Abstract

As part of his attack on previous philosophical understandings of meaning, Wittgenstein introduced the concept of family resemblances. The standard interpretation of his concept is that instead of being of a kind in virtue of sharing a set of properties that run through each member of the extension, things are of a kind in virtue of interconnecting resemblances; in virtue of family resemblances. ;When we stop to consider this metaphor of family resemblance, however, we notice that this is a rather odd interpretation. People are not members of the same family because they bear certain resemblances to one another; rather, they bear these sorts of resemblances to one another because they are of the same family. Looking back at the text, we find that this observation leads to a more successful interpretation of Wittgenstein's suggestion: things of a kind are likely to resemble one another in various overlapping ways, but it need not be in virtue of these resemblances that they belong to the same kind. ;This reinterpretation gains plausibility when we refine our concept of resemblance. Resemblance is often assumed to be equivalent to the sharing of properties, but a bit more consideration shows that the sharing of certain properties does not contribute to resemblance. This page and the number two cannot reasonably be said to resemble each other in virtue of sharing the property of 'being such that the Mona Lisa is hanging in the Louvre'. Resemblance, it turns out, is something closer to the sharing of internal properties. ;Just as being child and parent will explain why two persons bear certain resemblances to each other, so having certain relations, and sharing certain underlying properties, will explain why two members of a given extension resemble to each other. Being indications of these other family-making relations, family resemblances allow us to make preliminary identifications of many things, and allow us to learn the terms that refer to these things. ;In coming to recognize that family resemblances are not all-important, we also come to appreciate the importance, for meaning, of relational properties and context