Revisiting the Wittgensteinian legacy: perspectives on representational and non-representational language-games for educational history and theory

Debates in science seem to depend on referential language-games, but in other senses they do not. Language works in more complex ways, even in work that purports to be purely scientific. This article investigates the scope and limitations of language-games in educational history and theory. The study addresses concepts and pictures as examples of how language can work in theoretical, philosophical and historiographical interpretation. Attention is drawn to the legacy of Wittgensteinian insights, which highlights the “pictorial form”; thus the article deals with the problems that occur when our “picturing” of reality is forgotten, which led to the particular turn educational research has taken nowadays. This forgetting distracts the attention from the kind of research that is required to do justice to the educational field. From his stance, it is argued that though some kind of correspondence theory will always be part of the objectivity to which educational research aspires, there is no need to limit such a theory to a naive form of it. Instead, a broadened notion of correspondence theory can be offered where the various levels and language-games that are involved can be taken into account.