Family resemblance

It has been suggested that Wittgenstein picked up the idea and the term from Friedrich Nietzsche, who had been using it, as did many nineteenth century philologists, when discussing language families.

As the idea gained popularity, earlier instances of its occurrence were rediscovered e.g. in 18th-century taxonomy,[4] in the writings of Lev Vygotsky[5] or Władysław Tatarkiewicz.

Abstraction is the procedure which acknowledges this necessity and derives essences, but in the absence of a single common feature, it is bound to fail.

The German family-word is common, and it is found in Grimm's dictionary; a rare occurrence of 'family likeness' has been noted in a lecture by J. F. Moulton in 1877.

He develops his argument further by insisting that in such cases there is not a clear-cut boundary, but there arises some ambiguity if this indefiniteness can be separated from the main point.

Another simple model is described as: Item_1: A B C Item_2: B C D Item_3: A C D Item_4: A B D It exhibits the presence of a constant degree of resemblance, and the absence of a common feature without extending to infinity.

One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread – namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres".Philosophical Investigations is the primary text used in discussing family resemblances, although the topic appears also in other works by Wittgenstein, notably The Brown Book.

[19] Many contributions to the discussion are by people involved in philosophical research but concerned with more pragmatic questions such as taxonomy[4] or information processing.

[20] Hans Sluga has observed that "the notion of family resemblance... draws on two quite different sets of ideas, two different vocabularies, but treats them as if they were one and the same.

The first is the vocabulary of kinship, of descent, of some sort of real and causal connection...the second is that of similarity, resemblance, affinity and correspondence.

"[21] Wittgenstein's insistence that boundaries do not really exist but can be traced arbitrarily has been described as conventionalism and more generally the acceptance of his conception has been seen to present a refined nominalism.