Language problem

The puzzle of how language carries meaning at all — whether words pick out fixed features of an external reality, or whether their meaning is constituted by something more contingent and social. In its tighter form it asks how a symbol comes to refer to anything; in its more vertiginous form it asks whether two people using the same word are really sharing a concept, or only the illusion of one. A central preoccupation of Wittgenstein, who flipped his position on it across his career, and through him a recurring obsession for David Foster Wallace, who treated the language problem as the philosophical face of solipsism — the fear that we are sealed inside our own heads and only ever approximating contact.