The danger of words: a Wittgensteinian lesson for developmentalists

Borrowing from Wittgenstein's and Drury's ideas, this article shows that, by overlooking Wittgenstein's message about the danger of words and the importance of the grammar and clarification of concepts, some developmentalists sometimes fall prey to the fallacy of the alchemists, the fallacy of Molière's doctor, the fallacy of the “missing hippopotamus”, the fallacy of Van Helmont, and the fallacy of “Pickwickian senses”. As a result of these fallacies, the field of development (and psychology) is paved with ungrounded concepts, circular explanations, untenable reifications, misleading and nonsensical conclusions, and a mix-up of language-games. We suggest that to remedy such state of affairs psychologists should not ignore or overlook Wittgenstein's message about the danger of words to bewitch our thought, and should take his conceptual or grammatical investigations, not suspiciously, but as a preliminary and indispensable step to set the stage for appropriate factual and functional investigations, and for intelligible, coherent, and meaningful theoretical presumptions.