Abstract

The article begins by considering Wittgenstein’s notion of family-resemblance concepts. The article purports to defend that there is something wrong with the idea that language is a family-resemblance concept, that is, that we take behaviour as being linguistic merely in virtue of undetermined similarities with paradigmatic linguistic behaviour. In order to achieve this goal, it is first clarified in which sense so-called psychological concepts are not family-resemblance concepts. The essential link between the use of the expressions “language” and “linguistic behaviour” and the use of some expressions conveying psychological concepts, such as “saying something”, is then demonstrated.