A Critical Study of Two Conceptions of Wittgenstein’s “Family Resemblance”

In the Blue Book (pp. 17-18) and in the Philosophical Investigation (§§ 66-67), Wittgenstein offers the idea of ‘family resemblances’ to explain the relation between some ‘things’. This paper first explores two accounts of this idea, one by Renford Bambrough and the other by Ilham Dilman. This reveals that there are at least two different accounts of ‘family resemblances’. Secondly, the paper sets out a critical assessment of both accounts so as to suggest that they both fail at what they claim to do.