Design Ideation and language

Wittgenstein holds that ordinary language is fine as it is, that is, suited to its everyday use of facilitating communication between people. For example, when people talk about knowing things, in most contexts it is perfectly obvious what they mean. But when faced with an an abstract concept such as "knowledge" people might get confused because the essence of knowledge is difficult to identify. But this is because philosophers have abstracted a word from the contexts in which it has a function and find that, outside these contexts, the word loses its meaning. If philosophers were careful about how they use language - words are not defined by reference to the objects they designate, nor by the mental representations one might associate with them, but by how they are used - and Wittgenstein treats philosophy as an activity, he argues that philosophical confusion would cease to exist. Moreover, Wittgenstein's point is not that it is impossible to define "knowledge", but that we don't have a definition, and we don't need one, because even without the definition, we use the word successfully. In design activity, this may suggest that by using language carefully designers would avoid any confusion with words such as "design thinking" or "wicked problems". Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953/2001). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Publishing.