James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed contains a story:
Someone apparently went up to the great philosopher Wittgenstein and
said "What a lot of morons back in the Middle Ages must have been to
have looked, every morning, at the dawn and to have thought what they
were seeing was the Sun going around the Earth," when every school kid
knows that the Earth goes around the Sun, to which Wittgenstein replied
"Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been
going around the Earth?" Burke's point is that it "would have looked
exactly the same: you see what your knowledge tells you you're seeing."
... arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given language-game [The rules of language
are analogous to the rules of games; thus saying something in a
language is analogous to making a move in a game. The analogy between a
language and a game demonstrates that words have meaning depending on
the uses made of them in the various and multiform activities of human
life. (The concept is not meant to suggest that there is anything
trivial about language, or that language is 'just a game', quite the
contrary.)]
At last, Wittgenstein writes, "Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuechlein,
‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be
benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my
work.”
