A Review of Epistemological Aspects of Wittgenstein’s World-picture Theory

The world-picture concept is one main doctrine of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. As per this view, due to his participation in the language games, every individual develops some mental framework whose shadow is cast over his approach to the world and epistemology directing his reason and true-false evaluations. The world-picture concept comes from the ground of society and culture and from one’s practical kind of choices. In this essay, the author aims to make an inquiry into the foundations and outputs of the epistemology of theory and to show that its result is the negation of meta-standard in epistemology. By this theory, one fails to defend epistemological realism. The world-picture theory made the ground for the progress of social epistemology. Despite Wittgenstein’s efforts to explain it, the theory suffers from several disadvantages: first is that it is self-contradicting. Second is that Wittgenstein’s analyses to prove the role of society in the formation of world-picture concept is imperfect for he failed to take into consideration many other options. Furthermore, in his theory, Wittgenstein has confused language and concept thus failed to precisely illustrate the relation between practice and belief. His analysis that belief is involuntary is not sound; it leads to epistemological relativism. The method adopted here is descriptive-analytic.