The problem here is that the child’s concept or meaning does not reflect criteria of use, and as theprevious discussion indicated, it cannot generate such rules; doing so involves the pitfall of the privatelanguage.

In the ‘‘fast mapping’’ paradigm it is assumed that the child is able to extend the word-referentrelation to a broader (but restricted) class of applications. Learning in this paradigm is thus an internalmatter under the control of the learner’s inductive processes and is expected to be rapid, even instan-taneous. In contrast, in a Wittgensteinian paradigm of acquiring rules from use, the new word is a clueof sorts to the existence of a novel reference or a variation in use, or one specific to a particular social orspeech situation. The learner may become alert to other uses of the word and perhaps tries using theword on his or her own in similar situations (see next section). In this paradigm learning can beexpected to be extended in time before a learner can become proficient in the use of a particularword. There is ample evidence of slow accretion of meanings of words whose forms are readilyacquired, specifically for verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and nouns that do not refer to objectclasses but are more abstract in nature, whether names of higher level taxonomies, or of collective orabstract concepts such as mental states (Levy & Nelson, 1994; Nelson, 2007; Nelson & Shaw, 2002).These are considered in the next section.

The cognitivist position implies that children home in on correct generalizations of the applicationof a word to its conceptual meaning and use this understanding to guide word reference. Accordingly,to learn a word children must have ‘‘correct’’ concepts (ones that match adults’ and the lexical entriesof the grammar, whatever those may be). Demanding as this requirement appears, it seems to bewidely accepted by cognitive theorists, although the conditions for meeting it are not generally spelledout. These conditions presumably include a standard cognitive structure for forming appropriateconcepts to serve as word meanings, including a hierarchical taxonomy of nouns and a functional oressentialist core to guide applications, among other requirements. The ‘‘mapping paradigm’’ implies


such a structure: there must be an appropriate concept to map a word to if fast mapping is to work. Butthe evidence does not support this assumption. For example, the long-standing observation that whenfirst learning object words children engage in ‘‘over-extension,’’ in which a learned form such as ‘‘dog’’is applied to many different animal classes, not confined only to four-legged mammals (see Bowerman,1976; Rescorla, 1980) indicates that children do not initially share adults’ intuition about object classes.(This research is disregarded by contemporary researchers who emphasize the correct uses of terms,rather than ‘‘mistakes.’’) Experimental support for these observations comes from work by Mandlerand McDonough (Mandler, 2004) who found that prior to learning words, infants’ object categoriesare global, rather than basic level in type. Specifically, infants of 14 months group animals and vehiclesinto separate categories, but do not distinguish between basic types of animals (e.g., alligators andcows). Only after acquiring a beginning vocabulary at 18 months or later do children sort by basiccategories, as these words are used to refer to examples (e.g., dog, cat, bird). The import of this workis that the differentiation of children’s global categories into specific types comes about in responseto word learning, not as a basis for word learning.

Following the logic of the cognitivist approach, word-concept mapping seems to imply that everylanguage should consist of the same word-concept pairings, but we know this is not the case.6 In fact,there are several lines of research that contradict this assumption. For example, in work on children’sacquisition of terms for spatial categories such as ‘‘in’’ and ‘‘on’’ Bowerman and Choi (2000) have shownthat Dutch, American and Korean learners acquire different ways of dividing the spatial relations impliedin the different languages (e.g., whether the equivalent of the word ‘‘on’’ applies to items attached toa wall as well as to those sitting on a table). These different ‘‘concepts’’ emerge as the different languagesare being learned; they can only be learned from the distinctive uses of the terms in question.

In recent years theories of word learning have focused on a search for cognitive or linguistic strat-egies that children engage in to adapt the mapping paradigm to the task of acquiring words. Partly thissearch was motivated by wonder at the rapid pace of children’s word learning in early childhood (asmany as 7–10 new words a day according to Carey, 1978), which suggested that there must be someunderlying guiding principles, biases or innate constraints on the process. To account for the child’ssuccess, constraints such as ‘‘words refer to whole objects’’ were proposed, later refined to evolvingprinciples such as attending to shape of objects. This general approach was reviewed and evaluatedby Bloom (2000), who ruled out innate biases specific to word learning of either cognitive or linguistickinds and proposed instead that children learn words through two general cognitive processes, induc-tion or generalization to allow for concept formation, and intention reading. There is good evidencethat very young word learners do in fact attend to the focus of a speaker and make judgments aboutthe speakers’ intentions in using words (especially about reference). A similar assumption is acceptedin social word learning theories.

An implicit assumption of the cognitivist program is the autonomy of language learning as thoughthe child was being taught in a vacuum, striving to achieve the goal set by the researchers – correctnaming of isolated objects. This of course is antithetical to Wittgenstein’s conception of how languageis learned, embedded in forms of life. It is also antithetical to the researchers who view language withina social and cultural frame of reference. Moreover, although Bloom (2000) admits that the evidenceindicates that children who hear more language advance faster and go farther in language mastery,including learning more and more difficult words, he denies that parental or other social influenceshave any effect on the child’s learning. Presumably simple exposure to more words allows the childto ‘‘fast-map’’ more of them in this view. Given this denial of the value of social support practices, itis incumbent on social theorists to present arguments and evidence of specific effects not accountedfor by strictly cognitive models.

Before moving on to social-pragmatic theories, however, let me summarize the assumptions of thecognitivist views and briefly note their conflicts with Wittgenstein’s principles.

I. Individual concepts determine meanings and thereby use of words.II. The meaning of a word is the same across different contexts of use.

6 Thanks to Tomasello for this point.


III. Concepts/meanings are the same across speakers.IV. Children ‘‘pick up’’ words from exposure and map them to concepts/meanings.V. Meaning is a mental entity and also universal across speakers of a language (and presumably

across languages).

These constructs are not generally spelled out; most are contrary to the Wittgensteinian principlesoutlined in the previous section. The statement that learners ‘‘pick up’’ meanings of words from theiruse is the closest overlap, although ‘‘exposure’’ seems preferred to ‘‘use’’, at least by Bloom (2000). Boththe conception of meaning and the conception of learning process are at odds with Wittgenstein’sposition.

3. Social-pragmatic theories of word learning

The social approach to word learning was advanced by Bruner (1983) who introduced the idea ofLASS, the Language Acquisition Support System. The LASS was based on close observations of mothersinteracting with young learners, encouraging imitation, producing words, and expanding vocabulariesin different ways in different contexts. Social theories existed before the LASS came into the picture (seee.g., Nelson, 1973, 1985) and have persisted since, not all relying on such overt practices as Bruner de-scribed. In one sense, Bruner’s model fits Wittgenstein’s claim that children must be ‘‘trained’’ in therules that apply to word uses. Others report more subtle collaborative practices that do not fit the im-plications that ‘‘training’’ suggests of close supervision of guided steps to mastery. Most social learningtheories propose a variant on the scaffolding model attributed to Vygotsky (1978) in which the adultcarefully assesses the child’s current state and provides examples at a higher level to encourage thechild to make small advances in knowledge.

3.1. Meaning from use

The question of the meaning of words may be differentiated from the issue of how words arelearned. Wittgenstein quite clearly believed that words do not have meaning in the sense of mentalconcepts that determine their use. But from another psychological perspective, it may be acceptedthat people have mental concepts that underlie their uses of words on many occasions, but that theseconcepts and the associated word uses are both ultimately determined by uses of the words by thelanguage community. Thus the meanings or concepts that are associated with the word for an indi-vidual can be expected to be shaped to the form that is common in the community, although theymay have idiosyncratic additions to these shapes and attachments as well.7 Then there will be com-mon concepts across the community, expressed in common words, referring to aspects of the sharedworld or ‘‘form of life.’’ In addition, individuals may have ideas related to the common concepts thatare not part of the shared communal uses. The common meanings emerge from the shared uses andare then ensconced in established forms in dictionaries, which reflect the uses of the communityincluding those in different contexts. Whereas this may be the situation for mature speakers; thequestion remains of how young children may acquire words and meanings to begin learning thelanguage.

As Wittgenstein noted, object names are not good test cases for studying meaning, although theymay be excellent beginning points for infant learners, who can match their understanding of thingslike ‘‘ball’’ or ‘‘car’’ to the adult’s use of a word in situations where the activity involves reference tothese things. (E.g., ‘‘here comes a car,’’ ‘‘get in the car;’’ ‘‘throw the ball,’’ ‘‘where’d the ball go?’’). Itis understandable but regrettable that word learning research has expended so much attention onthis class of items, which, contrary to common claims, are not even the majority of the words learnedamong the first 10 or 50 words of most young English speakers (Nelson, 1996, 2007; Nelson, Hampson,& Kessler Shaw, 1993). Other words – verbs, higher level or more abstract common nouns, function

7 See Jackendoff (2002) for the argument that people are disposed to ‘‘tune’’ their concepts to those evident in the uses ofwords by the community.


words, adjectives and adverbs – present a different challenge to the learner. These are the kinds ofwords that Wittgenstein famously focused on, for example, ‘‘game,’’ ‘‘pain,’’ ‘‘add,’’ as discussed earlierin this paper. The temporal and causal terms that children acquire in the early years are good examplesof words that follow the steps toward meaning from use outlined below. Similarly, the mental terms‘‘know’’ and ‘‘think’’ were shown by Kessler Shaw (1999) to begin, as proposed, with one meaningin one situational context and to proceed slowly toward an extension to other contexts and uses. Theselatter cases challenge the account provided by cognitivist theorists based on the mapping metaphor.

A ‘‘meaning from use’’ theory of children’s acquisition of meaning for words was proposed by Levyand Nelson (1994) based on the observation that children’s own uses of words follow on the model ofthe way these words are used in the language situations in which they engage. Specifically, Levyanalyzed the uses of causal and temporal words by a 2-year-old child over 7 months of recorded‘‘crib speech.’’8 This analysis indicated that the child was closely modeling her use of the words onher father’s uses in pre-bedtime speech, and gradually extending the uses to new contexts, includingsome that the parent had not specifically used in this situation. On the basis of this and other studies,we outlined the following sequence of steps that children could be expected to engage in when acquir-ing new speech forms (see Nelson, 1996, 2007 for discussion).

� New language forms are acquired, together with their distributional relations with other languageforms, on the basis of the discourse and sentence context.� Discourse patterns are interpreted in terms of the child’s experiential knowledge and current

meaning system.� Following adult uses, the child forms a discourse notion of use and produces it in closely

constrained syntactic formats and in the context of specific topics.� Use of the form (externalizing) alerts the child to further uses by other speakers and to inferences

about its meaning.� Comparison of the use by self and others may lead to a resystematization of the form and other

forms that are semantically closely related.� The child’s uses indicate at least partial control in productive speech, but comprehension tests may

reveal gaps in the child’s meaning.� Full control of the meaning of some forms may be delayed for years after they are first acquired and

readily used, requiring further reorganization of the meaning system.

These ‘‘steps to meaning’’ emphasize the child’s attempts to extract rules for use and to relate theseto an emerging meaning system. Note that the child may begin with ‘‘use without meaning.’’ In my ear-lier work, I proposed that toddlers began word learning based on pre-linguistic concepts and cate-gories, what Vygotsky (1986) called pre-concepts (Nelson, 1973, 1974, 1985). However, a morepersuasive account of first word learning is that meaning emerges from pre-linguistic joint activitieswhere words are routinely used (Racine & Carpendate, 2007a, 2007b; also Nelson, 2007; Tomasello,2003). Such meanings are constrained by the contributions of social partners who represent the com-munity of speakers that the child is entering into (Nelson, 1973; Nelson & Shaw, 2002). Shared interestsexpressed through action and gesture emerge in shared activities during the first years, the forerunnerof a collaborative process that shapes the development of a shared system of words and uses/meanings(Nelson, 1996, 2007). Indeed, Wittgenstein (1953, p. 244) seems to suggest a similar process.

Infants and young children (and adults) do have cognitive resources for organizing their experienceindependent of language; psychologists refer to such organization as categories and concepts. Whenbased on private restricted experience, such concepts are likely to be discrepant in varying waysfrom the meanings used by the adult public language which reflect social practices and demands ofa shared communicable system. Nonetheless, these beginning private understandings may servesome of a child’s first uses of words, for example in the child’s extension of ‘‘dog’’ to many other animaltypes called by different names by the adults. The point here is that the child’s understanding of the

8 Speech by a child alone in bed (in a crib according to American usage) before going to sleep.


world is quite different from that of the adult, and even shared practices and activities are insufficientto ensure that the child can easily enter into the world of shared meanings established through the useof linguistic forms. Children’s initial private understandings (or proto-concepts) must become reformu-lated as experience with language accumulates, becoming in the process narrower or broader, morediscrete and categorical, more stable, more allusive, with more complex connections to other wordsand concepts (see Nelson, 2007 for more detail). On the one hand, language requires that the originalstructures are ‘‘tuned’’ to the rules of use in the community; and on the other hand language providesa whole new set of resources that change the terms on which concepts and ideas can be created, struc-tured, and manipulated. More conventionally put, language introduces a social system of classificationnot initially shared by the child, whose original meanings are likely to be idiosyncratic.

There are thus two aspects to this meaning from use approach that may diverge from Wittgenstein’sarguments: First, children may come to language with proto-concepts based on joint activity meaningsthat are inconsistent with the way language is used and that leads the child’s uses to be unacceptable tothe community. Second, the child’s beginning notions can include idiosyncratic bits that do not fit theuses of the community but do guide the uses of a word by the child; sometimes the child uses a noncesound for such purposes. The latter cases have counterparts in adult language when creative new formsand uses appear that may then lead to changes in the language over time (much as a mutation might inthe evolution of species). This eventuality does not go against the private language argument, as thenew use is proposed for the public, not for the self. In my view close attention to the developmentalcourse of word learning suggests that there is much more slippage and creativity within the individ-ual–society matrix of meanings than implied in Wittgenstein’s descriptions, although at any givenpoint in time the community’s uses are determinative.

Beyond the early word learning period, the ‘‘learning from use’’ model seems necessary to explainhow children achieve meanings of words and their uses that match those of the community. The com-plexity of the many kinds of words learned during children’s school years, and the conditions of learn-ing that support the acquisition of thousands of new words each year require attention. The generalprocess outlined by Levy and Nelson (1994) suggests an entry toward this goal.

3.2. ‘‘Usage-based’’ learning

Tomasello (2003) presents a version of a ‘‘usage-based theory of language acquisition’’ that isintended to provide the basis for a pragmatic social alternative to nativistic cognitive and linguistic the-ories. He summarizes the theory in terms of three emphases: (1) it contrasts with formal models andwith connectionist models by its emphasis on functionalism and on intention reading. (2) The theory isconstruction-based; it is not a theory of isolated words (and invariant word meanings) but of utter-ances. The focus is on concrete linguistic entities in use of specific words and phrases. (3) Most encom-passing, it is usage-based. He asserts that language structure emerges from language use in both itscultural and ontogenetic histories.

Tomasello (2003) heads six of the nine chapters of his book with a quotation from Wittgenstein, yetdoes not specifically discuss these ideas in the text.9 Two of these epigraphs catch the sense that we canmake of Wittgenstein in connection with Tomasello’s theory. The familiar comparison of words to toolsheads Chapter 6: ‘‘Think of the tools in a tool-box; there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule,a glue-pot, glue, nails, and screws. The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of theseobjects.Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear themspoken.For their application is not presented to us so clearly.’’ This quotation relates clearly to theemphasis in Tomasello’s work on the diversity of words and functions, differentiating the usage theoryfrom the ranks of the contemporary theories characterized in the first part of this section. At the mostelementary level of first word learning one must account for a broad range of meanings and functions,a fact that challenges the theorist as the singular focus on the generalization of names of objects – thefocus of most word learning laboratory studies – never does. Naming objects can delude the theorist

9 One of the two references is to Wittgenstein as the original source for referential indeterminacy attributed generally toQuine (Tomasello, 2003, p. 85).


into believing that words are attached to concepts that are universal across speakers and situations.Tomasello’s theory of children’s construction of language from its uses does not allow this interpreta-tion, as word uses are resources that the child takes for his/her constructive purposes, and the use ofa word – even an object name – shifts across situations. The ‘‘uniform appearance’’ of the word thatWittgenstein refers to does not confuse the learner in the same way that it confuses the theorist.Learners are more flexible.

Tomasello and his colleagues have focused much attention on the process of verb learning by younglanguage learners, in contrast to the general concentration on object names in many laboratories. Theyhave found that 2-year-old children do in fact acquire a new verb in the context of an activity but thattheir learning is quite closely aligned with the uses by the adult speaker (see Tomasello, 2003). They areslow to generalize to uses in new constructions on their own implying that children are sensitive to therules for using words as determined by the community of speakers and therefore resist going beyondevidence from use.

A second quotation from Wittgenstein of interest here heads Chapter 9: ‘‘For remember that in gen-eral we don’t use language according to strict rulesdit hasn’t been taught to us by means of strict ruleseither.’’ This quotation heading is in direct contrast to the reading by some commentators of Wittgen-stein’s sense of rules of use. Noting that Wittgenstein believes that children learn the rules of use byspeakers, theorists have projected the idea that there are strict criteria for use, or rules of correctuse that learners must acquire. The quoted assertion indicates that this interpretation is only a guidingprinciple; the rules that the community follows for word use are flexible and change with the situationor ‘‘language game’’ in which the word is used. (In this sense the tool kit metaphor is a bit misleading,as the same word can be used as a hammer on one occasion and a screwdriver on another.) Wittgen-stein believes that rules are implicit in uses by speakers and can be inferred by learners. Tomasello sim-ilarly believes that children acquire rules of use, and that in doing so they pay close attention to theevidence for how broadly to generalize a particular structure in analogy to other similar words (e.g.,verbs). This is, I believe, the point of greatest correspondence between Tomasello’s comprehensive con-struction theory of language development and Wittgenstein’s arguments. Indeed, on this basis onecould state that Tomasello’s theory is a detailed instantiation of Wittgenstein’s implied method oflanguage learning.

Tomasello analyzes words and constructions from the perspective of the child’s attention to theiruses, focused on the discourse uses of adult speakers. He denies that children are focused on figuringout how language is structured; rather, he emphasizes that children focus on adults’ communicativefunctions and intentions in their attempt to comprehend the adult’s meaning in using a constructionin an utterance. This focus on specific words and phrases as they are used in context is highly consistentwith Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the different functions that words serve in different contexts. Bothappear to agree that language structure emerges from language uses, although this is a major emphasisin Tomasello while it is not in Wittgenstein; rather it is a background assumption. If we consider thetheory from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s propositions highlighted in the first section (in italicshere), the overlap becomes clearer.

First, meaning depends on context of use (not on correct concepts, facts or truth conditions). Tom-asello takes a moderate stand on this. He accepts that there is a conventional meaning or function to beacquired for any word or construction; in that sense there is a ‘‘correct’’ use, but he denies that childrenstrive to attain it. Rather, he sees children as being quite conservative, for example in using verbs in onefunction only until provided with evidence for broader uses.

That rule following is determined by the community and not the individual is implicit in this process.The community decides whether the individual has used a word in the ‘‘right’’ way or the acceptableway, and is therefore a member of the language community. Individuals are not at liberty to changethe rules to suit their own concepts. Tomasello’s emphasis on social uses appears to be consistentwith this interpretation. The child’s sticking to one function of a new verb to the exclusion of otherssuggests that the child is a very conservative user of inductive processes. Wittgenstein assumes thatcommunity practices are uniform in shared forms of life. Then the statement that ‘‘we mean x by y’’is true only because we in the community all generally agree. Tomasello does not appear to takea stand on this aspect of the Wittgenstein position that there are no true concepts by virtue of brutefacts.


Criteria for use are inferred by the learner from uses of the community. Tomasello emphasizes thechild’s active construction of the language, including word meanings as well as syntax. Private mean-ings may be deduced from public uses, but it is the public uses that are criterial.

Meaning is not a mental entity but is produced through group activity. Children come to sharedunderstandings of language use, and therefore have constructed something like rules of how to usegrammatical constructions and words to mean what others mean. The fact that children share activitiesprior to learning the words that are used within them suggests that they may learn shared conceptsprior to or simultaneously with shared word meanings. Indeed Bowerman’s (Bowerman & Choi, 2000)studies on children’s acquisition of location terms indicate that children accept the specific construc-tion of space incorporated in the language used in their communities prior to using the conventionalterms in productive speech.

In summary, Tomasello’s functional constructionist approach to the structure of language and itsacquisition by children shares many characteristics with Wittgenstein’s view of language as a sociallyshared system of meanings derived from the context of its use. Given these basic assumptions manyissues arise in the modern cognitive tradition that were not at issue for Wittgenstein for whom issuesof cognition and learning were not paramount. Wittgenstein focused on words in terms of their uses byspeakers cast loose both from brute facts about the world and from self-evident concepts in individualminds. Language use became the defining middle ground. If the uses of the community came into ques-tion on the basis of new theories it would be necessary to change the relation of specific aspects oflanguage to how we understand the world, in the process adjusting our mental concepts (for example,changing the term for whale from fish to mammal). Or alternatively, an individual might come to a newmental understanding of something about the world (a whale is a mammal) and then attempt tochange language uses. Focus on language uses puts the whole structure in play.10

4. Wittgenstein, private language, and child language learning

Word learning theories in psychology maintain the link of individual conceptual structure to wordsand to their uses by the community. But Bloom (2000) and other cognitivist theorists go seriouslyastray by making the simplifying assumption that children’s private concepts map directly onto themeanings of natural language words and phrases, an assumption in direct contradiction to Wittgen-stein’s (1953) ‘‘no private language’’ argument. This assumption preserves the strong mental determin-ism that pervaded the classical study of concepts and words that Wittgenstein argued against. Bloom’sconception confines language to a narrow communicative role as emphasized in the last sentence of hisbook: ‘‘Words are important because they are the building blocks of language, and language allows usto express our thoughts and understand those of othersdto become full-fledged members of the hu-man community’’ (Bloom, 2000, p. 259). He explicitly denies that language is relevant to thinking:‘‘Words are not necessary for thought.Structured and abstract thought occurs without them’’. Thesesentences embed a philosophical position wherein the individual, endowed with the capacities forabstract conceptualization, stands at the center and the community whirls around ‘‘outside’’ makingavailable forms (words) for communicating with other individuals. This is more or less the standardWestern view of the role of men, words, concepts, and communities. It is a view that Wittgensteinargued strongly against.

Wittgenstein’s vision that each language game incorporates a ‘‘form of life’’ exemplified by the rulesat play in that game places language in the center of the shared meanings that the community derivesfrom their broad historically based diversity of activities. No single individual could encompass thebreadth and depth of these meanings. Traditional cognitivists like Bloom – psychologists, philosophersand others – who place individual minds in the center of the universe of meanings, in language oroutside it, are blind to the existence or influence of the symbolic networks that drive our conceptionsof the world.

That concepts are to some degree at least private while word meanings are social is in my viewnoncontradictory, but is rather a key to understanding how language gets into and changes private

10 See Putnam (1975) on problems of this kind.


thought. Our private thinking must be coordinated with or integrated with public language because itis permeated by the meanings of public language. A specific language is thereby a specific tool for un-derstanding general concepts.

The emergent social cultural view of word learning (Nelson, 2007; Tomasello, 2003) is influenced byand largely in tune with Wittgenstein’s position. Here language is not just a means of expressing ourthoughts as members of the human community, but it creates a bond between members of the com-munity based on shared uses of language and shared meanings among language users in differententerprises, ultimately resulting in shared culture. Language is a bond within the community preciselybecause the individual’s concepts are derived from those of the community of language users. This is notto say that language users may not construct concepts independent of those revealed in language use,but it is a claim that insofar as we use language to express our concepts these are inevitably honed tocommunal forms. And this is what children are learning as they learn the meaning of words by attend-ing closely to the uses of words in discourse.

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Wittgenstein and contemporary theories of word learning