Complicated: Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Ancient Literature

Ainsley Brigham

Professor Heather Ross, Dr. Rob Thompson

PHL4001 Contemporary Voices in Philosophy, Ethics and Language 

Spring 2026

Complicated: Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Ancient Literature

There is a persistent desire to define things clearly — to fix the meaning of a word once and for all, to draw a sharp boundary around a concept, and to finally say exactly what something is. That desire shapes how we imagine language working: as something that can be refined and made precise until it fully captures what is meant. It is not merely a personal habit of mind. It has a serious philosophical defender in Saul Kripke, whose lectures in Naming and Necessity argue that proper names are rigid designators whose reference is anchored in the essential properties of the things they name. On this account, at least some words do exactly what the desire for clarity imagines all words should do: they latch onto the world, necessarily, and hold.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations challenges this picture at its root. Meaning, for Wittgenstein, is not an essence that language captures but a phenomenon that language enacts. It arises in use, within the rule-governed practices he calls language games, and it cannot be extracted from those practices and held up as a fixed, self-subsistent thing. More than that: language is not a tool we pick up and wield over an already-intelligible world. It is something we are always already inside of. We inherit it, participate in it, and share it with others before we ever try to explain it. The philosopher’s task, accordingly, is not to uncover what hides behind language. It is to describe, honestly and carefully, what is actually happening when people use words.

This paper takes Wittgenstein’s use-based account as its guiding thread and reads Kripke’s essentialist framework alongside it, taking both seriously. It also turns to a concrete illustration: what it is like to be a reader of Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey. That experience — the experience of encountering ancient language through the medium of one’s own — is not merely an example of how translation works. It is an occasion for noticing something about how language always works: that meaning does not arrive from outside our context but reveals itself through it. We never stand above language games, choosing which one to enter. We find ourselves already in them, already shaped by them, and already encountering the world through them. Wittgenstein’s insistence that philosophy’s job is to describe this situation, rather than escape it, is both his methodological commitment and, this paper argues, his deepest insight.

I. Wittgenstein: Language Games, Use, and Anti-Essentialism

The central claim of Philosophical Investigations is stated with characteristic restraint in §43: “For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” The language game is the concept that carries this insight. Wittgenstein opens the book with a simple construction site scene: a builder calls “Slab!” and an assistant brings a slab (§2). No definition is exchanged. No mental image is transmitted from one mind to another. Meaning has occurred because both participants are operating within a shared practice that gives the word its function. The rules of this game are nowhere written down. They are embodied in the activity itself, in the habits and expectations and training that constitute the practice. The assistant does not ask for a definition. The assistant goes and gets the slab. Action is the point.

The significance of this picture becomes vivid when the game breaks down. On a construction site, the word “Phillips” calls for an immediate response: a participant in that practice knows exactly what to do and retrieves the right tool without hesitation. Take the same word out of that context entirely — into a space where those rules have no purchase — and the result is not meaning but confusion. There is no game, and without a game, there is no meaning. This is not a failure of language. It is a revelation of how language actually works.

There are hierarchies among language games. Natural language — English, in the present context — is itself a game, and within it are nested countless more specific games: the construction site, the philosophy classroom, the science laboratory, the practice of reading ancient texts. Each has its own rules, its own criteria for meaningful participation. Confusion arises when participants believe they are playing the same game but are in fact playing different ones. Meaning does not happen there. There is no game, only crossed purposes.

From this picture, Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism follows directly. The tradition’s desire for definitions — necessary and sufficient conditions, sharp boundaries, no vagueness — assumes that beneath the surface of ordinary use there is a hidden essence that language tracks. Wittgenstein invites the reader to look at the word “game” itself: board games, card games, ball games, children’s games, Olympic events (§66). What single essential property do all these share? He finds none. What one finds instead is “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” — family resemblances, the way members of a family share features without any one feature being universal (§67). Categories in ordinary language hold together not by essence but by pattern. Their edges are vague. This is not a defect. It is the nature of language, looked at honestly. “Don’t think, but look!” (§66).

This methodological instruction leads directly to Wittgenstein’s account of what philosophy can and cannot do. In §107 he addresses the demand for logical precision that governed his own earlier work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal. But also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” The ideality of logical language is purchased at the cost of connection to actual life. A philosophy that seeks perfectly sharp definitions achieves precision only by losing grip on the world where meaning actually occurs. The rough ground of ordinary practice — messy, vague, full of family resemblance and borderline cases — is not a problem to be overcome. It is the only ground there is.

II. Kripke: Rigid Designation, Baptism, and Essential Properties

Kripke’s Naming and Necessity challenges the descriptivist tradition’s claim that proper names are synonymous with definite descriptions. On the Fregean and Russellian picture, “Aristotle” means something like “the philosopher who tutored Alexander and wrote the Nicomachean Ethics”; the name refers to whoever satisfies those descriptions. Kripke argues this is fundamentally mistaken, and his argument centers on the distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators. A rigid designator refers to the same object in every possible world in which that object exists. Proper names, Kripke argues, are rigid designators; descriptions are not. The Nixon example is the clearest illustration. “The 37th President of the United States” is non-rigid: in a possible situation where Humphrey won the 1968 election, that description picks out Humphrey, not Nixon. But “Nixon,” even in that counterfactual situation, still refers to Nixon. When we say “if Nixon had bribed a certain senator, he would have gotten Carswell through,” we are speaking of the actual person Nixon, asking what would have been true of him. The name tracks its bearer across possible situations in a way the description simply does not.

What fixes this reference? Kripke’s answer involves an initial act of naming — which he calls a baptism — and a causal-historical chain through which the name is subsequently transmitted. In the baptism, a name is attached to an object by ostension or by a description used to fix reference rather than give meaning. The name then passes from speaker to speaker, each intending to refer to whatever the previous speaker referred to. Speakers today who use the name “Aristotle” may hold largely mistaken beliefs about him, but they still refer to him because they are connected through a chain stretching back to the original naming event. There is nothing magical about the name itself, Kripke insists. It is simply a device for picking out an object and keeping it in view.

The deeper essentialist claim concerns what is essential to the individuals proper names pick out. Kripke’s answer is origin. What makes a person the particular individual they are is not their achievements, beliefs, or personality — all of which might have been otherwise — but the specific event from which they came into being. I could not have had a different origin and remained myself. Kripke extends this to natural kind terms: “water” refers to a substance with the essential structure H₂O, a necessary truth discovered empirically. The metaphysical question of what something essentially is remains distinct from the epistemological question of what we know about it. If science revises our beliefs about water, it does not change what water essentially is; it only means we were wrong about what we were referring to.

III. The Tension: Baptism, Practice, and the Ground of Reference

The conflict between Wittgenstein and Kripke reflects two fundamentally different pictures of what grounds meaning. For Kripke, meaning is grounded in the world: in essential properties, in causal-historical chains that operate independently of the descriptions and uses speakers associate with names. For Wittgenstein, meaning is grounded in practice: in the rule-governed activities of speakers who share a form of life. These pictures genuinely compete.

The sharpest collision is around the act of naming itself. In §38, Wittgenstein examines what he calls the philosophical fantasy that naming is a kind of baptism — that pointing at an object and uttering a word creates an occult connection between them. He writes that this picture is what leads to philosophical confusion: “for philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (§38). The word “baptism” is striking because it is precisely the word Kripke uses to describe his original naming event. For Wittgenstein, the fantasy of naming as baptism — as a primitive, practice-independent act of attaching a name to a thing — is exactly the picture that needs dissolving. Pointing at a thing and saying a word does not by itself fix reference. It only functions as a naming act within a prior context of shared practice, a form of life in which participants already understand what kind of thing is being named, what the gesture means, and what is being asked of them. Strip away the practice, and the baptism accomplishes nothing.

There is also a deeper tension around necessity. Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism (§§65–67) targets precisely the aspiration to give definitions that hold necessarily, without vagueness or borderline cases. He finds that aspiration impossible to satisfy in ordinary language and argues that the apparent need for it reflects philosophical confusion rather than genuine features of language. Kripke, by contrast, not only accepts necessary truths but grounds them in the essential natures of things. The necessity Wittgenstein wants to dissolve, Kripke treats as a genuine feature of the world. This is the deepest theoretical divide between them.

And yet, when one looks carefully at Kripke’s own account, practice is quietly presupposed at every turn. The causal-historical chain is not a merely physical process. It runs through communities of speakers, through traditions of use, through institutions that preserve and transmit names across time. It works because speakers participate in practices that give names their function, that sustain the connection between name and bearer across generations. At every link, the chain presupposes the kind of shared form of life that Wittgenstein places at the foundation of meaning. Kripke’s account does not bypass practice. It depends on it, silently, throughout.

IV. Reading the Odyssey: Language Revealing Itself

There is a way of noticing what Wittgenstein is describing that is easier to access through reading than through philosophy. When I read Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, something is happening with language that does not fit the picture Kripke offers and that Wittgenstein’s picture illuminates directly. The experience is worth describing carefully, because it is not primarily an experience of translation as a technical problem. It is an experience of being inside a language game — of encountering meaning that reveals itself through the particular context I bring to the text, and that exceeds what I can fully grasp or control.

I do not come to the Odyssey as a neutral reader standing outside language, selecting words from a shared museum of concepts. I come to it as someone already thrown into English, into a particular cultural and historical moment, into a set of habits and assumptions about what heroism looks like, what cleverness means, what an epic is for. These are not obstacles between me and Homer. They are the conditions under which Homer can mean anything to me at all. The ancient Greek world in which the poem was first embedded — its values, its religious frameworks, its relationship between cunning and virtue — does not simply present itself to me when I open the book. It reveals itself partially, through the medium of my own context, and what it reveals is always shaped by what I bring.

Stanley Cavell, extending Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy in Must We Mean What We Say?, offers a way to name what is happening here. Cavell argues that we are possessed by language more than we possess it — that ordinary language philosophy is not a technique for mastering meaning but a practice of returning to what we actually say, attending to words not as symbols pointing at essences but as expressions embedded in forms of life that reveal who we are and how we stand in relation to each other and to the world. The encounter with a text, on this view, is always an encounter with something that exceeds our existing framework. We bring our language game to it, and the text does not entirely fit. It resists. And that resistance is not a failure of communication; it is the condition of genuine encounter.

This is what reading the Odyssey actually feels like. Wilson translates the opening epithet applied to Odysseus — the ancient Greek word polytropos — as “complicated.” Other translators have rendered it as “wily,” “crafty,” “resourceful,” or “much-wandering.” Each of these is a different judgment about how to reconstruct, in the language game of modern English, something that was alive in a different form of life. None of them is a discovery of the word’s essence. Each is a decision about which game to play, which resemblance to emphasize, which aspect of the original to carry forward and which to leave behind. And as a reader, I receive Wilson’s choice through my own game. “Complicated” means something specific to me, in my moment, shaped by how that word has been used in the contexts I have inhabited. What it means to me is not identical to what Wilson intended, and neither of our meanings is identical to whatever Homer was doing when the word was first placed in the poem. What is happening here is not meaning being transferred. It is meaning arising in a new encounter, between the text and the reader, in a specific practice at a specific time.

This is what Wittgenstein means when he says that meaning is use. Not that meaning is arbitrary, or that all readings are equally valid, or that the text does not constrain interpretation. Rather: meaning does not exist outside the practices in which it occurs. It is not waiting behind the text to be extracted by a careful enough reader. It shows up — partially, in context, shaped by the language game the reader is already inside — and what shows up is always more than the reader brought and less than the text contains. That gap, the gap between what I bring to the Odyssey and what the Odyssey brings to me, is not a problem to be solved by finding a better definition or a purer translation. It is the structure of meaningful encounter itself.

Now consider what Kripke’s picture would say about this experience. On his account, the name “Odysseus” picks out a particular referent, and the word polytropos has its meaning fixed in the context of its original use. The question for the translator becomes: how closely does “complicated” track the essence of polytropos? But this framing misses what is most interesting about what is happening when I read. The question is not whether Wilson’s word tracks an essence fixed in ancient Greek. The question is what happens when I encounter her word, in my language game, in my form of life, as someone who cannot step outside the context I have always already been thrown into. That encounter cannot be described by a theory of rigid designation. It requires a description of practice, of the conditions under which meaning arises at all. It requires, in other words, exactly what Wittgenstein offers.

V. Philosophy as Description: The Rough Ground

The argument across this paper has not been that Kripke is simply wrong. His account of rigid designation captures something that descriptivist theories genuinely fail to explain. Names do seem to track individuals across counterfactual situations in a way that descriptions do not, and the reference of a name does not depend entirely on whatever descriptions speakers happen to associate with it at a given time. These are real phenomena, and Kripke identifies them with precision and force.

But the picture Kripke offers — of meaning grounded in essential properties, of reference secured by a metaphysical connection between a name and its bearer that operates beneath and independently of the practices in which speakers use names — is a picture that can only be sustained by abstracting away from the rough ground where meaning actually lives. The baptism that initiates the causal chain only succeeds as a naming act within a practice. The chain only transmits reference because communities of speakers sustain the practices that give names their function. The necessary truth that water is H₂O is a truth that became available within the specific and highly regulated language game of chemistry, constituted by its own rules, standards of evidence, and criteria for correct use. Strip away the practices, and Kripke’s mechanisms have nothing to work with.

Wittgenstein’s picture does not deny any of Kripke’s specific observations. It contextualizes them. Rigid designation is a feature of certain language games — scientific discourse, formal systems of naming, legal identity — that have developed practices for securing stable reference across contexts. These are genuine achievements within forms of life, not alternatives to them. What Wittgenstein resists is the move from noticing these achievements to positing a metaphysical foundation beneath all meaning that would explain them. That move is the move onto the slippery ice. It achieves theoretical tidiness at the cost of losing contact with the world in which meaning actually occurs.

This is where the role of philosophy comes into focus. Wittgenstein’s insistence in §107 — back to the rough ground — is not a counsel of despair. It is a methodological commitment: philosophy does not stand above the practices of language, looking down at them from some pure vantage point and pronouncing on their essences. Philosophy is itself a practice, embedded in a form of life, governed by its own language games. What it can do, when done well, is describe. It can attend carefully to what is actually happening when people use words — in the classroom, on the construction site, in the encounter with an ancient text — and resist the temptation to replace that description with a theory that promises more than description can deliver. Cavell’s formulation captures the spirit of this commitment: ordinary language philosophy is a return to what we actually say, a practice of hearing language rather than theorizing about it, of attending to the forms of life in which words do their work rather than abstracting them into structures that float free of any context.

And this is what reading the Odyssey shows, in its own way. There is no vantage point outside the language game from which to encounter Homer purely, without the mediation of context, history, and practice. I read from where I am. The text reveals itself to me through my form of life, partially and imperfectly, in ways I do not fully control. That is not a failure of access to some pure original meaning. It is what meaning is — situated, contextual, arising in encounter, always already shaped by the game I am inside. Back to the rough ground. That is where Homer lives too.

Conclusion

The desire to define things clearly, to fix meaning once and for all, is understandable. Kripke’s essentialist account of names and natural kinds is a philosophically serious expression of that desire, and it captures real phenomena. Names do function differently from descriptions. Reference does have a robustness that purely descriptive theories fail to explain. These are genuine insights.

But Wittgenstein’s picture is more fundamental, because it asks a prior question: what makes it possible for names to refer at all? For practices to sustain meaning across time? For a reader to encounter an ancient text and find something there that moves them? The answer is not that there are essences in the world waiting to be latched onto. The answer is that there are forms of life — shared practices, language games with their rules and their criteria — within which meaning arises. Rigid designation and causal-historical reference are achievements within those practices, not foundations beneath them.

Language is not something we stand over and organize. It is something we are already inside of. We inherit it, we participate in it, we encounter the world through it. When I read Wilson’s Odyssey, I do not extract a meaning that was waiting behind the text. I enter into an encounter shaped by everything I bring and everything the text withholds, and meaning arises in that encounter — partial, contextual, real. That is not a deficiency. That is the rough ground. And philosophy’s task, on Wittgenstein’s account, is not to rise above it but to describe it honestly: to attend to what is actually happening, to resist the pull toward essences and idealities that lose contact with life, and to say, carefully, what is there. Back to the rough ground. That is where meaning has always been.

Works Cited

Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Updated ed., Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson, W. W. Norton, 2018.

Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press, 1980.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.