Don't look only for similarities in order to justify a concept, but also for connexions. The father transmits his name to his son even if the latter is quite unlike him.1
Abstract
In §66 ofPhilosophical Investigations Wittgenstein looks for something common to various games and finds only an interconnecting network of resemblances. These are “family resemblances”. Sympathetic as well as unsympathetic readers have interpreted him as claiming that games form a family in virtue of these resemblances. This assumes Wittgenstein inverted the relation between being a member of a family and bearing family resemblances to others of that family. (The Churchills bear family resemblances to one another because they belong to the same family, they don't belong to the same family because they resemble one another.) A close reading ofInvestigations gives no evidence that Wittgenstein made this mistake. Rather, family resemblances may play a role like the one criteria play for psychological terms. They give excellent but fallible evidence for membership in the extensions of some terms.
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I would like to thank Felicia Ackerman, Donna Summerfield, and the Texas A+M Reading Group for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. And, most of all, I would like to thank Bernard Gert for his help and encouragement.
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Gert, H.J. Family resemblances and criteria. Synthese 105, 177–190 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01064217
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01064217