system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How debated of a topic is the idea of "language games" in the philosophical community? How prevalent of an idea is it in modern philosophy/linguistics that the words we use to describe reality cannot be separated from reality itself? What are the counter arguments to this position?

I've been taking a computer science course which has really changed my mind philosophically but left me obsessed with specifically language.  In my findings I stumbled across the idea of language games and found it made sense to me but after further thinking it seems that would kind of nullify, or at the very least severely hamstrings) the idea of universal understanding on a level desired for philosophy.

The thing is I know there's a counterpoint to this view, but I'm currently struggling to see it.  It made me curious how commonplace the idea of language games are in the philosophical community and what the counterpoints are to people who disagree.
gpt
Part of what helped to crystallize this concept for me was understanding that for Wittgenstein, language-games are a set of practices set within the context of other practices. Within certain kinds of philosophy there is a tendency to separate *what we say* from *how we act*, but Wittgenstein forces us to collapse this distinction again and to recognize: speaking is acting. And language games make sense to their practitioners precisely because their speaking is always already embedded within a bunch of other non-verbal social practices (and which themselves implicate shared assumptions and shared values - often unspoken ones) that help to contextualize everything.

This helps to explain why, when we take something out of context, it often doesn't make much sense and can even sound absurd. Wittgenstein was making precisely this sort of point when he said of the lion "if a lion could speak, we could not understand it." Because the sorts of things lions do and are interested in are not the sorts of things people do and are interested in.

So, bringing the lion into the equation pushes this aspiration for universal understanding a notch higher. Exactly how universal do you want to make your communications? If you want all humans to understand you, why stop there? Why not all mammals? Why not all life?

To counter Wittgenstein's argument in his own terms you would need to make a case for a universal context including a set of universal practices (and, potentially, values) that all the relevant forms of life can relate to. A tall order at the very least.