In his final years at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein postulated
that philosophical problems are merely linguistic puzzles
wrongly imbued with metaphysical significance. The solution to a
philosophical problem could thus be obtained through a
grammatical investigation into the puzzle’s articulated
statements. He describes a grammatical investigation as one in
which ‘we remind ourselves of the kind of statement that we make
about phenomena’ (p 90). This extends beyond the traditional
usage of the term grammar - as it pertains to ordering well-
formed syntactic sentences - to include the structure of our
practice of using words, or language-in-use, as a spatial and
temporal phenomenon. This emphasis on the dynamic aspect of
language differs greatly from his earlier work in the tractatus
wherein he treated language isolated from use with reducible
essential qualities that could be defined through atomic
propositions of logic. This treatment results in the development
of an idealized system which focuses on a narro