The family resemblance is an idea of Ludwig Wittgenstein which shows that a word’s abstraction could be explained without assuming that there is a separate entity characteristic of everything that could be properly denoted by that word.
In one of his books – Wittgenstein invites his readers to consider all the processes that we call games, like table games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, etc. Then he asks “What is common among all of them?”
After that, the author reminds us not to go the easiest way possible and says “There must be something common, otherwise they wouldn’t be all called games.” Still, he insists on the reader to actually look and say whether there is really something common among all the activities that we call games.
When we look – Wittgenstein claims – we will see that everything is a “complex network of commonalities”, crossing and overlapping each other. Sometimes these commonalities are general and other times they exist only in the details.
Wittgenstein believed that there is no better way to describe those commonalities than with the term Family Resemblance. The word “game” for example, doesn’t have one specific essential meaning. The meaning of the word “game” depends a lot on the situation in which it is used. Yet, all of these situations possess family resemblances.
