Wittgenstein’s Conception of Language in Teaching and in the Comprehension of Concepts

Abstract

How are our concepts, in general, formed and understood? This is a question that
deserved Wittgenstein’s attention, at the moment in which he perceived that the
role of lan-guage is not reduced to communication, but also has one constitutive
function in the process of the meaning of our experience. This new “linguistic
turn” in his thinking brought him to a struggle against the dogmatism present in
philosophical positions that are based on one exclusively referential conception
of language. I think that this struggle extends to the educational field, when
we see the uses of concepts that presuppose ultimate foundations in the
acquisition of our knowledge, situated in the ideal, mental or empirical
domains, establishing an image of meaning that determines, even today, the
educational policies: the image that there would be extralinguistic meanings
that can be naturally achieved through a teaching method.