Fictitious Language Games, Otherness, and Philosophy of Education: A View on the Later Wittgenstein

The article combines later Wittgenstein’s fictitious language games, along with the forms of life associated with them, with the concept of otherness and places them both within the philosophy of education. The account of otherness overlaps with the view of fictional language games in that the latter deviates from our ordinary, extant uses of language and our Lebensform, and thus can be perceived as extraordinary, unusual, strange, and sometimes nonsensical. The advantages of dealing with such construed preposterousness rely, first, on its leading to a better understanding of our own form of life; second, on its opening a window on the changing of our form of life; third, on its acquainting us with the other. The educational roles of it are presented, first, as being needed at the very beginning of a child’s language learning, when the learner probes the limits of sense and thus enters the domain of otherness; second, as freeing children from the tyranny of adults’ norms and showing the norms that adults accept as absurd; thirdly, as puzzlement that gives an impulse to our thought development, which occurs in contact with the other. Therefore, it is claimed that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy opens perspectives on educational thinking not only in terms of teacher training (Abrichtung) of the learner to follow the rules of existing practices, but also in terms of imagination and critical attitude towards the existing forms of life.


Introduction
Ludwig Wittgenstein is usually referred to as a philosopher of education on the basis of either his own practice of teaching and lecturing (e.g. Gasking and Jackson 1967;Peters and Stickney 2018) or his later concepts concerning rule following and understanding and correctly applying concepts (Synytsia 2020, p. 40;Friesen 2017). It is also frequently emphasized that he "often uses educational situations to examine philosophical puzzles" (Maruyama 2001, p. 51). Each of the contexts features the concept of training, or Abrichtung, which the teacher gives to the learner, to make them follow rules according to the patterns of the practice developed in the form of life in which they live. In this paper I will claim that Wittgenstein's later philosophy opens perspectives on educational thinking not only in terms of Abrichtung, but also in terms of imagination and critical attitude towards existing forms of life, which can be brought about by dealing with otherness, epitomized by Wittgenstein's fictional, conjured-up language games. Consequently, in the first section, I will focus on the bounds of sense in later Wittgenstein's thought. Next, I will discuss the account of otherness, emphasizing the view that what is perceived as strange, or even preposterous, significantly deviates from the ordinariness of our extant form of life. In the third section, I will set out a stance on the advantages of our dealing with the extraordinary, enumerating three points: first, dealing with it leads to a better understanding of our own Lebensform; second, it opens a perspective on changing our form of life; third, it helps us get acquainted with otherness, which can, in turn, lead to extending our social life so that it becomes more inclusive. In the fourth section, I will elaborate on the educational roles of nonsense, claiming that it is present and needed at the beginning of a child's language learning, when they must explore the limits of the sense and thus enter what is beyond it. I also believe that dealing with fictional language games frees children from the tyranny of adults' norms and shows that in some practices accepted by adults absurdity can be seen, which is exemplified in a large part of children's literature (especially the literature of nonsense). Finally, I treat dealing with otherness as an impulse to our thought development.

The Bounds of Sense in the Later Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein's thought underwent a significant change of methodology between the early and late periods regarding his circumscribing the bounds of the sense of linguistic expressions (e.g. Biletzki 2021;Hutto 2004;Rhees 2006;Toulmin 1969). What, then, is the background of, and the differences in, the two approaches? In general terms, the differences boil down to the shifting of stress from the formal logical approach to language, manifested in the Tractatus, to the grammatical and even anthropological view on language and sense, presented in the Philosophical Investigations and a large part of Nachlass. For Rhees, for example, it is the move from the philosopher's focus on a calculus, or a system, as a scaffolding of meaning to his emphasis on a form of life as a thing that insures our common intelligibility (Rhees 2006, p. 135). In a similar vein, Toulmin claims that while Wittgenstein's aim both in the Tractatus and in the Philosophical Investigations remains principally the same-the determining of the limits of sense-the effects are fairly different: the former being formal conditions of meaning, the latter being grammatical forms actually played and weaved in our practices (1969, p. 58-59). Some others point, like Hutto, to the "replacement of logical form with forms of life as the governors of sense" (Hutto 2004, p. 137) as the crux of the shift in question. In the Tractatus, it can be claimed, the bounds of sense are delineated by logical form and these bounds are transcendental (TLP,6.13) to the sense to be contained within them. The limits-as being the ultimate logical horizons of the expressions that can confer a sense-cannot themselves, as they stand, express any sense: they are a structure in which all statements have to be grounded. For this reason, in Wittgenstein's view, they are not articulable or sayable in any metalanguage. They show themselves only in other senseful propositions that are based on them. In support of this, one can allude to Sections. 4.12-41,211 of the Tractatus: Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it-logical form. What expresses itself in language we cannot express by means of language. What can be shown cannot be said (TLP, 4.12-4.1211).
At the same time, in the early Wittgenstein's account, logical forms, though transcendental, are external neither to the nature of things to be found in the world, nor to language: rather, they constitute a common link for and in them. On the one hand, "Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits" (TLP, 5.61); on the other hand, it is built into language and our linguistic expression about the world can precede our experience of it: "Logic is prior to every experience-that something is so. It is prior to the question 'How?', not prior to the question 'What?'" (TLP,5.552). In such a perspective, what fits the bounds of logical form can be counted as making sense, irrespective of its logical value, whereas what violates the form which is set by logic counts as nonsense. 1 The priority of logic to experience underscores that logical form determines the domain of linguistic, as well as philosophical, possibility: the realm of what can be thought and said. What can be taken to have a sense has to conform to it.
The line of argument for Wittgenstein's methodological shift from the Tractatus to the Investigations presents the view that forms of life play basically the same role in the later writings that logical form played in the Tractatus. Forms of life are also transcendental in that they constitute the bounds of possible sense, while themselves being outside the scope of the sensible and explicable (cf. Boncampagni 2022, p. 39-40). When considering the sense of some utterance, or its lack, one has to take into account the grammar, i.e., the language game in which it is embedded or the context of its use, which all constitute what Wittgenstein calls "the form of life". As logical form constituted the limits of the sayable it had to be regarded as an a priori condition of any sense, in the same manner, in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, we should "look on the language game as the primary thing" (PI, §656). In another place of PI it is emphasized that "What has to be accepted, the given, is-so one could say-forms of life" (PI, p. 226). On the basis of it, it can be concluded-along with Hutto's remark-that "as there was no way of charting the limits of logic independently, there is no point in trying to understand forms of life, language games 1 3 or grammar from on high. There is no getting behind, beneath or above grammar for the philosophical purpose of providing some kind of overview" (Hutto 2004, p. 140).
Therefore, along with Wittgenstein's shift of focus from logical to anthropological, or even ethnological, issues, the bounds of sense are bound not with logic, but rather with forms of life and language games. In this context, along with the sensible, the concepts of otherness -variety, difference, strangeness or extraordinarinessappear as something beyond our usual form of life.

The Diversity of Sense and the Variety of Forms of Life
Having taken into account that, for later Wittgenstein, "speaking of a language is part of an activity, or a form of life' (PI, §23), and that "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life" (PI,19), one can reasonably come to the conviction that grasping the meaning of a linguistic expression is to determine how it is used within a language game, which either is actually played or can be thought to be played in an alternative game-supposing that a form of life looked different. In other words, it cannot be taken for granted what can make sense and what cannot whatsoever without linking that expression to the possible practices to which it belongs.
What, then, does make sense in the later thought of Wittgenstein? In the last resort, what we usually perceive as sensible and reasonable in our thinking and actions comes from the proprieties of our language games. The meanings are conferred on our expressions through their uses that are actually practiced by the language users within specific and mostly unique niches of their social activity, which their partakers live in and which they take to be natural. Their language games are a unity that comprises both such linguistic items as signs or sounds and their actual usages in particular context-in line with one of Wittgenstein's remarks: "I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the 'language-game'" (PI, §7).
Language regarded as a game has rules that are intrinsic to it, and rule-following is a human activity noticeably manifested in our speaking a language. Yet, what Wittgenstein has in mind by rules is not only grammar in the traditional sense, but also pragmatics in is widest possible sense. It means that some expressions make sense in certain semantic contexts and situations, when used in certain, communally accepted ways, whereas some others are treated as unintelligible or strange (Glock 1996, pp. 193-194). It may be rightfully claimed that, according to Wittgenstein, saying something is treated as a move in a game (Rhees 2006, p. 33), where some actions are legitimate and some others are not. However, it is worth noting, as the game analogy suggests, that our "playing by the rules" is not only limited to our mere follow-up of some logical calculi or formal chess-like instructions, but also covers a variety of much less strict regulations regarding their use. Furthermore, in our social life, the set of rules is not set up in advance, nor strictly constrained (Cavell 2000), but it can possibly be changed or developed "as we go along" (PI, §83).
The actual rules underlying our speaking and action are thus interwoven into our "form of life" (PI, §19) and are inherent to our practise, i.e. to what we do as individuals and communities (Dehnel 2016, pp. 275-328). As such, they are often implicit and taken as ordinary and obvious without saying, as those "which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes" (PI, §415). Accordingly, they constitute our ordinariness and normalcy, as well as-as an opposition or alternative to-things which we take, or do not take, to be so.
The particular components of the ordinariness and normalcy of our praxis may cover very different language games, beginning from the employment of concepts in the grammatical and inferential contexts, ending with their employment in typically practical and social situations, such as giving and following recipes in cooking (Finkelstein 2000), celebrating feasts, promising, wishing, betting, bidding, etc. In the wider, 'macro' contexts they also embrace the discourses of social institutions (Winch 1990), political interactions (Rasiński 2012) and wider cultural background (Boncompagni 2022, pp. 40-44). There can also be a level-which may be named 'ecological' or 'species'-that stems from a naturalistic reading of Wittgensteinian forms of life (e.g. Pears 1995;McGinn 2010;McArthur 2018) and in which a physical sense is conferred on this concept; human reflecting on, and imagining of, for example, sensory apparatus of other creatures and their possible expression of pain can be located on this level (it seems that animal ethics partly draws on such reflections).
What, then, can count as otherness? In accordance with Wittgenstein's insights, our existing everyday language games -or forms of life -can be termed the sphere of the ordinary or the usual, whereas practices that break the rules of what is treated as normal, ordinary and usual can be termed extraordinary, unusual and even nonsensical. Accordingly, otherness can be taken -in accordance with Wittgenstein's considerations -as a gradable concept, however not in a strict and formal way. The spectrum of otherhood can comprise variety, difference, strangeness, extraordinariness, queerness or puzzlement and at the mere end of this spectrum is preposterousness or nonsense. The point is that, in the last resort, otherness, including nonsense, is what it is from the perspective of "the beholder", i.e. as referred to that beholder's form of life. Our acquainting with that nonsense would rely on our possibly imagining a form of life or practice, a fictitious one, in which that manifestation of otherness would by some means operate. In a sense, one can say, otherness is always within our form of life (e.g., Animals' life, is often a part of our life, despite their being creatures different from us), although the most often it seems to be beyond it. Our problem is often the problem of recognizing otherness as parts of our world.
Is there any textual evidence in the Investigations for such an understanding of nonsense, i.e. as possible sense referred to some different grammar -conceivably reflecting an imaginary, different form of life that could constitute otherness? Lynette Reid (Reid 1998, pp. 145-148) draws our attention to § §490-particularly a combination of §499 and §500-and bids us to seek the explicit backing for such a view in them. Therefore, in §500, Wittgenstein says: When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation (PI, §500).
And, in a preceding paragraph, he expounds on the different reasons for withdrawing expressions from circulation: To say "This combination of words makes no sense" excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may shew where the property of one man ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary line that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for (PI, §499).
Reid comes to the conviction that what can be viewed as nonsense does not have to be a single thing, but can vary significantly: […] the Investigations says that the bare formula "excluding a combination of words from the language" can signify many different ways of operating with, or not operating with, that combinations of words. What §500 in combination with §499 gives us is not the idea of einfacher Unsinn, but the idea of vielfältiger Unsinn. And if nonsense is vielfältig, then it is not the same as "piggly-wiggle" (Reid 1998, p. 146).
It, in turn, could mean that our dealing with a variety of nonsense can be instructive. First, there can be a multitude of different kinds of nonsense; second, nonsense is "not allor-nothing matters" (Reid,p. 147), but can be closer or farther from what we, in our ordinary language games, take as sensible.
What, then, apart from the above theoretical clues in §499-500 of the Investigations, are the specific examples of jumping "over the boundary" ( §499) of the accepted sense in Wittgenstein's own philosophical later approach? A substantial part of his method of philosophising-first of all in the Investigations-relies on inventing fictional games and practises and reflecting on them afterwards (see Glock 1996, pp. 194-195). The introducing of these language games is very often preceded by such expressions as "Imagine" (PI, §4), "we might say" ( §3), "It is as if someone were to say" ( §3) "Suppose that" ( §15), "Imagine someone's saying" ( §14), "Think of" ( §11), "It will be possible to say" ( §17), "it looks as if" ( §20) etc. It signals that these imagined language games serve as a means of a tentative creation of equally fictitious modes of life that can be built on them.
Aside from well-known examples from the Investigations, some clear and explicit considerations on nonsensical usages are given in Wittgenstein Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939, edited by Cora Diamond (WLFM). Here, in the opening lecture, Wittgenstein foreshadows what he will be talking about in his course by referring to nonsense in juxtaposing with something "surprising", something "we do not know what you mean" or something "that is no longer correct usage" of an expression: We will come to cases where I will point to a statement and say, "Is this similar to nonsense or to something that is surprising?" I may be inclined to say, "Surely this is nonsense." You might say, "Isn't this arrogance? Shouldn't we say, 'Aren't you inclined to call this nonsense?' or 'This is nearer to the kind of expression of which we say, "I don't know what you mean" than the kind of which we say, "I know what you mean but I don't know how it happened".'" One German philosopher talked about "the knife without a handle, the blade of which has been lost". Shall we say that this is nonsense? And when do we say that it is no longer correct usage of the word "knife" but is nonsensical usage? (WLFM, p.

21)
Sometimes, in the contexts of certain language games and their grammar, what is perceived as nonsense is evident and patent; yet other times, when placed in the context of some other practices, both linguistic and behavioural, it turns out to be not a patent, but a disguised nonsense (cf. PI, §524), one that acquires some meaning against the background of unusual uses. Some of them are within the scope of our possible imagination, while others are not. In the second lecture on the foundations of mathematics, Wittgenstein analyses, among many other things, the expression "I intend to play chess" and the criteria for its understanding by a learner who is taught this expression: Well, how is one taught the meaning of the expression "I intend to play chess"? One sees that it is the sort of expression which people use when sitting down at a chess board; but of course they sometimes say it when not sitting down at a chess board. Yet saying this generally goes with certain actions and not with certain other actions. (Suppose I say, "I now intend to play chess" and then undress.) […] They might think me slightly queer, but that is all.
[…] But if that were the rule instead of the exception, if there were a race of men who always walked straight out of the room whenever they said "I intend to play chess" -would we say that they used the phrase in the same way we do? One might be puzzled about this (WLFM, p. 25).
Certain ways of understanding and meaning that Wittgenstein speaks about seem preposterous and ridiculous in the practice of the framework of ordinary chess players, such as getting undressed after uttering that intention (i.e. of playing chess), yet it is possible to imagine particularly imaginative ways of its application. It is absurd, however, that they may make sense in certain uses; they are explicitly referred to as queer and leading to puzzlement.
In a similar vein, in Zettel, Wittgenstein discusses an imagery tribe which applies the concept of pain in a way that is different from ours; namely they have two phenomena that they would call "pain": "one is applied where there is visible damage and is linked with tending, pity and so on. The other is used for stomach-ache for example, and is tied up with mockery of anyone who complains" (Z, §380). As a result, only when visible harm, or injury, a person presents is thought to be in pain. In such an "exercise in imagination" (Hutto 2004, p. 142), the understanding of the concept of pain by the tribe can also be seen as queer and puzzling, if not nonsensical, thus representing otherness.
A question may arise as to how far the queerness in question reaches. What about an expression that contains a plain contradiction, or the practices which logical or mathematical contradictories result from? In "Lecture XXII" of Wittgenstein Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, when scrutinising this issue, Wittgenstein tells a story about a fictional tribe which does not respect the law of contradiction in some trading practises, and which we would tend to call not only strange, but even mad: This is queer. We wouldn't call a man mad who denied the law of contradiction-or would we? Take this case: people buy firewood by the cubic foot. These people could learn a technique to calculate the price of wood. They stack the wood in parallelepipeds a foot high, measure the length and breadth of the parallelepiped, multiply, and take a shilling for each cubic foot.-This is one way of paying for wood. But people could also pay according to conditions of labour. But suppose we found people who pile up wood into heaps which are not necessarily a foot high. They measure the length and breadth, but not height, multiply, and say, "The rule is to pay according to product of length and breadth." Wouldn't this be queer? Would you say these people were asking the wrong price? Suppose that in order to show them what a stupid way of calculating the price of wood it is, I take a certain pile which they price at three shillings, and make it longer by making it less high. What if the heap piled differently amounted to £1-and they said, "Well, he's buying more now, so he must pay more."-We might call this a kind of logical madness. But there is nothing wrong with giving wood away. So what is wrong with this? We might say, "This is how they do it." (WLFM, p. 202).
According to Wittgenstein, we are inclined to call others mad when we "see an entire discrepancy between what we do and what they do-in such a way that the whole point of what we are doing seems to be lost, so that we would say, "'What the hell's the point of doing this?'" (WLFM, p. 203). But this can, and probably will, next lead to the reflection on our own form of life: But is there a point in everything we do? What is the point of our brushing hair in the way we do? Or when watching the coronation of a king, one might ask, "What is the point of all this?" If you wish to give the point, you might tell the history of it. What is the point of imitating gothic? I isn't clear in all that we do, what the point is (WLFM,. The tribe of wood sellers is thus a relevant example of otherness. At this point, having seen not only how the things in question might otherwise function, but also having come to the conviction that our own way of life might be substantially different, we are ready to reach a better understanding of our own Lebenswelt: its intrinsic contingency and radical historicality (Humphries 2020, pp. 11, 21-34).

Why Ought One Deal with Otherness?
Given that Wittgenstein's fictitious language games can be regarded as exemplary aspects of otherness, the question of the role of otherness in both intellectual-not least philosophical-and practical activity arises. Focusing on both on Wittgenstein's own explicit remarks and on the very method of his philosophizing, it seems that dealing with it serves, overall, the three following aims.
First, it offers a way to better understanding of the form of life in which we live, as well as the language that we speak and the concepts that we use. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein makes an explicit remark that appears to render this thought: "Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than constructing fictitious ones" (CV, p. 74e). It means that grasping a concept-or, wider, a linguistic expression-is not only to learn to imitate its hitherto applications, but also to recognize its misapplications as well as the conjured-up uses that go beyond our ordinary, extant practice. Therefore, the understanding of a word or a phrase develops through our dealing with it in many different concepts, both old and new, which probably results in our capability of finding new uses and meanings in many novel, unexpected circumstances.
In the Investigations, Wittgenstein emphasizes the importance of alternative uses of language by claiming that "The language games are rather set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities" (PI, §130), where the latter may be taken to comprise cases of what are thought of as unusual usages. In the last resort, through this we can come to a better understanding of our own form of life, thus acquiring self-knowledge about the way that we live and the rules that we actually follow.
Maruyama, when discussing Wittgenstein's philosophical method, tends to extrapolate the Tractarian concept of elucidation for his further philosophical reflections and associates it with "perspicuous representation" or a "clear view", Übersischt (PI, §122) -despite the fact that Wittgenstein himself consequently shunned using the term "elucidation" in his later thought (Maruyama 2017). As elucidation leads to neither forming new explanations (theories) nor discovering new facts, while clarifying instead what is already known, in the same vein our acquiring a clear view of something, a perspicuous representation, "produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'" (PI, §122). The seeing of connections thus brings a specific kind of understanding through, as Maruyama claims, elucidation-in opposition to the understanding gained through scientific or evolutionary explanation. As Maruyama focuses mainly on the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, he keeps referring to the facts concerning a particular historical tribe and claims that "Perspicuous representation is made by the arrangement of factual contents alone, without adding any explanation to it" (2017, p. 120), which might suggest that non-factual, alternative, or even queer language games do not belong to what would count as Übersischt. Yet, allowing for the nonfactual character of the language games that Wittgenstein analyses in the Investigations and many other places of his Nachlass-"often these are mundane, ordinary things […] but sometimes they are things which are unlikely to have been imagined before, or are surreal (Harris 2017, p. 136)-it might be concluded that nonsense has the ability to contribute to the synopsis, the "perspicuous representation", of our linguistic expressions. Thus, if Maruyama is right about the elucidatory feature of Wittgenstein's later philosophical method, otherness can lead us to better understanding of our Lebensform.
Second, our dealing with otherness-through the perspicuous presentation of our language games-opens a way of developing, or changing, our own form of life, which might proceed by our adoption of practices which seem to be far from actual habits, or by abandoning, for some reasons, extant practices and starting new ones. What is seen as patently nonsensical in the present context could turn out to be only a "disguised nonsense" that, in the end, can be accepted and included in our own Lebensform. In §524 of the Investigations, Wittgenstein speaks of the issue as following: Don't take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, occupy our minds. ("Don't take it as a matter of course" means: find it surprising, as you do some things which disturb you. Then the puzzling aspect of the latter will disappear, by your accepting this fact as you do the other.) (The transition from patent nonsense to something which is disguised nonsense.) (PI, §524) The possibility of change is embedded in our language and lifeform and draws on the contingency of both. No form of life and linguistic system is preestablished and logically necessary. As Cavell accentuates, language encourages us to project meanings onto new situations as well as to discover unknown meanings: […] the learning is never over, and we keep finding new potencies in words and new ways in which objects are disclosed. The "routes of initiation" are never closed. […] Why haven't we arranged to limit words to certain contexts, and then coin new ones for new eventualities? (Cavell 2000, p. 30).
Examples of the changes that Wittgenstein, and also Cavell, imply can be found in many contexts, both with a greater focus on language and on practices. One of them is the case of the Polish ex-president Lech Wałęsa, the first leader of the Solidarity movement, who once publicly declared that there are "positive positives and negative positives" (in Polish: "są plusy dodatnie i plusy ujemne"). Although the expression both made the audience laugh and startled it, since it did not make sense as it was, it still went into the Polish language as meaning "sometimes the advantages are bigger and sometimes smaller". Another group of examples may concern society's refraining from using particular words, like the word "spinster" in English -since they started to be seen as pejorative and stigmatising in some new contexts (our replacing the pejorative word "spinster" with, for example, "single" really did change our practice: i.e., our viewing and treating women that are not married). But many other terms and uses of words appears in response, for example, to medical advances ("cerebral death"), or social and political changes ("surrogate mother" etc.).
Thirdly, alongside the understanding and the transformation of our Lebensform, our dealing with unusual practices engenders a better understanding of what is seen as otherness. It may be taken that what significantly deviates from our normalcy and ordinariness, and what can be perceived as nonsense (can trigger our puzzlement or the feeling of queerness), i.e. something exceeding our form of life, can be termed otherness. Thus, the scrutinizing of the examples of different language games, i.e. various ways of life, is, in fact, a dealing with "whatifness" (see Zarębski 2021b) that can lead to an acquaintance with diversity and difference. The proper method that would serve this purpose is again the "clear view" or Übersischt. When approaching otherness, as Wittgenstein underscores in his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (RFGB), the point, on our part, is to avoid the trap of scientism. Our understanding of otherness does not consist in finding any quasi-positivistic or evolutionary explanation of the form of life (behaviour, rules, practices, etc.). That would mean our intellectualizing on-or paternalizing (see Lenka 2007;Carroll 2017)-different Lebensformen according to the norms and criteria taken from our own form of life (see Harris 2017, pp. 141-142) and, as Frazer himself did, treating the habits, rites and ceremonies of a particular people as errors or bad science. Yet, what we actually need to do is "to recognise that the rites express something important in the lives of the people" (Harris 2017, p. 136). Therefore, instead of explaining, we should rely on clarifying and elucidating that leads to understanding through our having "perspicuous representations" (PI, §122). This, in turn, comes down not to our developing theories, but instead to our focus on particulars and taking into account examples of how words are, or can be, "used within a framework of beliefs and everyday practices" (Harris 2017, p. 136).
The acquaintance with otherness and whatifness by dealing with fictitious and alternative language games in a Wittgensteinian way is tantamount to one's openness to a diversity of perspectives and lifestyles. Such familiarity with diversity is, in turn, a precondition of actively forming our Lebensform in dialogue with others, thus including otherness into our own worldview and practices, which is a challenge for every community pretending to lead a genuinely democratic social life (see Saito 2018; Zarębski 2021a). Our dealing with it results in a testing of the limits of the sense that is inherent in our extant form of life, and could lead to reformulating our Lebensform so that it encompass the diverse others. (In terms of change of our own form of life, the opposite direction is also possible: it would rely on our recognizing something in our extant practices as no longer acceptable and thus other, nonsensical; sexism, nationalism etc. would count as such practices).

Nonsense, Otherness, and Philosophy of Education
The problem of otherness in the philosophy of education inspired by the later Wittgenstein has been explicitly and comprehensively addressed by Maruyama in his dissertation Wittgenstein on Teaching and Otherness: Toward an Ethic of Teaching (2000), where he focuses primarily on the teaching aspects of the educational philosophy and places emphasis on "recognizing the otherness of learners" by teachers. He underscores the ethical dimension of teaching in contact with otherness and posits the teacher's obligation to respect the different cultural backgrounds of students (Maruyama 2000). Yet, the above perspective also opens another possibility of viewing it within educational thought, namely, the possibility of showing the role of fictitious language games, and thus otherness, in the very process of learning.
This role is played at the very beginning of learning a word by a child. Harris develops this issue by highlighting the significance of imagination in learning: "there is a playfulness in the way that the child learns words, where fantasy and reality operate in tandem" (Harris 2017, p.136). It may be also said that what operates in tandem in learning is sense and nonsense, ordinary and extraordinary. When children learn words and the way they function, they probe the limits of language and thus learn its accepted usages within the practices that they live in. An example of that activity is reflected on by Cavell, when describing her baby daughter's way of learning the word "kitty" (Cavell 2000, pp. 23-24): first, she learned to point the picture of a kitty in a picture book; next, she pointed to a real cat passing by and said "kitty", but later the baby kept calling "kitty" a piece of fur while stoking it; "In each case her word was produced about a soft, warm, furry object of a certain size, shape, and weight" (Cavell 2000, p. 24). For Cavell, each time she might mean a variety of things: "This is like a kitty", "Look at the funny kitty", "Aren't soft things nice?", "See, I remember how pleased you are when I say 'kitty'", "I like to be petted", and many others.
It seems that what Cavell's daughter did was to form, by learning, the sense of the word by actively and freely trying out (or experimenting with, albeit, as a child, not in a designed and deliberate manner) many different alternatives-including those outside of expected, ordinary use. By teacher-father responses she was able to successively enter-while growing up-the ways of life of a wider community. Here, playing with imagination and nonsense helps a child introduce her form of life.
However, the unusual can serve another purpose. As many theoreticians of children's literature agree, playing with strange and nonsensical speech can allow children to undermine the adult normalcy imposed on childhood and the "the tyranny of the norm" (Nodelman and Reimer 2003, p. 95;cf. Tigges 1988) associated with the adult form of life. (Obviously, there is a difference between teaching children the expression: "This is a pumpkin", which is descriptive, and: "Boys don't cry", which is normative; after all, children's trying out alternatives-in the sense of opposing of what is given by adults can start at both of them). Thus, non-sensical "games of grammar" (Wagner 2012, p. 205), such as nursery rhymes or counting games, can give rise to a child's grasping pieces of different language games; accordingly, they can stimulate children's openness to different forms of life and various sorts of otherness. At the same time, the nonsense literature, like that by Lewis Carroll, may "expose the often absurd rules that govern the adult world" (Wagner 2012, p. 205). It seems that a large part of children's literature-particularly nonsense literature (see Lecercle 1994), but also, for example, the literary output of Astrid Lindgren (see Gaare and Sjaastad 2002;Zarębski 2021b)-draws on that critical and emancipatory educational idea.
Aside from the above two aspects, the point of our dealing with otherness in learning is that it stirs the mind and gives it an impulse to thinking: to seeing and solving problems. Harris claims, in a similar context, that "imagination is at the heart of our thought; it extends to all things and is necessary in a child and an adult's learning" (Harris 2017, p. 135). For her, the presence of imagination in philosophical investigation is evident from the opening sections of the Investigations: figuring out the community with a language consisting of only four words-"pillar", "slab", "block" and "beam"-requires a lot of inventiveness (Harris 2017, p. 138) and thus, one may conclude, can be regarded as extraordinary, strange and even nonsensical. Based on that, it can be surmised that our thinking keeps developing when it is in contact with otherness. And assuming that Wittgenstein's conjured situations and language games are supposed to be exercises with different manifestations of otherness, it signals that what fosters our intellect is its contact with difference and oddness.
Can "games of grammar" of children's nonsense speech and literature evoke philosophical puzzlement and give rise to thought development? Referring to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There, Wagner claims that "The Alice-books raise an awareness for the pitfalls of (written) language, pitfalls that in our everyday life hardly ever produce any problems, yet lie at the very heart of philosophical discourse" (Wagner 2012, p. 215). And considering Wittgenstein's acquaintance with Carroll (Pitcher 1967) and textual evidence for his being inspired by the Alice books (Wagner 2012, p. 208), the answer should be affirmative.

Conclusion
In the view presented above, Wittgenstein's later philosophy opens perspectives on educational thinking not only in terms of the teacher training the learner to follow the rules of existing practices, but also in terms of imagination and critical attitudes towards the existing forms of life. Wittgenstein is seen as allowing an account of otherness that is embedded in many fictitious, imaginative language games that serve our acquiring a perspicuous presentation, Übersischt, of the uses of language along with the forms of life into which these uses are woven. Otherness is perceived so from the perspective of our existing, extant ordinariness. Such an account, on a general, theoretical level, gives rise to making theoretical and educational use of nonsense, bolsters our own Lebensform, shows opportunities for it to be changed as well as acquaints us with diversity; while on the educational level, it accompanies children in their language learning, suggests alternatives to adults' accepted norms, and, finally, in our contact with otherness, it encourages our thought development.

Conflict of interest Not applicable.
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