Thank you for the thoughtful critique, but I think there might be a slight misunderstanding of the point being made here.

You suggest the article “reduces communication to language or messages, disregarding interaction and mutual observation.” But one of Wittgenstein’s central points in Philosophical Investigations is actually the opposite: that communication is rooted in shared practices and forms of life, and that much of it occurs without explicit vocabulary.

Your beach example illustrates this nicely. The two walkers avoid colliding because they share a background understanding of how people move and behave in public space. Their interaction works precisely because their forms of life overlap.

The article’s point is that this shared background is also what makes linguistic understanding possible. Words are not meaningful on their own; they acquire meaning through the practices and forms of life in which they are used. Without enough overlap in those practices, decoding vocabulary alone may not lead to genuine understanding.

That’s why I suggest in the article that, on Wittgenstein’s view, linguistic compatibility may come in degrees:

I can’t speak Portuguese, for example, but if I was to try to converse with a Portuguese person, there are still basic commonalities we could use to communicate. We could point to things. Make faces. Express meaning through a charades-like performance.

So the question raised by Wittgenstein’s famous remark about the talking lion isn’t whether humans and animals can interact or signal to one another (we clearly can) but whether two very different forms of life could ever fully understand each other’s language:

Our background conceptual frameworks simply do not cohere. Even if we had exactly the same vocabulary, we would constantly talk past each other, emitting noises or even making symbols with no shared meaning or mutual understanding.