The Essence Of Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein was of the view that words lack essences and that, therefore, their meaning was simply a matter of how we use them in what he called language games.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around this but, after many year of thinking on and off about it, I feel I finally got a handle on what Wittgenstein is trying to say here. There's an, what I like to describe as, arbitrariness to words. There is no logical reason, no rationale, why "water" should refer to [math]H_2O[/math]. We could use "water" to refer to, as Wittgenstein said, poison or whathaveyou. That's that.
Over the course of my own "investigations" I came to discover the source of my confusion, the reason why I couldn't understand Wittgenstein's point. Using water ([math]H_2O[/math]) as an example, it's not the case that [math]H_2O[/math] lacks an essence, it has one; it's just that the word "water" we use to refer to it has none.
Ergo,
1. Wittgenstein's view that words are missing an essence is true.
BUT
2. The things the words refer to, no matter how haphazardly (language games), do possess essences specific to them.
When we philosophize on issues, our aim/objective is to come to some kind of understanding on the true nature of things (essence present as in 2 above) but the problem is that to do that we use language and that throws a spanner in the works (essence missing as in 1 above).
A penny for your thoughts...
I had a hard time wrapping my head around this but, after many year of thinking on and off about it, I feel I finally got a handle on what Wittgenstein is trying to say here. There's an, what I like to describe as, arbitrariness to words. There is no logical reason, no rationale, why "water" should refer to [math]H_2O[/math]. We could use "water" to refer to, as Wittgenstein said, poison or whathaveyou. That's that.
Over the course of my own "investigations" I came to discover the source of my confusion, the reason why I couldn't understand Wittgenstein's point. Using water ([math]H_2O[/math]) as an example, it's not the case that [math]H_2O[/math] lacks an essence, it has one; it's just that the word "water" we use to refer to it has none.
Ergo,
1. Wittgenstein's view that words are missing an essence is true.
BUT
2. The things the words refer to, no matter how haphazardly (language games), do possess essences specific to them.
When we philosophize on issues, our aim/objective is to come to some kind of understanding on the true nature of things (essence present as in 2 above) but the problem is that to do that we use language and that throws a spanner in the works (essence missing as in 1 above).
A penny for your thoughts...
Comments (605)
I think we first need to be clear on what an essence is. We can start by tracing the philosophical idea of essence through history. Then a good strategy would be to start an inquiry why Wittgenstein rejected the idea of essences.
An essence to my understanding is anything that sums up the true nature of a thing whatever that thing is. For example, let's stick to water, the essence of water (the referent of "water", not the sign/word "water" itself) is that which makes water water. :grin:
Quoting TheMadFool
Quoting TheMadFool
:chin:
Is it true that there is nothing that makes words words?
I think what you are describing here is called a rigid designater, not an essence.
Words are signs, they stand for things. What they stand for is up to us, whatever we fancy that is. That's Wittgenstein.
Quoting Wheatley
The essence of a thing is not the same as the essence of a word used to refer to that thing.
I don't think so. I'm attempting to go beyond the words, to the things themselves the word stands for.
That's just an assertion.
Quoting TheMadFool
I never suggested otherwise.
Quoting TheMadFool
But you do mention words in your OP.
Do I have a choice?
Quoting Wheatley
:ok:
Quoting Wheatley
And...?
Well, you can quote Wittgenstein to support your argument.
Quoting TheMadFool
Okay, it's not a rigid designator. My mistake.
Wittgenstein seems to be making a point on language - that words don't possess an essence or, positively speaking, meaning is use, and we could be, given that is so, talking past each other but language and philosophy are entirely different subjects. I'm left wondering though whether we can do any philosophy without language and this reminds me of noumena and phenomena.
And, why would you wonder if we could do philosophy without language. Of course we couldn't. It would be like asking if trains could pull themselves without the locomotive.
The notion itself lacks exactitude. You can't fix a blurry image by getting corrective glasses.
Quoting Sam26
IF you're right, all hope is lost.
I said you have to be a bit more precise, not exact. In language, sometimes a blurry image is just what we need. However, in this case, if you're correct that meaning equates to use, then any use of a word in any context would necessitate its meaning, and this isn't true. What about incorrect uses? People use words incorrectly all the time, is their incorrect use driving the meaning of the word? No.
Language is the main tool of philosophy, it's where philosophy lives and breathes. Why would you suppose that all hope is lost if this is the case?
It's the same thing in my book. That's precisely/exactly what I meant too.
Quoting Sam26
Ignoratio elenchi. Wittgenstein, and I too, am talking about words and not meaning.
Quoting Sam26
Language is a tool alright, a good one at that, but not the best.
You're contradicting yourself but I get the point.
Quoting Sam26
Thanks for the heads up. :up:
Suit yourself.
Same here! Most of my ideas/thoughts seem to belong to someone else if being the original thinker amounts to owning an idea. If you have any issues, go talk to them. Thank you.
The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, allegedly initiated by Ludwig Wittgenstein, is said to have reduced philosophy to language. In other words, philosophy is an aspect of language lacking, to my reckoning, any distinct identity in and of itself. It's kinda like saying physics is, all said and done, just math. :chin:
I think his main issue is that language was made for things we can grasp. As you say, language was a map of the territory. But what territory does it display?
Now, I always say context is important. Wittgenstein believed so too. Even a map is useless without context. What part of the territory is being displayed? What do the symbols display? Where am I on this map? How do I have to align the map so that it matches my direction?
Our human context is the experiences we gather through our senses. That is to say, the context of our language map is the physical world we live in. Everything we can touch, smell, feel, see and hear. Eventually we started incorperating elements into our language that can not be perceived though. It shifted from being representative to descriptive - and in the process a whole lot of "things" have been made up.
The word "metaphysical", meta standing for beyond or rather above physical, says it all. If language is a map of our world, how can it describe something that is beyond our world? How can we talk about something that we can neither touch, nor smell, hear, feel or see?
We do manage somehow. Partly. But there's definitely a point to be raised how philosophical discussion in large parts consists of people debating words, arguing about their definition for things that have no real world counterpart.
This is by no means a new problem though. Prominently, Plato comes to mind - where in Euthyphro, Socrates diligently and patiently tries to learn the meaning of "being pious" from Euthyphro only to go around in circles and ultimately not finding an answer to what the word "piety" and all it entails represents.
That's interesting, because from what I've gathered, there's a great deal of disagreement about what he means, among those who have really familiarised themselves with what he said.
Which again showcases what Wittgenstein is trying to say about philosophical discussion. There is a great deal of disagreement about any topic concerning the non-physical. Regardless of how much anyone entertains themselves with such ideas.
Saussure liked to describe it that way too. All of linguistics since Saussure likes to describe it that way.
And Shakespeare:
You can go back to the Cratylus for some arguments pro and con.
Grice distinguished between natural meaning (clouds mean rain) and non-natural meaning ("clouds" in English means clouds).
There's a bit more to Wittgenstein than recognizing the arbitrariness of the sign.
What might that be?
This is problematic. The significance of context was known way before Wittgenstein was even born. His theory of language games must be about something else entirely; if not, why all the fuss? Is this much ado about nothing? Something was/is probably lost in translation?
:up: Wittgenstein, was he a charlatan? A pseudo-philosopher?
Possibilities:
1. Perhaps that words lack an essence reflects the fact that reality lacks an essence.
2. Our definition of meaning as an AND function fails to do justice to how it actually operates, AND/OR function. Family resemblance.
I've always been a bit, a whole lot actually, bothered by what is correct usage of words. This is basically the idea that a word has a fixed referent and while context/the language game matter, given a particular context/language game, a word has a referent that should remain constant.
Consider now Wittgenstein's private language argument. He deems such an impossibility because it would be incoherent. It's not clear what he meant by that but the received wisdom seems to be that correct usage becomes meaningless as the sign/word - referent association breaks down and becomes chaotic, too chaotic to be understood hence, incoherence.
This suggests, to me at least, that Wittgenstein subscribes to the sign-referent theory of meaning or some variation of it. If not, his private language argument is nonsensical (correct usage).
Come now to Wittgenstein's meaning is use concept. Words can be used for anything that we can do with them seems to be the takeaway. There is no essence (to a word) holding us back. Basically, correct usage is meaningless or N/A.
What up with that?
Notice that despite this, it's not the case that just any words will do. You choose the words for your posts with great care.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I suggest thinking about our entire way of life. How do we feed ourselves? Raise children? Punish criminals? Get to work in the morning? Then think of talking as making conventional noises which help us coordinate practical action (including mating.) What's the meaning of a pheromone ? Of rattlesnake venom?
There's way too many arbitrary word-uses in this statement for it to make sense. Existence before essence (i.e. forms-of-life enable-constrain language-games) – or didn't you read the memo? Plato / Aristotle (... Husserl) might say you fail to (com)prehend the essence of essence, Fool. Wtf are you talking about anyway – what does "the essence of Wittgenstein" even mean? :confused:
Quoting TheMadFool
This is ultimately true, by which I mean objectively true, but words do have an onomatopoeic quality, even if they are not used onomatopoeically, which yet imparts to them a subjective essence. For instance, there is a definite essence, surely subjective in nature, by which I mean that said essence exists as the word is percieved by the human mind, to the English words "teeny-weeny" and "itsy-bitsy", and a rationale for why these words describe smallness, the "slenderness" of the vowels within them producing a feeling of spareness within the mind's eye. Could one possibly concieve of "itsy-bitsy" as referring to the grandiosity of a thing? In like manner, there is a rationale for why the Old Irish word mor describes bigness/largeness/greatness, with it's "thick" vowelization, and so this word can be said to have a subjectively discerned essence, itself. I wouldcontend that words which have an onomatopoeic quality, do so because they have a subjective essence. If you look carefully, you will notice that there is far more onomatopoeia in the word stock of language s than you might initially surmise.
Quoting TheMadFool
Indeed, this is what makes mathematics so beautiful. It can create arguments without the intrusion of linguistic uncertainty to cloud meaning, or otherwise bollocks things up.
He was legit. The TLP might look like the work of mystic crank, but the later stuff is so unpretentious and readable...which doesn't mean trivial to understand...so what's the issue? The fame?
Words don't necessarily stand for things. The 'nomenclature theory' is a target for Wittgenstein (and for Saussure, incidentally). 'Meaning' is conventional, but 'language is received like the law', not what we, this generation, might like it be. We find ourselves in a network of practices, including 'iterable' mouth farts, and worldly objects built by others and not just 'natural'objects. We were 'thrown' into this way of chewing the air in 'that' situation, while handling these or those tools. It's all extremely messy, but somehow we keep the machine oiled and spinning.
:up:
It says almost nothing extremely well! (I mean it sticks to something like a quantitative/logical skeleton of reality, the tendons & ligaments of which are the usual ugly prose.)
[quote=Banno]Notice that despite this, it's not the case that just any words will do. You choose the words for your posts with great care.[/quote]
I hope I did choose the words for my post with great care. From a Wittgensteinian perspective I'm obligated to ensure that my choice of words respect the language game that I wish to participate in - I did the best I could.
The arbitrariness of word meaning, however, is revealed only when we look at how word meaning changes across different language games. Enough said.
[quote=Banno]I've seen a lot of posts still assuming "reality" or some placeholder--"consciousness", "meaning" (metaphysical, logical, internal, behavioral, scientific, etc.)--as if Kant hadn't already made a sufficient argument that we can't know the Thing-In-Itself (though he thought we could, through rationality, accomplish the same goal without an objective world).[/quote]
Yes, we (probably) can't know the thing-in-itself but that doesn't imply, to my reckoning, that the thing-in-itself lacks an essence.
Language, in my humble opinion, was designed to field signs (words) that were then linked to referents (the essences of the things-in-themselves).
Now for some reasons, one possibility being people misusing/abusing words (using words incorrectly i.e. assuming a flexible attitude towards definitions), a single sign (word) began to apply to more than one referent (thing-in-itself) and we get family resemblance. At this juncture, it becomes imperative that we distinguish family resemblance from polysemy (one word having different meanings; puns) for the latter was a well-known feature of language but the former was introduced later by Wittgenstein.
Family resemblance is distinct from polysemy because unlike the latter, it creates an illusion that a word has an essence to it. The reason for this is simple:
Word: Definitional features
A: w, x
A: x, y
A: w, y
Because there's an overlap (partial/incomplete) with respect to definitional features of the word A, we make the mistake of thinking there's an essence to A but on further/deeper analysis, we discover there is none. This illusion of essence does not occur with polysemy (puns).
It would indeed be a grave error if someone were to philosophize on the word A in terms of its essence (a fixed referent) because, like it or not, there is none. I believe Wittgenstein claimed that most philosophical problems were of this type - philosophers fooled by family resemblances and the illusion of essence that comes with it. Off the top of my head, I can't think of an example. Perhaps you can help me out here.
Quoting Banno
After reading a few articles here and there about Wittgenstein, I have come to the conclusion that what he has to say about language and philosophy is of consequence but to say that essence is about grammar is going a bit too far for my taste. It feels like Wittgenstein has created this language box for philosophy and he's trying just too hard to fit philosophy into it - what's inside the box isn't philosophy but Wittgenstein's own distorted notion of philosophy. I even feel justified to level the charge of sophistry against Wittgenstein. This is just my opinion though.
Quoting hanaH
If there's a point to your post, sorry I didn't get it.
Quoting 180 Proof
If X has an essence, then that implies X has a set of qualities (a, b, c,..) that makes X X. These qualities (a, b, c,..) help identify X as X. I'm sorry I can't make it any clearer than that.
How essences relate to Wittgenstein is that though a word lacks an essence, it doesn't imply that that which the word refers to lacks an essence.
Quoting Michael Zwingli
Excellent! :up:
Quoting Michael Zwingli
There is no such thing as family resemblance in math.
Quoting hanaH
I believe so too. How could I have goofed up like that!
telling comment. (Of course, 'the real world' is what exists unperceived by the mind, right?)
I didn't want to involve @Antony Nickles since you were the one to post. Sorry if it was inappropriate.
Very roughly, the whole question of 'essence' goes back to Parmenides - both the philosopher of that name, and the Platonic dialogue concerning the same figure.
As is well-known, Plato set the bar very high for what constitutes knowledge. He dismisses a lot of what people think they know by showing that their knowledge is mere opinion or pretence. The question of what constitutes knowledge is never completely solved, in my opinion. But one of the underlying themes is that the rational intellect (nous) is able to know in a way that mere sense cannot, because it is able to grasp intelligible principles through reason. And when the mind does that, it finds a higher degree of certainty than it ever does in respect of opinions about sense-able objects.
That is what underlies the discussion of the nature of the forms, which are intimately connected to essence, as the essence is 'what a thing truly is', as distinct from its appearance which is incidental ('accidental' in that lexicon). So to know a particular truly is to know its intelligible form, which mind does directly, in a way sense cannot.
That is what is at the origin of Western metaphysics. Of course it was then massively elaborated for centuries, first by Aristotle and the other successors of Platonic philosophy, then also by the Islamic philosophers and so on, down through the centuries. That was the musty, dusty 'tradition of metaphysics' from which successive generations of modern philosophers have sought to free themselves.
Well, almost all. Except for the Catholics.
'Designed'? Who designed it? Did Esperanto finally catch on? Instead it's probably more like this.
[quote]
Animal communication is the transfer of information from one or a group of animals (sender or senders) to one or more other animals (receiver or receivers) that affects the current or future behavior of the receivers....When the information from the sender changes the behavior of a receiver, the information is referred to as a "signal". Signalling theory predicts that for a signal to be maintained in the population, both the sender and receiver should usually receive some benefit from the interaction. Signal production by senders and the perception and subsequent response of receivers are thought to coevolve.
....
The vervet monkey gives a distinct alarm call for each of its four different predators, and the reactions of other monkeys vary appropriately according to the call. For example, if an alarm call signals a python, the monkeys climb into the trees, whereas the "eagle" alarm causes monkeys to seek a hiding place on the ground.
[\quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_communication
Quoting TheMadFool
That much is clear. I'll try again.
I'm pointed out languages as complicated systems of conventions that animals use to coordinate their behavior. We can babble about essences all day long and get nowhere. Phlogiston. We can call one of the vervet monkey's "warning cries" the "eagle" alarm, and even say that she 'means' or 'refers' to the eagle she sees. But this hypothesized essence is secondary to the conventional reaction of the other monkeys to the cry. The 'meaning' is there in the world in the way that the community of vervet monkeys use it.
Consider that it doesn't matter what the individual monkeys intend in some private monkey thought-space when giving or responding to the cry (doesn't matter what beetle if any they have in their box.) What they do is all the "understanding" that matters.
Animals don't have language. They have calls.
[quote=Review of Why Only Us? Chomsky and Berwick]Animal communication can be quite intricate. For example, some species of “vocal-learning” songbirds, notably Bengalese finches and European starlings, compose songs that are long and complex. But in every case, animal communication has been found to be based on rules of linear order. (Whereas) human language involves the capacity to generate, by a recursive procedure, an unlimited number of hierarchically structured sentences. A trivial example of such a sentence is this: “How many cars did you tell your friends that they should tell their friends . . . that they should tell the mechanics to fix?” (The ellipses indicate that the number of levels in the hierarchy can be extended without limit.) Notice that the word “fix” goes with “cars,” rather than with “friends” or “mechanics,” even though “cars” is farther apart from “fix” in linear distance. The mind recognizes the connection, because “cars” and “fix” are at the same level in the sentence’s hierarchy. A more interesting example ...is the sentence “Birds that fly instinctively swim.” The adverb “instinctively” can modify either “fly” or “swim.” But there is no ambiguity in the sentence “Instinctively birds that fly swim.” Here “instinctively” must modify “swim,” despite its greater linear distance. ...Attempts to teach Bengalese finches songs with hierarchical syntax have failed. The same is true of attempts to teach sign language to apes. Though the famous chimp Nim Chimpsky was able to learn 125 signs of American Sign Language, careful study of the data has shown that his “language” was purely associative and never got beyond memorized two-word combinations with no hierarchical structure.[/quote]
You realize that we are animals, right? We tend to flatter ourselves that our communication is quasi-divine. Why are humans so sure that they don't also have calls, albeit impressively complicated? I mean...why are humans so sure that they know what they are talking about any better than the screeching vervet monkey?
There's no disputing the additional complexity. But imagine, as Voltaire might, an extraterrestrial that is to us as we are to the vervet monkey. Let's call them Gluons. Perhaps the Gluons will say "earthlings don't have language, they have calls." And then the spectacular Freons show up, scoffing at the vanity of Gluons.
But the point is not really to insult either humans or animals. I'm saying that looking at animals giving conventional signals for practical purposes is a path to something like the essence of Wittgenstein. Start from separate bodies in a world trying to work together. Build on that.
No, I don't agree that we're just animals. From the viewpoint of biological evolution, that is true. But when we developed language skills, story-telling, meaning-seeking, tool-making, and reason, among other things, then we're no longer solely determined by biology. (Interestingly, this was one of the issues where Alfred Russel Wallace fell out with Charles Darwin. He was, of course, completely on board with respect to the facts of biological evolution, having been credited with co-discovery of it, but he too believed that h. sapiens manifests abilities that outstrip those that can be predicted on the basis of biological evolution alone. See his Darwinism Applied to Man - rather Victorian in tone, as might be expected, but makes the case.)
I know a bit about embodied cognition, it's all very good, I'm all for it. But it's a separate domain of discourse, if you like. If you introduce metaphysics, which the OP does by speaking in those terms, then the issue can be analysed in those terms.
Sometimes the design doesn't necessarily require a conscious, deliberate effort. Your signalling theory is about how language can evolve to maximize/optimize its utility. The end result is a language that seems designed (by someone). See :point: Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution to get an idea of what I meant.
By the way, what does this have to do with Wittgenstein, care to share?
Quoting hanaH
I made it clear right from the get-go that I agree with the great Wittgenstein that words lack essences - they can be used in any way we want therefore. I'm especially concerned about family resemblances since it creates an illusion of essence (overlapping elements of meaning).
However, that words lack an essence doesn't entail that the referents of words lack an essence. Come to think of it, Wittgenstein seems to be rather confused about what philosophy is - philosophy is, all things considered, about essences (the referents of words) and not, I repeat not, about words that were meant to stand for those essences (referents).
Why then all the fuss about Wittgenstein and the so-called linguistic turn? I ask because it would mean that philosophers who subscribe to Wittgenstein's views have abandoned the idea of philosophy as about essences (referents) of things-in-themselves and are now under the impression that philosophy is linguistic, to do with words (signs). To use a mathematical analogy, what Wittgenstein has done is shift the focus of philosophers from the number 2 to the numeral "2". Frankly, this makes zero sense to me.
As for language as a community/social entity, I'm with you on that. Here to, we have to be extra cautious because language being social was known much before Wittgenstein and so when Wittgenstein said language is social, he surely meant something else. What is that something else is unclear to me.
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks for your valuable contribution to the discussion.
Yes, Platonic forms fits like a glove with what I mean by essence. There is an element of perfection in Platonic forms and essences that must've attracted religious thinkers to it, God is, after all, perfect. A slight digression there but it seemed worth noting.
Anyway, what bothers me, as I mentioned in my reply to hanaH, is why Wittgenstein believed that philosophy was not about referents (essences/Platonic forms) but about the signs (words) used to symbolize them? It seems rather preposterous to say that just because words are missing essences that the things that refer to them too are minus essences.
As far as I'm concerned, I regard family resemblances (a key notion in Wittgenstein's philosophy) as nothing more than the misuse/abuse of language (incorrect application of the definition of words) and Wittgenstein goes on to found his philosophy on what is, all said and done, mistakes people make. Reminds me of the liar paradox - a subtle variation of which is used by Kurt Gödel in his incompleteness theorems. Why would anyone in his right mind use a lie to prove a point? Can a falsehood be used to prove anything at all? :chin:
Why would Wittgenstein found his philosophy on mistakes?
I can see how you arrived at the conclusion that words don't have an essence, because Witt shows that "meaning" (as a thing) is not how language is meaningful, which could be taken as words have no necessity. And add to that the overall investigation to show that reference is only one of many ways that language is meaningful (so not just word to object, or to definition, unlike a sentence).
The connection between meaning and use is harder because he is using the same word (meaning), and so people imagine the same picture as meaning as a thing, only now, the referent is "use". But Witt is drawing our attention to how meaning cannot be one thing, explained one way. The "use" (or sense) is an option of possibilities, such as threats, apologies, paraphrases, lies, excuses, believing, thinking, knowing (concepts, Witt terms them). Our concepts are meaningful to us in various ways, and also depending on the context. "I know" can be: I have proof; or, I know my way around; or, I know you are in pain. We don't "use" words, or refer to some activity. It is a matter of seeing which sense of an expression (concept) is important to us here, now; which is not arbitrary, as neither are our judgments, criteria, what matters to us, etc., over thousands of years as the conditions of our expressions. These conditions (Witt will say grammar) show us what is essential about a concept, it's "essence", what differentiates an accident from a mistake? what part does an excuse play in our actions?
Because, I think, modern philosophy on the whole doesn't want anything to do with essence, substantia, or any of those medieval scholasticisms. The world has moved on. Philosophy nowadays wants to ground itself in the concrete, in the day-to-day realm of what we actually do, not with what it sees as reified concepts such as 'essences'. All of which is completely tangential to Wittgenstein, I suppose, so treat it as a footnote.
This was a dismissive, poor summary of Witt at one point, but not a real reading. You feel that the conditions and criteria of our expressions (their grammar) could not express what is essential about something, but it is you (following Kant) who assumes the separation of the world from our language. Wittgenstein found that our expressions show our cares, desires, our judgments, all our lives. That the two are bound together. So when he looked at what we imply when we say _____, he was making claims about how the world works as much as our expressions. The history of the things we've said about a thing are all the things that matter to us about that thing.
I love this question. Especially if we substitute "usage" for "meaning". Which we might as well. Or vice versa: "people mean things by words incorrectly all the time, is their incorrect meaning driving the meaning of the word?"
It must be, because correct derives from precedent practice, and originally anything went.
Ok, so now, in a mature language game, we prefer to deny the relevance of this. We say, "people can say what they like, it doesn't make it true". But I don't think they can. And it would.
In what ways other than reference is language meaningful? Even if there's an answer to that question, of what relevance do they have to philosophy?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yup!
Quoting Wayfarer
Why I wonder? How would we go about living lives if, for instance, we don't know the essence of poisons and their antidotes? How do we recognize water if we ignore the essence of what water is? Surely, something's not quite right with Wittgenstein and his acolytes if they're, as you seem to be claiming, moving away from essences to merely, quite obviously, playing with words.
Philosophy is not a word game...or is it?
Quoting Antony Nickles
My apologies. I'm a tyro with a bad attitude. Someone who Bertrand Russell regarded as a singular genius must surely deserve more study than I have put in.
Update
1. Meaning is use [words lack an essence].
2. Language games [Form of life determines meaning (use)].
3. Family resemblance [Illusion of essence]
4. Private language [Incoherent for many reasons]
Someone help me construct a coherent picture of Wittgenstein's philosophy.
I'll give it a shot. :zip: There, I tried. The floor is now open for others.
Well, arguably, what happened to all that essence and substance talk, was that it was transformed into the basis for modern science. I was reading about Carl Linneaus recently, who is the father of modern biological taxonomy. How could he have done what he did, without Aristotle's species, genera, and so on? The ideas of form and substance and the other elements of classical metaphysics, is what enabled science proper to take shape. That's why the scientific revolution happened in Europe, and not the East. But the way that it developed precluded the qualitative and the ethical, it became completely focussed on what could be made subject to mathematical analysis. The qualitative aspects were assigned to the observing mind as 'secondary attributes'. Again, very rough sketch.
Quoting bongo fury
Well, we should learn them to.
Yes, although I tend not to like to use the term "world", which itself suggests subjective experience, to describe it. Usually, I will refer to it as "the universe", or as " objective reality".
Haha...this is he "of the perpetually raised brows", rendering the "hairy eyeball".
I would definitely disagree with this assessment of the PI, viz., that "incorrect use makes no sense in the context of the PI." First, my point in pointing out to @TheMadFool, that use doesn't equate to meaning, is that it's imprecise. It's "correct usage" of words/concepts that drive meaning, i.e., a concept has various uses (incorrect and correct) driven by rules (implicit and explicit rules) within a given cultural language-game.
If we look at the first example of a language-game in the PI, we can clearly see there are correct and incorrect uses of words. We observe that if the assistant doesn't respond appropriately to the call "slab," then the assistant has not learned the language-game, and by extension has not learned the proper responses to the calls. Would you say that if the assistant brought a "pillar," that the assistant is "correctly" understanding the use of the word or the call "slab?" Obviously not. So, the obvious implication in this and other language-games is that there are "correct" and "incorrect" uses of words.
When teaching a child the correct use of the word cup, would we say there is no incorrect use? It's true, of course, that W. says that words go on a holiday, i.e., that they lack a use, but this is no argument against what I'm saying. If a philosopher is using the word illusion out of it's normal setting in which the word gets it's meaning, then not only does the word "lack use" in that context, but it's incorrectly used. ""Lacking use" surely also implies incorrect use, as opposed to correct use.
And there is, moreover, excellent reason for that. The full phrase is: "meaning is use in a language -game". In other words, 'use' is always relational. To even talk about misuse simply makes no sense. Which is why the word 'misuse' also appears exactly zero times in the PI. To see this, simply try to invert the statement: "Meaninglessness is incorrect use in a language-game". But no language-game specifies 'incorrect use', because 'use' is a function of, let's call it, felicity ("The signpost is in order a if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose"). Either a use fulfills its purpose, or it does not. If it does not, it is not a use at all. Not only does introducing (and lets be clear, it is an extra-textual introduction that does not exist in the PI) 'correct and incorrect use' have practically no textual warrant at all, it also confuses things. It makes it seem as though 'use' could, even in principle, be something not in accord with a language-game. But Witty makes the point over and over and over gain that this is exactly what one cannot do.
That's why, it seems, I instinctively used [math]H_2O[/math], the chemical formula for water, in my post. It seems so natural to do so, as if that, the chemical composition of water, is its (water's) essence but...is it? I suppose it is - everything about water can be explained with how the molecule [math]H_2O[/math] would/does behave. I wonder if Wittgenstein had anything to say about science and what seems to be its focus on the thing-in-itself (the referent e.g. water) rather than the sign (the word "water"). Could we then say that to deal with the Wittgensteinian problem of language games we could switch our perspective to a scientific one? I'm shooting in the dark here so do bear with me.
Quoting bongo fury
I would love a democratic approach to language - remembering rules is a millstone around our necks but, luckily or not, once a word, here "definition/meaning" is defined, correct and incorrect naturally/automatically enter the picture.
So, I'm arguing semantics, I suppose that's meant to mean that it's trivial, or that I'm avoiding the point you're making. Incorrect use,would be, "...not having learnt the use at all." If anyone is arguing semantics, it's you. Surely, W. implies that there are correct and incorrect uses of words, whether he uses that phrasing or not. Let's use Moore's use of the word know in On Certainty as an example. What would be more precise? To say, Moore hasn't learned the use of the word know, or that Moore is using the word incorrectly in that context? I would say the latter is closer to what W. is trying to point out. Obviously W. is pointing out other more subtle things in the context of the PI, but this doesn't take away from what I'm saying.
Quoting StreetlightX
Of course, "meaning is use in a language-game," and of course it's "always relational," but that doesn't mean that any language-game conveys the correct use of a word. Groups of people create their own language-games all the time, especially religious people. I wouldn't go so far as to say they haven't learned to use the word at all, because in some contexts they do use the word correctly. However, in other contexts they're using the word incorrectly, and to say so, is in keeping with the PI, as far as I can see.
Use is always in accord with a language-game, but you seem to imply that there aren't language-games that don't accord with the proper function of words. Hence, language-games that don't convey the correct use of words, and here is where we disagree.
There are words which have meaning and words which do not for Witty. And this distinction maps onto words with uses, and words without uses. And this matters because to speak of 'correct' and 'incorrect' uses - which Witty rightly avoids - changes the kind of thing 'use' is. To speak of 'incorrect use' is to introduce the confused notion that there are, as it were, 'incorrect meanings'. But either one means something, or one does not. An 'incorrect meaning' - or 'incorrect use' - would simply be - not a meaning at all. I.e. not a use at all. Which is why he avoids the confused notion of an 'incorrect use' entirely.
Quoting Sam26
Yes. That is exactly the implication. Language-games specify 'the proper function of words'. Language-games are not the kind of thing that can be mistaken, wrong, or incorrect (except, perhaps, by the lights of a different language-game - but this would simply be to say that the differing language-games are trying to do different things with words. Say, assertion vs. command).
Quoting Sam26
The standard of the 'correct use of a word' just is the language-game. You seem to be implying that there are 'correct uses' that stand outside of language-games. But this is exactly what the entirety of the PI is geared against.
No, I'm not saying that there are correct uses that stand outside of language-games, that's definitely not correct. I'm saying that not all language-games are on equal footing, some convey incorrect uses. If this wasn't so, then anything goes in terms of meaning.
This second sentence doesn't follow. If I am trying to assert something, I should not use language in the manner of a command. And vice versa. What constrains the 'proper use of language' is what one is trying to do with langauge. But to ask if commands or assertions are 'on equal footing' or 'not on equal footing' is not a question that is sensical. The standards are the forms-of-life. Beyond that, nothing.
All I'm saying is that you can't just create any language-game, and then suppose that you have somehow meant something by your words. This doesn't make any sense. Concepts can't be used just any old way, even if they're used in a language-game created by a group of people, and even if they're are trying to do something with their words.
If your language-game has a purpose (and it would not be a language-game if it didn't), then the words employed within it absolutely mean something. There's no other standard. This doesn't mean that 'concepts can be used just any old way'. Our doing things always pose constraints on our saying things, which are, of course, part of the doing.
By what standard? "Langauge-game or not"? This is certainly has no warrant in anything Wittgenstein ever said.
But look, I understand what you're getting at. But the way to put it must be different: it is not that your religious mates had a language-game which 'used the word incorrectly'. It's that your religious mates do not have a language-game at all. That's the point. It's not 'incorrect use'. It's simply - no use. And correspondingly: no language-game. Not any stringing together of words and actions can count as a language-game. That's what it means to be 'misled by grammar'.
Because they are not language-games. And he talks about that incessantly: idling engines, being mislead by grammar, captured by pictures, etc.
For many philosophy has been about something like essences. It's been something like a pseudo-science of folk science of such essences. Call them forms or universals or concepts.
It's not that Wittgenstein was too dull to grasp this dominant conception of philosophy. Instead he was too bright to miss what was wrong with it. He challenges that view directly.
[quote=Wittgenstein (Blue Book)]
Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's ideas could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.
But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)
The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.
As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.
[/quote]
This is so vague. What about rule following or the chess game example and the famed meter stick?
Not inappropriate; I was just correcting any misconstrule.
It seems a rather cheap way of deflating the issue at hand. When he says:
There seems a suggestion of 'vitalism' - that 'meaning' might be thereby construed as being 'something immaterial', something which might, erroneously, be thought to exist separately from the sign. Presumably this is something undesireable, associated with 'the occult sphere'. But 'use' is quotidian, what we're all familiar with - it's a pragmatic solution. But what kind of account of meaning does it really give?
As he introduces Frege it's worth considering what Frege had in mind:
which sounds platonist. It goes on
Quoting Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge
It is just this 'third realm' which, I think, Wittgenstein wants to reject, on account of it being 'immaterial' or 'occult'.
So it makes some sense to talk of correctly or incorrectly following a rule, so long as one keeps an eye on what one is doing.
The problem with Kripke's quus isn't it being incorrect addition so much as that quus is only of any use in philosophy classes.
That we can have a A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs depends on our having a nice arrangement of epithets.
All this by way of agreeing with Davidson, that while it is tempting to think of language as dependent on agreed conventions of some sort, it isn't so. For any convention one might take up, there will be an ingenious or ignorant construct to undermine it.
And this is also what @Pop, and others, who deem language no more than transmission and reception of signals, are doomed never to be able to account for.
In my view, that's a common misunderstanding of critical philosophers in general. It's not religion as such or the immaterial as such that's a problem. The 'third realm' is rejected (or rather circumvented) because it's useless...like phlogiston, like the ether. I mean 'useless' in terms of ('rationally') justifying claims.
:smirk:
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
I have the usual sense of having an idea "in mind" and, like others, I'll talk about having a "realization." "Mental" language will always be with us. It's useful. So it's not about denying the existence of "what it's like to grasp a concept" or "what it's like to see red." It's about seeing the epistemological uselessness of this mysterious and yet banal stuff.
You mention "signs connected to signs." It's true that the dictionary gives only signs as the meaning of other signs, and so on. But let's remember the vervet monkeys. They are bodies in a world together. Their cries are connected to eagles and other predators (as well as evasive responses.)
It's been decades since I've read the PI but it seems to me that "incorect usage" corresponds to making an invalid move in a language-game, so to speak, such as using a word native to religious discourse like "God" in a physical science discourse in order to treat it a "hypothesis" (or vice versa e.g. "evolution" in a religious discourse). Witty doesn't explicitly proscribe word usage as "incorrect" but, IIRC, does convey the idea as analogous to e.g. moving a rook diagonally in chess, thereby no longer playing chess whether or not one realizes it. I could be mistaken though. Still, this is the gist of Witty's critique of philosophical discourse in which "language goes on holiday", no?
I'm not sure I follow your point in terms of what I was saying. It seems that the rule and the use go hand-in-hand. The pawn in chess would would be quite useless without the rule, or a rule that governs its moves. So too, it seems in language-games, the grammatical rules (implicit or explicit) govern how we use the words, or in chess how we move the pieces (correctly or incorrectly).
Excellent juxtaposition!
En passant was not always a move is chess. It was once possible to move the King like a knight, once. - the "King's leap".
We add and subtract from the rules. that's part of family resemblance.
Great. See if you can sign one up to the Forum.
I'm happy to talk more if you decide to be serious again.
...that is, to obey a rule is to act; but the act governs the rule.
Here's my take on what you're wondering about:
The correct use of words is a matter of convention which may change over time.
The only sense I can make of the PLA is that for any private language, its non-ostensive words, at least, would have to be translated into a public language you are familiar with in order to know what they mean or refer to. For example say your private language has a word for love; how could you know what the word meant if you didn't say it means the same as 'love'? I mean you'd have to be thinking of love in the first place to have invented the alternative word, no?
Some people claim that non-ostensive words don't refer. I think this is incorrect. 'Love' refers to love. We all have an idea what love is, but we needed familiarity with a public language in order to have that idea in any reflective, abstract sense.
Meaning is not use, strictly speaking, but use indicates meaning. If I were to use a word in an eccentric way to refer to something other than its conventional referent or referents, then my use would indicate the alternative meaning I have assigned to the word.
Thinking, believing, understanding, pointing, excusing, deducing, etc., etc. All the various concepts and activities of our lives have different conditions (criteria) and possibilities than reference or correspondence (and embody different interests and judgments of our culture in different ways). This is the main point of the PI (that everything is meaningful in its own way).
You are restricting what you call philosophy to something analogous to a statement being true or false (essence as something singular and certain), when, for example, Austin has shown that there are statements that have the value of being true without the same criteria and mechanism as true/false (that some statements accomplish something (or fail to) in the saying of them).
Quoting TheMadFool
These are only examples of physical objects which are able to meet the criteria of certainty and predictable outcomes (which was the standard required by traditional philosophy for everything). But just because not everything submits to the scientific method, does not mean we are abandoning truth, necessity, and what is essential to something being what it is.
Quoting TheMadFool
The rigid requirement of certainty makes any other criteria seem irrational or arbitrary. Wittgenstein is talking about understanding things in the same spirit that Plato sought, just without the same metaphysical picture. Words and the world are not separate in the way you imagine and so in trivializing language you cut off the ability to look into what is essential about the world. (When philosophy could not maintain certainty and universality it separated appearance from the world in order to keep the world pure. It does the same kind of thing with language and the world.)
Quoting TheMadFool
Meaning is not a thing (and “use” is not a substitute), but our concepts still embody what is essential about a thing through its criteria, conditions, and possibilities.
Quoting TheMadFool
A "form" of life is not a referent nor a basis for meaning but just a picture to introduce the idea of different categories (like: an apology, duty, responsibility) and the ordinary criteria of each.
Quoting TheMadFool
Again, family resemblance is not a negation of what is essential, but only to say that a concept may have multiple senses (uses), possibilities, which we come at in the context from different interests. A table is essentially a flat surface with four legs, but, from a different angle, anywhere at which we eat dinner. What is essential will depend on the context and our attention to the criteria that reflect our interests, though, of course, not everything meets the criteria of what we would identify as a table.
Quoting TheMadFool
This section is not an argument (for a conclusion) but to show the difference between what is personal and the mental process we picture that to be (a thought, intention).
I get what you are saying, but I think it's problematic to call some personally assigned referent an "alternative meaning." This is because it's best to think about "meaning" being something like the system of behavior and worldly entities that includes spoken or written words. The "meaning" of a stop sign is (something like) the fact that people stop at it most of the time. If there is a private mental accompaniment to that stopping, so be it, but it's not important.
(I've been suggesting that talk of referents is, in general, more misleading than helpful. Better, in rational discussions, to say with what is public.)
:up:
Perhaps it's human vanity that prevents us from simply looking at social animals and seeing how their signals allow them to coordinate their behavior and therefore get fed or avoid becoming food, which is to say survive.
We might also consider how we humans survive, just like the other animals, by coordinating our efforts via words and other "low cost" signifying actions to wring out a living from our environment. (By "low cost" I mean it doesn't take many calories to give the location of a resource or a threat. It makes sense that something "cheap" like tongue-shaping air or wiggling the fingers would serve such a purpose.)
Ya, I see what you're saying. That's probably a better way to say it.
You're the one who introduced animal communications into the conversation, as if that were meaningful in respect of the nature of language and conceptual thought. Now you're appealing to 'survival' as if that is a criteria of what is true. As if the only criteria you have for deciding 'what is true' is 'what contributes to survival'. But this is simply taking evolutionary theory as a philosophy, which it isn't. It's a scientific theory, intended to explain the emergence of species. You should take the time to peruse some of the essays linked to my profile page, notably Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, and It Ain't Necessarily.
But not only to behave oneself in the manner of the rule. Also it is to discourage and exclude incorrect behaviours from the game.
I don't claim Witty says this. But it was my point here.
Yes! I was going to use this exact image - of playing chess - as an example, but I dropped it for brevity's sake. A few more words on why it's so important to distinguish between "not playing" (no use) and "playing wrong" (incorrect use): the issue turns on how 'use' is understood. If use is 'use in a language-game', then use is always, as it were, something 'positive'. Use for a purpose, as it were - for doing something. And the point is that if you are not doing something with a word, then in what sense can you be using it - and hence meaning something - at all?
This goes right to the heart of the issue of the 'publicness' of language: the further problem with admitting 'incorrect use' is that this more or less amounts to admitting private language. If there can be no private language for Witty, it is because all meaning is inseparable from doing: and doing is not something that can even in principle, be "private" - which is to say, unintelligible. Doing, for it to count as a 'doing', must be exhibitable. Others must be able, in principle, to 'pick it up', to learn from you how to 'go on', in a similar way.
This is also why it is so detrimental that people so often drop the 'in a language-game' part from 'meaning is use in a language-game'. Language-games are, by definition, public things. In fact, the importance of the idea of the language-game (which I think is so often missed) is that they admit of different kinds. This is so important in fact, that Witty very early on in the PI writes out a whole list of them: giving orders, reporting, requesting, thanking, etc. This is further why language-games are not just 'contexts' (another term that is almost wholly absent from the PI). Would would it even mean to try and 'give orders' privately? Or request privately?
The inseparability of 'use' and 'language-game': they are mutually, 'analytically' defined by means of one another, means that a use which is not a doing is simply not a use at all. One can of course, try to do something, but in a wrong way. One can make a wrong move in chess, and one can say: 'that's not a move you can make'. And like @Banno said, this can introduce novelties. But the introduction of novelties still implies that one must be trying to play chess - it must be something that others, in the future, can also pick up (the en passant): this use expands the language-game: it alters chess itself. Chess is something different after the introduction of the en passant. A new use will bring with it a new language-game in tow, after which one cannot say of that use that it is incorrect. Prior to it's introduction, the en passant was simply a move in a language-game not accepted as chess.
I stand by that. It makes sense to look at simpler animals and their communication for the foundations of our own.
Quoting Wayfarer
The point is merely to stress that communication is situated in a world, and that it helps organisms survive in their difficult world by synchronizing their behavior. I don't think it's helpful to understand the meaning of "true" as "whatever helps one survive." (I don't have some final theory or definition of truth. I use the word as an animal might use its claw, in many different context-dependent ways.)
Quoting Wayfarer
Well it has been taken that way by some perhaps, but it's not what I'm about. Perhaps you are projecting one of your favorite foils inappropriately. To me it seems that you are reading gray as black. Yes, I think of humans as the most complicated of currently-known animals, with communication that's fundamentally about thriving in this world (which presupposes surviving in it.) The rest seems to be stuff you've added on (like the "true" is "whatever allows us to survive", etc.)
But that is what you said:
Quoting hanaH
It's not 'human vanity'. It's a fact that humans make artefacts and create languages, and that animals don't. So trying to explain that as a fuction of evolution casts no light. But I do agree that this is tangential to this thread so will leave off.
How do you think it is problematic? I can say that when I write or speak 'gronk' I mean or refer to horse. Of course that would be of no importance to public discourse, but it's not in any way confusing as far as I can tell. (Of course this purportedly private meaning would really be a public meaning insofar as it denotes horse; a denotation that would be impossible without the public language already being in place).
Sure, but that wasn't what I have been intending to address. Someone could arbitrarily choose that, for them, the stop sign doesn't mean stop, but go. Of course, they wouldn't last long putting that into practice.
I agree that you could do that, and we do use 'mean' that way often enough. You make a good point at the end, which incidentally Wittgenstein also made.
Quoting Janus
It's not a practical problem, but philosophically the concept-as-immaterial-referent doesn't seem very useful. By definition, we can't check such referents directly.
It may be an oversimplification, but I think a good path into Wittgenstein involves thinking of human communication as if it were just the communication of another, less complicated animal. Let's see how far we can get without immaterial referents that may be no more rational or useful than phlogiston.
That is very interesting about Frege, thank you @hanaH (do you have a page # for the Blue Book cite?). I agree with your seeing Wittgenstein as reacting to that (why he spends such an inordinate amount of time battling against the idea of "meaning" as a thing/cause, or any mental process). Also, it reminds me that for Wittgenstein there is a sense of language being alive. And instead of giving us the power of life over words, he lands on the idea of an expression. Not that an expression (or something non-word) is connected to something in us that is made external (nor "used"), but that it, in a sense**, merely happens--only that it occurs--but at a point in time, in a place, to be considered perhaps against what just happened (or not), in this culture, in relation to a sense/use of a concept (or not), by me as a reflection on me and in creating my responsibility for it. That in all that it is thus alive, or can be given life in investigating the implications of all of the above (by me or someone else). (**This is not to say that we do not sometimes reflect on what to say, choose what words to say, or try to make a point, influence a certain reaction, etc., but these do not change the impersonal sense of an expression, how it is (and can not be) meaningful, or the determination of the use of a concept(s).) Also, it is interesting that a lot of the time there is the picture that thought is alive until it is put into language, and then, having been cemented in an expression, it is thus dead. But, even so, we can, in a sense, resurrect that expression each time we encounter it (read/listen to it).
J.L. Austin is a great example of first starting with how things don't work. His work A Plea for Excuses is really an investigation into how action works, but he starts with how it fails.
Do we need to be able to check referents (whatever that might mean: that they are really there,
perhaps?). I see no conceptual problem involved in referring to the headache I have today, or even the one I had yesterday, even though it is not possible to check the verity of their (present or past) existences.
Sure, I might be lying and then I would not be referring to anything that is occurring or had occurred, but rather to a fiction that I am purporting is occurring or had occurred. The fact that we all know headaches occur should be enough to establish the coherence of the idea that we can refer to them.
And this itself is valid iff it's done with the consensus of the current players.
Quoting Janus
:up:
Quoting Banno
:100:
Using a tool for a task for which it is not made or cannot satisfy is an example of "incorrect usage", no? Others may repeat this which only indictates that misusing the tool is "popular" for the moment. Witty takes aim at common misuses of words/concepts in philosophy (re: using moves from nonphilosophical language-games in philosophical language-games) that had become "popular" with philosophers. No "private language" is implied by "incorrect use" (or misuse) of words failing to mean – make sense – in a language-game, only confusion, especially, for Witty et al, the kinds of confusions of which many "philosophical problems" consist.
All I can say is read more carefully. It wasn't a good paraphrase.
Quoting Wayfarer
Note that you brought the evolution of species up. At some point I mentioned the evolution of communication systems, but that's different.
I said: perhaps it's human vanity that prevents us from simply looking at social animals and seeing how their signals allow them to coordinate their behavior and therefore get fed or avoid becoming food, which is to say survive. [and applying those lessons to our own communcation ---which I was hinting toward.]
The point is that they signal one another, body to body, in order to survive and thrive as a "team" of bodies in a world of objects, including food and predators. The theme here is that meaning is "in the world," in the (or as the) relationship between their cries and their food and their predators.
I hear you, and this is something like the point of the beetle in the box. The "headache in itself" plays no role. It's impossible in principle to compare headaches, and it's therefore absurd to think that the "meaning" of headache is some quale-as-referent. It's far more reasonable to examine how the token "headache" is entangled with other public behavior (including the use of other tokens.) This is how we learn the "meaning" of "headache" to begin with.
Here's Wittgenstein on this strange issue:
These silly questions bring the house down, IMO.
I agree that it is impossible in principle to compare headaches. I don't agree that the ""meaning" of "headache"" is learned entirely on account of public behavior, though. One could not learn the meaning of headache if one had never felt pain. One could learn something of the meaning of headache, even if they had never had a headache, if they had felt pain, because then it could be explained "you know, it's a pain in the head".
To me this is not so obvious, however initially plausible. If you assume that meaning is referent, then it's a tautology. But in the Wittgensteinian spirit, I'd say that knowing what a word means is just knowing how to use it appropriately.
If I go by what you say, then I can't ever know if you know what "headache" means. The only way I can get a sense of whether you have experienced pain is by noting whether you use the token "pain" appropriately.
I agree knowing what a word means involves knowing how to use it appropriately; but I cannot see how that could be the whole story. If the person who has never experienced pain talks about pain, the whole conception she could have of pain that informs that talking would be derived from the kinds of behavior exhibited by those who say they are in pain.
And that would be an inadequate conception inasmuch as it does not include the input derived from having experienced pain. Understanding pain cannot be wholly to do with what you can know about another, because in all cases their behavior could be wholly faked, and the concept of pain is not the concept of any kind of behavior, simply because someone could be in pain and manifest no outward sign of it at all.
Intriguing to say the least. An attitude reminscent of Bolyai and Lobachevsky, the two of whom discovered/invented non-Euclidean geometry.
However, philosophy, I reckon, is aimed at grasping reality which means the meaning of "definition" has to be so crafted as to make that possible. Lobachevsky and Bolyai kind of moves (playing around with the definition of "definition") would eventually lead to us losing touch with reality unless...that doesn't happen and we actually end up gaining a deeper insight on the issues herein mentioned.
Quoting Antony Nickles
:up: What's meaningless in one language game is meaningful in another? :chin:
Why would Wittgenstein then say some philosophical problems are psuedo-problems, not real but actually instances of "bewitchment by language"? By the way, none of the articles I read on Wittgenstein provide concrete examples of this happening in actuality.
It doesn't make sense!
Quoting Antony Nickles
See my reply to Janus above - we can perform a Bolyai-Lobachevsky move no doubt but then the question is, will that bring us closer to reality or take us further away from it?
I hear you, but if the proposed referent of "pain" is uncheckable, then there's no reason to even assume that it's singular (or that you and I have the same referent in mind in this very conversation.)
[quote = W]
The assumption would thus be possible—though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one sensation of [s]red[/s] pain and another section another.
[/quote]
Quoting Janus
I agree that someone might sit quietly in pain and even hide their pain (out of pride, perhaps, or fear.) I don't think this exceptional situation cancels the concept's dependence on behavior in general though. An angry person can conceal their anger, but surely the concept anger is learned with the help of the punching and yelling of self and others and correlated tokens.("He got real mad and hit her in the face.")
Because philosophers get stuck in a word that may be totally misleading, thus getting stuck when a way out is manifest just by switching to another vocabulary. By switching such words, one switches one's way of thinking about the problem.
Take the word "thinking". We use it all the time, but it can be seriously misleading. Even though we use it, we're not sure about what it means. But if one assumes one does know, then one is infecting your philosophy to such an extent that you'll be willing to entertain the notion that machines can "think." If we don't know what thinking is for a human being, why apply it to machines, which are even further removed from us by many facts about nature.
Actually even the word "knowledge" is problematic, to such an extent that we even say that justified true beliefs constitute knowledge. But this is highly problematic. One can have a justified true belief, but not have knowledge:
Imagine you watch the finals in the NBA and team A beats team B. You saw it and reached this conclusion. Unbeknownst to you, what you were watching was a replay of a previos game in which the same team wins (team A) against the same opponent (team B). In the actual finals team A does beat team B, but you were watching a replay, not the actual game. So you had justified true belief, but it wasn't knowledge.
It's all got to do with how we define the word "definition".
My guesstimate is that if our aim is to understand reality, the definition of "definition" will have to be tailored to that end. That's the reason why we've defined "definition" as about essential features (essences).
However, just like Bolyai & Lobachevsky (mathematicians) ushered in the era of non-Euclidean geometry simply by tinkering with the parallel postulate, we could to alter the definition of "definition", make it about something other than essences or play around with its logical structure (e.g. replace AND with OR) and see what happens, let the chips fall where they may in a manner of speaking.
Maybe, just maybe, something amazing might happen as it did with non-Euclidean geometry (theory of relativity).
This may help (from the Blue Book).
What does this mean? It's like saying bringing a fish in the ocean closer to water or taking it farther way. :roll:
:up:
Quoting Janus
I'll respond to you later. See my update post.
It simply means how accurate is our mental model of reality.
OK, I think I see the key difference between what we've each been saying. I would say that for a word to refer it is not necessary to know that it refers to the very same thing for all of us. In ostensive reference of course differences will become obvious. So I would agree that reference is more determinate in the empirical context. But I don't think that a lesser possibility of determination annuals the idea. It is enough that I take myself, and others generally take me, to be referring to a pain, an emotion, or a desire all of which are things commonly understood by almost everyone, to justify saying that non-ostensive words refer. I think the alternative is too black and white.
Quoting hanaH
In the spirit of not wanting to indulge in black and white thinking, I am not seeking to deny that the concept is at all dependent on behavior, I just want to say it is not (in its fullness) wholly dependent on behavior, as I think I've already acknowledged and explained.
Quoting Janus
Fair enough. We can drop it for now. Good chat!
[quote=Some Guy]Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.[/quote]
Wittgenstein claims that how we use the finger, what we point to with it, decides what the finger is, its meaning as it were. True that but...it doesn't follow that the moon or anything else the finger points to is minus an essence.
This is the crucial realization in my humble opinion: Wittgenstein's thesis would only carry weight if, in the example above, the moon (referent) itself had no essence to it. That would be an astounding discovery. However, since he's only really talking about the finger (words/signs), :meh:
:up: Thanks.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-mind/Radical-behaviourism
To me this is not about something like "only particles and waves are real" but rather about the stuff that makes science and rationality possible: public stuff. FWIW, I think it's mostly a dead end to try to give some strict definition of "real" (and the other common master words.)
(You posted that quote before I finished corrected it.)
I wonder if (for instance) this would cover logical laws, scientific hypotheses, mathematics. Through which many discoveries have been made about real objects, events, processes, which would never have been discovered through ordinary discourse.
Quoting Antony Nickles
'The letter kills, the spirit gives life'.
Quoting TheMadFool
1. Context vs Language game & Form of life.
That the meaning of words depend on context was well established way before Wittgenstein formulated his theory of language games & forms of life. Ergo, since Wittgenstein believed that his theory was brand new indicates context-sensitive meaning of words was/is not what a language game & form of life is about.
2. Language as social (private language).
Here too, everyone already knew language, being a form of communication, is social and so what does Wittgenstein's claim that language is social add to what we were aware of long before Wittgenstein was even born.
It's just another kind of Gettier problem, and I believe Gettier is just wrong about this. Believing one is justified, is not the same as being justified. It's the difference between a claim, especially probability claims, which always carry with them the chance that your claim is incorrect, and what we mean by justification. Just because my sensory experiences usually lead to correct conclusions, doesn't mean they always do. It's the difference between believing that X is a fact, and X actually being a fact. If I make a claim that X is knowledge based on a particular justification, and you later find out that your justification was unwarranted, then it doesn't fit the definition, viz., it wasn't justified. We may have a good ground for our conclusion, and that grounding gives us a warrant to believe the conclusion, but if later you find out that your grounding is unwarranted, then you don't have knowledge. You may have the right to claim it's knowledge, but that right is dependent on what reality actually is. However, this is a bit off topic.
Quoting TheMadFool
Ah, Fool buddy, you've shot yourself in the dark again. :smirk:
There is no "Wittgensteinian problem of language-games" that I can see. Besides, "a scientific one" would just comprise another language-game. You either find Witty's semantics useful for clarifying our discursive (bad) habits or you do not. I very much do.
The PI could have justifiably – more precisely – been titled "Philosophical Reminders". He isn't providing new knowledge, Fool; Witty is elucidating confused and inconsistent discursive practices – calling attention to how philosophers in particular myopicly misuse ordinary language to, what he thought, say what cannot be said rather than shutting up when and where silence articulates – shows – what words cannot.
How an apology is meaningful is different than how fairness is meaningful. They have different criteria, they matter to us in different ways, we judge them on standards that are of different structures. This is the "grammar" which is the expression of their "essence", what is essential to us about each thing.
Quoting TheMadFool
Language allows for our bewitchment. A word (different than a sentence) has the possibility of having a direct visual referent, so we can say the "meaning" of "cat" is that thing right there. We are mesmerized by the idea of all of language working this way because of our desire for certainty, something fixed, universal, predictable, etc. We can define a single word without a context, so we picture all language without any, removed from their ordinary criteria, and then we are tempted to impose our criteria for certainty, etc.
-Witt, Blue Book, from @hanaH
So Wittgenstein's philosophy is to fight our temptation to take the forms of language that express certainty and apply them universally as a theory of meaning.
To comment on my own previous post
1. Context vs Language game & Form of life.
A language game differs from context in the following sense:
Take the word "drug". In one language game, that of medicine, its meaning shifts from being beneficial (curative) to harmful (addictive) based on context. Vide infra.
The doctor prescribed John some drugs for his Delhi belly and he was soon well again.
The doctor told John to stop taking drugs as it was damaging his mind and body.
Feels a bit contrived but seems to make sense. Context can make a difference (change the meaning of words) within a particular language game. Is this a distinction without a difference?
2. Language as social (Private language)
Wittgenstein is saying something new only if the prevailing theory of language holds that each one of us has our own private version of the meaning of the words. When we converse, what such a theory would say is happening is best illustrated by an example: Suppose there's a word "W". I would have a private meaning A of that word and my interlocuter would have his own meaning B. Since meanings A and B are private (mutually inaccessible), it isn't necessary that A = B.
When the word "W" pops up in our conversation, I would think A and the person talking to me would think B. We would basically be talking past each other. The way out of this quandary would be, through discourse, to find common ground, home in on what either of us actually mean (Socratic dialectic).
However, as Wittgenstein states, A and B are private, they're part of a private language, and thus the Socratic dialectics leads us nowhere. The beetle-in-the-box! What I mean or what my interlocutor means with "W", Wittgenstein claims, "drops out of the conversation". We're left debating, discussing, just the word "W" (its referent no longer of any consequence).
Missed this - look, within a language-game, yes, there can be something called 'misuse'. As in: "that's not how you move a rook". But Wittgenstein is largely totally uninterested in this. His menagerie of linguistic ills - language in idle, being mislead by grammar, being captured by a picture, and so on - all bear upon words employed without a language game; that is, without even a role like a rook that could, even in principle, be said to be 'wrong'. This distinction is what is novel and important in Witty. Everyone knows words can be used wrong. That's trivial and uninteresting. Witt is ultimately concerned about words which are, as it were, 'not even used' (to paraphrase the old 'not even wrong'). Employments of language which do nothing, which serve no purpose. It is one thing to move the rook qua rook in the 'wrong way'. It is quite another to throw the [s]horse[/s] castle shaped piece across the room and call it chess. In the one the piece at least has a role. In the latter it does not (incidentally, the issue of "role" appears over and over and over again in the PI - and it is almost criminally under-remarked upon - unlike 'misuse' which, again, doesn't appear even once in the entire book). The 'philosophical problems' that Witty diagnoses belong entirely to the latter category.
:lol: Trust me to do that!
Quoting 180 Proof
What exactly is a language game? It can't be context because that was old news and people seem to regard Wittgenstein's theory of language as a novel idea.
Quoting 180 Proof
Methinks it's the other way round. Philosophers are the ones who maintain strict standards of word usage (definitionally accurate). Ordinary folk, on the other hand, seem to be misusing words left, right and center.
Your Post
As for silence in philosophy, I think it's a rather complex issue:
1. I don't know thus I can't speak (ignorance + silence).
2. I know but I can't speak (knowledge + silence)
From silence alone, we can't tell the difference between knowing and not knowing.
Okay. Now you've done it! I have to reread PI. Thanks. :brow:
Quoting TheMadFool
Yeah, this is exactly what Witty objects to (e.g. essences).
A 2nd-order metaphor (i.e. technique of grammatical analysis).
Beetle In The Box
There's the word "beetle".
I use it to refer to x in a box I have.
You use it to refer to y in your own box.
I can't look inside your box and neither can you look inside my box.
Ergo,
Not necessary that [math]x = y[/math]
or
possible that [math]x \neq y[/math].
This is about a word, "beetle", that's got private meanings (x for me and y for you).
However, words are signs we use for referents, the actual thing that interests us. Words that we use to refer to private experiences (can't be shared with others) are like the word "beetle" e.g. the word "pain".
There is no way I could divine what the word "beetle" or "pain" means to you and vice versa.
We're only left, therefore, with the word "beetle" ("pain") and nothing else. You and I could very well be talking about entirely different things (referents). Thus, the conclusion that philosophies that depend on experiences that can't be made public, shared, are private would be pointless. It's like using a word without knowing what it means. I would get the grammar (syntax) right but any sentence I construct would be semantically dubious. Therefore, @180 Proof,
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.[/quote]
Why?
So, it's one thing to correct someone who moves the rook the wrong way on a chess board, but it's quite another thing to correct someone who throws the piece across the room. Which is to say, that the former has a mode of correction, the latter doesn't. In the latter example, there is no mode of correction because you've removed the piece from all context of correct and incorrect.
This makes sense in terms of how Moore uses the word know, in, for example, Proof of an External World. The word know serves no purpose, it has no role in Moore's context, which means that it's not functioning in a language-game, which by definition, means it has no function. It appears to have a function because we are fooled by the grammar. Wittgenstein is saying that what Moore is doing is not epistemology at all.
The problem, it seems to me, is that in the chess example, i.e., throwing a piece across the room, that doesn't even look like a move in chess. At least in language, it appears that you are doing something with the word, because of the grammar of language. Maybe the chess example should involve something not so radical, to bring it more in line with what's happening in language, but I'm not sure what that would be. Maybe something like, after you have learned the moves, you keep trying to move the rook diagonally, to fit some notion you have about rooks. I'm not sure.
1. How much of philosophy depends on the existence of private languages?
From the way philosophy is conducted, the first port of call being define your terms, it appears that what philosophers are most wary of are idiosyncratic (private) meanings of words and if an exchange/discourse, a productive one that is, is to take place we need to be clear on what the terms involved mean. Not that peculiar definitions are a problem as such but they need to be brought out into the open before we can have a conversation.
What if this can't be done as happens when the referent can't be shared/made public? Pure subjective experiences are exactly the kind that we can't show to other people - they're categorically private.
Even so, some words like "pain", referring to a purely subjective experience exist. Wittgenstein probably explains this in terms of visible/observable/shareable correlates like wincing, grimacing, tears, screams, etc. Is the correlation perfect? Does it matter? No and yes. It matters because these correlates function just like words and the beetle-in-the-box scenario rears its ugly head. Somehow reminds of theaters and thespians. A friend of mine, every now and then. for some reason, says "quick, act normal!"
2. Meaning as use.
Agreed, let's play along with Wittgenstein, and one, agree words are minus essences (family resemblance) but what exactly does "use" mean in meaning is use? A word is, all said and done, a symbol/sign - it stands for something, the referent. A word's use is predicated on that purpose/function. Take that away and how exactly am I supposed to use a word?
I'm exhausted. Will post as and when it seems right to do so. Until then adieu!
Nobody uses private, untranslatable languages. Witt wasn't attacking a thesis anybody anywhere has ever held.
He was just highlighting that language is a tool for communication between people who are immersed and embedded in a world.
He's like Heidegger.
Negation is the way to certainty. In a world of possibilities, we cannot say what necessarily "is", though we can exclude what is impossible as "is not". This forms the process of elimination.
Ha, that's fair. But yeah, you're totally right, the problem is 'non-moves taken for moves' - diagonal rooks, or, to be more precise: 'rooks' that move arbitrarily. Whose moves one cannot learn to 'go on' from, because not subject to the constraints of a purpose - a doing of things with words.
Quoting 180 Proof
:cheer:
Is there a common fumble, a contemporary example in mind that illustrates "words that are misused in contrast to words said that are not actually used" I don't really know what the difference is in practice.
Wittgenstein's go-to examples are often questions which aim to elicit instances of non-use (as answers). A nice illustrative one is §88: "If I tell someone “Stay roughly here” - may this explanation not work perfectly? And may not any other one fail too? “But still, isn’t it an inexact explanation?” - Yes, why shouldn’t one call it “inexact”? Only let’s understand what “inexact” means! For it does not mean “unusable”."
Notice that the standard for a 'useable' expression is simply: does this explanation work (to get one to 'stay roughly here', so that I can, say, find them again in a bit?) Yet, the person who does not understand 'use' asks the question: "does 'roughly' indicate some measure of inexactness"? But already this question abstracts from the purpose of the command. It is qua command - it's use as a command, for the purpose of speaker and receiver to find each other again - in which the word's meaning is to be found. The use is bound up in a complex of actions and goal-directedness. But as soon as you abstract from that, you can begin to ask questions which treat of the command something other: you begin to ask questions about 'exactness', about measurement, boundaries, and so on. If I had to name this distinction I would call it the difference between treating words intensively and extensively.
The PI is filled with these kinds of 'bad questions': what counts as a 'simple'? What is a game? What counts as the general form of a proposition?
“Things the words refer to” have essences. Not sure what this could mean. I point to an object and call it a “rock”. So the word I use does not have a essence but the rock I point to does. And what is that? The shape? The color? The chemical composition? I point to another object and call it a “rock” It looks similar to the first rock but does not have the same color, shape or chemical composition. Is there one essence both rocks share, and what is that?
Lastly, “H2O” has an essence. Let us first give it a little specificity. These symbols are used in chemistry as expression of atomic theory. This theory makes successful predictions of our macroscopic world. But like any scientific theory, it can be replace by a better theory, which may do away with the symbols of “H2O” And if this happens, what happens to “H2O”’s essence.
Sure, agreed.
Just pointing out that sticking to certain words like "justified true beliefs" can lead one to be captured by language. Which is true in many cases.
Consider the vervet monkey:
Very short : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ZG8Dpc8mM
Slightly longer, more serious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lsF83rHKFc
The use of various warning cries is to trigger the group to flee to a place of safety that depends on which predator is threatening. While one can speculate about what-it's-like-for-a-vervet-monkey-to-see-a-snake, all that matters is that a snake triggers a cry triggers a group flight to safely. The snake and the monkeys are in an environment together. The warning cries are calorie-efficient movements of the "networked" bodies/monkeys that allow them to coordinate their behavior so that they are more likely to thrive in the world.
Obviously our human world is staggeringly complex, but we too are primates trying to make it. Our mentalistic language is useful in ordinary life, but dragging it wholesale into serious philosophical discussion (treating it like an axiom) is comparable to assuming the world is flat as one sits down for some serious cartography. Sometimes the "obvious" stuff is completely wrong.
But there's a problem with that reading: it has Wittgenstein offering an improved theory of language, when he seems to be adamant that he's not offering a theory. Something's wrong if you end up saying, the problem with philosophy is an incorrect theory of language, here's the correct one, problem solved.
There's reason to think Wittgenstein was already convinced, at the time of the Tractatus, that philosophy is largely a confusion brought on by misunderstanding language, and in this he is not alone. He thought then that the solution was logical analysis, a process that reveals the underlying logical form of our statements.
One way to read the Tractatus is as an explanation of why logical analysis works, or at least showing what the world must be like for logical analysis to work. When we come to the latter Wittgenstein, we see 'grammatical analysis', the exploration of utterances through imagining the language-game they might belong to, but it does seem like the Tractarian 'metaphysical' bit, if that's what it is, is missing, or at least elusive, so we're tempted to grab "forms of life" and stick it in there.
But if that's right, why doesn't Wittgenstein just say so? I mean, he kinda does, here and there, but why does he insist he's not offering a theory? Is he mistaken about that? Is he actually offering a theory about language? If he's mistaken about that, surely that's pretty interesting, and we should all be talking about why LW doesn't think his theory is a theory.
I don't have a simple answer here, but one thing worth considering is taking language-games (and grammar and forms of life, all that) not as a theory but as a philosophical technique. A language-game is at least a way to show the reader what Wittgenstein wants them to see. (Just as Frege invented the Begriffschrift as a way to show the difference between concept and object, not as a claim that this is the notation everything is *really* written in.)
Sure. If Wittgenstein wasn't trying to get people to think of meaning differently, why bother to write? Once the world was thought to be flat. Once philosophers thought they were scientists who studied an invisible realm of forms or meanings-as-immaterial-referents. Some still do, in both cases.
But then, if meaning is indeed literally use, how come "meaning" is not being used as "use" in English? Isn't it self contradictory?
noted the place given to questions; Wittgenstein is in a dialogue with himself throughout the book, and in so doing he has his readers following and questioning as we proceed.
One of the core methodological approaches is the distinction between saying and showing. It's the same approach adopted in kicking away the ladder in the Tractatus - an area of continuity. Wittgenstein is showing us that meaning is use by having us work through a series of question.
If you read a page of the PI without having to stop and think, then you haven't been paying attention.
In working through the various elements of the PI, @TheMadFool is engaging with the text in an appropriate way. Eventually the pieces will fall in together. Or not.
It's a metaphor, like "God is love." Mentalistic language is common and useful. The word "meaning" has earned its supper in ordinary life. But, as Saussure also noted, the nomenclature theory of meaning is basically pre-scientific.
That said, it's not prudent to read some aphorism as a mathematical theorem functioning as a condensed result. To me Wittgenstein is more of a destructive than constructive thinker. He sweeps out cobwebs, lets in light and air, shows us through many examples how superstitious we tend to be about our own communication.
One core method in the PI is not to look at language in terms of meaning, but to show how what we actually do with words does not fit with certain philosophical presumptions ( ).
Ok then.
Quoting hanaH
Yes.
Quoting hanaH
I can agree with that. His virtue is in pointing out that certain issues are more complicated than they seem, or ambiguous.
:up:
Or pseudo-explanations.
It's such a simple rhetorical move, but it breaks a chain. Postulated images don't give life to the system. Why should they?
This makes me wonder whether, on your interpretation, Wittgenstein would count religions or theologies as language games.
:roll: I guess you are demonstrating Davidson's point here by misconstruing my understanding? I am an Enactivist
Progress!
But we can synchronize our behavior with words (marks and noises that get categorized), which shows that the meaning of a word is not grounded or hidden in some private mental space which, as you describe above, would be no use. The life of signs is in the world. The "meaning" of a stop sign is out there in the way we treat it.
:up:
Than what theory?
Either there is no theory to be "less valuable" or Wittgenstein is wrong about what he was doing. Which is it?
That is exactly the sort of question I think might be wrongheaded, and it's the sort of question a lot of us have felt ourselves wanting to ask after reading Wittgenstein. (For instance, I believe he nowhere says that philosophy "is a language-game".)
But what if there's no ontology here at all, no saying this practice here, this is a language-game, but that one isn't? What if language-games are just a sort of flashlight (remember this, @Banno?) you can shine on the thinking and talking and so on that people do? What if, instead of saying that the language-game is that which gives sense to an utterance or a word used in an utterance -- what if we only said that language-games are a way of seeing how an utterance can make sense, how a word can be given sense by being used in such a way? Not a question of what's there -- is this or that a language-game? -- but of how we look at language use.
:ok: There is this general sentiment, as evidenced by the way debates are conducted (the first order of business being define one's terms), that people (usually) have idiosyncratic definitions of words for concepts that play a major role in a discussion. Such words, with personal meanings can be viewed as constituting the vocab of a private language.
Suppose X and Y are engaged in a conversation about God. X claims God exists. Y is unsure if his understanding of God and existence is the same as X's. So Y demands that X define "God" and "exists". X will naturally comply. Say X says "God is being who's all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful". Y again faces the same problem. Is his (Y's) understanding of good, knowledge, and power the same as X's? This process reiterates at all levels of clarifications of meaning X attempts.
There must be a point at which Y stops asking for further clarification on the meaning of the words X uses - Y is confident that X and Y are on the same page so to speak. Is this a possibility? :chin:
Or perhaps I have misunderstood you?
I can't see how that could be a sound enough theory to attract many adherents. We learn, we don't invent, the meanings of words. I agree with @Joshs that each of us has our own unique set of meanings (or better associations) around words. Conventional meanings can be stretched by association; for example when it is said that men are dogs; but that "stretching" is still reliant on conventional usages.
That's not right. See 2. The Significance of the Issue
Help me out here - surely, 'the creatures for which such training might produce a variety of outcomes' simply can't do maths. I mean, whoever fills in those values has no latitude in what those values are. Is there something I'm not seeing, or a point I'm not getting?
You're still asking the wrong question -- as bolded -- at least as we're trying this out.
Early Wittgenstein had a doctrine -- I think, am I remembering this right? or is this just a Vienna Circle thing -- about what might make a statement senseless. Later Wittgenstein, it always seems to me, denies the presumption of sense, and instead of a bin marked "senseless" to chuck things in, he has an in-basket of things that have not yet been given sense, not yet shown to be meaningful.
Dumb example: a philosopher asks, "How do I know that tree there is real?" and presumes that the question makes sense, because, because, well, it's grammatical English. Does it make sense? There's no answer to that right off, not even the answer that it is senseless. You can say, well, if I lived next-door to a Hollywood backlot, I might very well look out my window and wonder if the tree I'm looking at is real.
That much you could get from Austin, showing you a situation in which it would be quite clear what is meant by asking if a tree is real. Since that's clearly not what the philosopher thinks he meant, the burden is his to show us a situation in which his meaning would be that clear. Insofar as there is a standard to meet, a paradigm to measure up to, it's ordinary language. It's not that only ordinary language is permissible, but that if you hope to be making sense, you hope to be making sense the way ordinary language does.
That would be the sense in which Wittgenstein is only offering reminders, not a theory. He doesn't offer a new standard, one he just made up himself and is satisfied with, of how to decide whether some utterance is meaningful. He's offering a way for you to see for yourself, a way of looking in which it will be perfectly clear whether it's meaningful.
I really think that means that Wittgenstein, unlike the logical positivists, gives you no grounds for dismissing religious speech, for example, as meaningless. But he does deny you the presumption that it is meaningful. If it is woven into the fabric of people's lives, if whether you say this or you say that is consequential for them, if it is as plain to the members of a faith community what their religious speech means as "Would you pass the salt?" is to 'us', outsiders to that faith, then what is there to say?
If, on the other hand, you ask your friend the believer a question about his faith and he gives you an answer that, let's say, "feels" like it's just as abstract or vague or insubstantial as your question, and as you question each answer you get some similar-feeling verbiage each time, so that you feel like you're digging a hole in mud, never making any progress... Yeah, you might begin to suspect that he doesn't know what his faith means any better than you. All he's got is words he says that you don't, and they only connect to other words he says that you don't, a machine that runs alright but has no evident function.
As a poet, you might want to build exactly that sort of machine. (William Carlos Williams defines "poem" as "a small machine, made of words".) --- No need to get into that here. --- But as a philosopher, you want to avoid doing that. I think part of what Wittgenstein is after is how it is possible to build such a useless machine, how it can be done without realizing it, and whether there are ways of thinking -- perhaps even ways we cannot completely avoid!-- that are particularly likely to lead to pointless machine building.
Around here I'm reaching the limits of even guessing though...
Look again, Banno. You're wrong.
If I ask what you mean by "God", it's not that I think you have a personal definition. It's that different language communities use it differently.
Ultimately, I think people understand one another through empathy. If I put myself in your shoes, or try to see the world through your eyes, it becomes obvious what you intend.
And so if language cannot "refer" (directly as it were) to our--let's call it "personal"--experience, than we feel we must, as Kant did, cordon off the referent (the thing-in-itself) to preserve the qualities of certainty and universality, etc. we associate with any "essence" of something. In his discussion of the beetle and in imagining a private language (and a boiling pot), we take Witt to be intent on destroying the referent/the object/the thing-in-itself/the essence/our experience.
Quoting TheMadFool
This is the picture solipsism has of itself. It comes from the desire to remain unknowable, to have and keep something fundamentally special about me. And people take Witt as making a point of denying our individual experience (sensation).
And here people take this as only that the object is irrelevant; that the internal is no longer under consideration, or is turned inside out. As in:
Quoting hanaH
So we have destroyed the referent and are merely discussing language.
Quoting hanaH
Which Witt specifically admits (and denies).
But "clearing up the ground" implies readying it for another project:
And so the point of all this is not to erase the individual experience, but to turn us from picturing our sensations, experience, etc., as working the same as anything else.
So he is specifically not destroying what is "interesting" to us, what "is great and important" (see above). He is preserving essence, our individual experience--or, to say it so as not to lead to a confusing picture--what is essential about (to) each thing being what it is. Notice the "if" in his quote at the top. If the grammar of the expression of sensation is not construed on the model of 'object and designation', than we are not irrelevant. But then, what is the grammar of the expression of sensation in which we are not irrelevant?
Quoting Janus
And this is the fear of the uncertainty of the other. Yes, we can be fooled, mistaken (not only because it can be kept secret). And what we can find out is only "external" (though the expressiveness of the other is more than we see; our understanding is more than their behavior). But what it comes down to is that we want to know the other so we do not have to address them; but the "grammar of the expression of a sensation" is 1) that I don't know my pain--I have my pain and I express it (or repress it); and 2) you either accept (or reject) my expression of pain (it is also not a matter of knowledge). So, again:
Quoting TheMadFool
But what is essential about our experience is not that we cannot entirely, completely express our experience or know the other's, but that we are separate. I can continue to express and respond to you regarding my experience (or hide it), and our experience is identical to the extent to which we accept that it is the same. This is the grammar of our experience by which the essence of it (what is essential to it) is expressed.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
We could call what he is trying to have you see for yourself, an insight. He is not making statements (true/false or empirical) that would tell you something, give you knowledge (these are not his opinions). They are provisional claims about how each different thing does what it does. So they would be "theories" about every different thing (each grammatical claim), except that this is a method (for all of us) where one lays something out (to show the other), and then, if they see it (its aspect of difference from other things)--if it is something so ordinary that everyone would agree--why would we call it a theory? (#128) Without your seeing for yourself, the claim is rejected, isolated, impotent.
And so, like Austin, these (games, rules, mental processes, pain, etc.) are all examples, to show us a way to see the vast array of the world, to find our way back to understanding the essence of things we want to find out about--truth, justice, aesthetics, religion, etc. But he is not cataloguing knowledge like Aristotle; he is trying to make the gears of philosophy mesh back together and grind forward again.
I don't think so. But Witty had... interesting views on religion. If you haven't, take a read of his Lecture on Ethics [PDF]. It's about 8 pages long, and it quite explicitly sets both religion and ethics outside the realms of what can be said. That is, what can belong to a language-game:
So although it is, in Witty's technical terms, nonsense, he still accords it a great deal of respect. A charitable reading would be to say that ethics and religion fall on the side on the side of 'pure showing': a showing that cannot be said. Hence the rather enigmatic 'wonder at the existence of language itself':
Notably this lecture was given pre-PI. It has a very Tractarian ring to it, and it's not clear how, if at all, the renovations in the PI might have altered these views.
This doesn't help in any way because a communal, social meaning can't be had unless each inidvidual makes his own private/personal meaning public/social and that's exactly what's problematic. So long as it's possible to have a very personal/private interpretation of words, the problem of private languages extends to communities as well.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The beetle in the box: The word is same - "beetle" - but what it refers to maybe different. Wittgenstein's aim is not to come up with a solution, it seems impossible, but to do an exposé of the problem.
How many philosophical issues are beetle-in-the-box kind?0
The simple answer is that Witty thinks language can be many different kinds of things, none of which can be specified exhaustively in advance. On his understanding of 'theory', a 'theory' of language would say something like: language is such and such, and that which does not fall under such and such specifications, would not be a language. For the most part, Witty's target is himself: the Witty of the Tractatus that tried to specify a 'general form of the proposition'. But on (later) Witty's reading, language is something like a resource, or a fund: it can be used for very many different things, perhaps things we can yet not imagine. Language is as language does (or what is done with language), as it were. And what is done with language is un-theorizable in advance.
One could, in a manner of speaking, call this a theory, and in an expanded sense it is. I think, to be finicky, I'd call it a meta-theory: a theory about theories of language, which basically says: "don't do it, bad idea".
I agree there's no particular reason to assume that the meaning of words would hide in images. Just because one can illustrate a concept via a picture or a painting doesn't imply that the nature of concepts is to be found in images. Vice versa, just because the meaning of words is elusive and cannot be fully captured by a definition doesn't imply that it's inexistant. In the silence of the mind, we know what words mean to us. We can play with concepts in the manner Husserl does, i.e. analyse their use and possible misuse, so as to elicit their meaning.
In effect Husserl did apply the aphorism "meaning is use" to explore his essences.
Meaning is use
Ludwig Wittegenstein: Sign-Referent concept of meaning is bollocks.
---
When we say a sign's (a word's) meaning is its referent we are using the sign (the word) to stand for the referent. That is to say, inter alia [1*], one particular use for words is to refer to things individually or as a group (the standard definition of "meaning").
[1*] What could be other uses for words?
Crossword puzzles, poetry, magic...
Explain these uses without resorting to sign-referent theory of meaning.
A request actually.
(Your required other uses.)
This appears to be distinctly inconsistent with what Wittgenstein says about language and boundaries at PI 68-70, though he does seem self-contradicting within this passage here. He says that he deeply respects, and would not ridicule such "nonsense". It makes one wonder what is meant by "nonsense".
The boundaries of language are created for specific purposes, like when we create a definition for a logical proceeding. But language use, and consequently meaning, is not restricted by such boundaries. Therefore going outside "the boundaries of language" does not leave one in a world of meaningless nonsense.
Understanding this principle is key to understanding the role of freewill, and 'private language', in the creation and evolution of language in general. Claiming that the boundaries of language are "the walls of our cage", is a misrepresentation which leaves one within Plato's cave, looking at the reflections and believing them to be the reality. .
If everyone starts with their own rules, this happens:
The magic word was missing. Also I don't understand your request, nor why it was made.
You made a claim. Now you have to prove it. Can you?
I think it's worse.
When you make a claim, you gotta prove it. Basic philosopher's etiquette. I look regal to you because you've forgotten your manners. Sorry about that.
My claim was that people use words in a variety of activities including solving crossword puzzles, writing poetry, and casting magic spells. What part do you want evidence of?
Quoting Olivier5
So, kings are rude! Copy that!
Quoting Olivier5
Oh! We're back on track. Good. How are the various uses you mention above divorced from the sign-referent sense of meaning?
Define: "the sign-referent sense of meaning".
How did you come to disagree with me without having understood me? There must be a sense in which you grasped the sign-referent concept of meaning. Use that!
Try not to be evasive...please (there's the magic word).
Sorry but I did not disagree with anything, was just answering your question about alternative use of words. But I can try again, with more disagreement. :-)
Or showing that it can't serve the explanatory purpose that folks think it does, showing that it's parasitic on the same synchronization of public behavior which it is supposed to explain.
Quoting Antony Nickles
That's part of it, but isn't it also about an obsession with certainty? "I can't be wrong about seeing this patch of redness. That at least is something I can count on." "Sensation" or "appearance" is the name of something one cannot be wrong about. Or so runs the grammar, which is mistaken for a deep, metaphysical principle, as if we don't just happen to usually use the words that way.
Quoting Antony Nickles
One project could be a better linguistics. Another project might be more personal, to talk less confused nonsense, to pay more attention to worthier issues.
Quoting Antony Nickles
:up:
I agree that the "if" is important. It's something like a reductio ad absurdum. It's a logical-grammatical slap in the face to wake us up from this incautiously inherited nonsense.
Quoting StreetlightX
:up: Quoting Olivier5
I hear you, but this is a retreat to the beetle-box. A theist could use the same logic for God.
Witt used the picture metaphor because "seeing" meaning in the privacy of the mind suggests something static and luminescent. In simple cases the referent theory makes sense enough. We can point at the cat on the mat (even this is not so simple, really, but nevermind.) We extend the analogy to talk as if we all gaze on the same form of Justice or 23 (or suffer the same ineffable pain-stuff.) We (talk as if we) can reason in the privacy of our mind as if we were "handling" such forms with an inner organ, examining how they fit together, as if they were immaterial legos. Platonism is like the miasma theory that preceded germ theory. It's easy to see its appeal. It takes time to sniff out its failings ---to see that it is parasitic upon the synchronization of public behavior that it is supposed to explain.
Note that the immaterial private soul gazing on immaterial essences is something like the official theological background of philosophy. Even skeptics and solipsists are happy to start there and forget to doubt this captivating picture (flies in the bottle of the "obvious" (contingent, inherited, habitual but optional.))
Oh! My bad. So, explain your answer then please. :smile:
Meaning is use doesn't stand up to closer examination.
Wittgenstein is of the view that, uses the word "game", people use words correctly despite not being able to define them. This is problematic because of the following reasons:
1. When Wittgenstein claims that people can't define words, he uses the standard definition of "meaning" with the logical AND operator, the meaning of a word being the conjunction of essential features.
2. When Wittgenstein then claims that words are being used correctly it can only mean that definition amounts to a disjunction, the logical operator is OR, of essential feautures.
It just means there's no eternal dictionary somewhere. It's really not complicated or controversial.
Some words are so old their roots are prehistoric. For us, those words seem eternal:
"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!"
"It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.
"That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then."
--WP
The picture of a word and its object (referent) as the only way anything is meaningful is the exact thing which makes a "solution" impossible. Imagine an example: "I have a pain in my throat" "Hey, me too!" "But mine is congested at the top and scratchy as it goes down." "Mine too! That's funny; we have the same pain." Now does the possibility that our pain might have turned out to be different seem less scary? Say: "Oh well, mine is more just dry and constricted, but sorry you're not feeling well!" which is, nonetheless, my knowledge of the other's pain, in knowledge's sense(use) of my acknowledgment of your pain, as: "I know you are in pain."
I'll try to see where the examples I provided lead me.
In crossword puzzles, we must discover words based on the number of letters and non-canonical definitions invented by the crossword composer. These definitions can be ambiguous and there lies one of the tricks played by composers to solvers: the definition may not mean what it seems to mean, prima facie; IOW there's an obvious meaning to the definition, but it often hides another one, occult in a way, which offers the key to the solution.
An example that comes to mind, not a great one: "a third person" in 3 letters --> she. Third person is to be understood grammatically, not literally.
This is thus a language game about the borders, the limits of meaning, its infinite echoes, and the solver progressively explores a sort of no-man's-land of meaning. The fact that crosswords are solvable at all is a testament to the power of meaning. So it's not really a counter-example for your thesis I guess
The case of poetry is different, of course, and more noble and all that. I can't even try to deal with it here, except for stressing that a great deal of its beauty lies in euphonia, i.e. words used as music, as sounds. There we do have a use of words that is not (only) referential but also aesthetic.
Magic is again about the power of the verb, a power that is thought of as physical: if I say "abracadabra" a flower will bloom or a rabbit will vanish or or a person will get sick. It is therefore a use of words beyond reference as well, and in fact those magic words like "abracadabra" often have no meaning at all other than as a spell. You can't buy an abracadabra on the market.
Only here I'm trying to show that the point is not to replace the internal referent with an external one, as if the problem was just the assumption of an internal thing, and not that the grammar of sensations is entirely different even than public behavior.
Quoting hanaH
I didn't want to open another door from this discussion, but, absolutely; the desire behind this word-"essence" picture (or appearance-reality or irrational-rational) is the need for something to be certain, determined ahead-of-time, complete in its applications, predictable, based on math-like rules. I was simply contrasting the personal desire to have or be something certain that no one else has or is (something ever-present as much as certain) with the fact that there is a (rational) grammar for our sensations apart from that (and from simply equating "behavior" with a sensation). (In the same way, the grammar of color is that, if we agree that the color is the same between two objects, than it is one color, not a quality of the objects or a correspondence of that to some impression in our mind.)
Quoting hanaH
Yes, but to say we "don't just happen to usually use the words that way" is to simply flip to the other side of the same (generalized) coin, instead of seeing that sensations have their own logic that is entirely different, rather than simply the negation of the internal referent.
Quoting hanaH
I wouldn't say Witt is dismissing our personal life in relation to our sensations/experience, and certainly does not simply believe it is a matter of words (rather than seeing our ordinary criteria for how those concepts work), but, as I said, that our relation to our experience and the expression of others is simply entirely different than how we wanted to picture it in philosophy (for certainty), yet that it (or ordinary criteria) is oddly familiar (Cavell will call this uncanny; Plato/Heidegger/Witt say we remember it).
Quoting Antony Nickles
IMV the grammar of sensations is public behavior though. Toothaches and stopsigns both get their "meaning" (if we insist on taking such a concept seriously) from what happens outside us, in between us.
Quoting Antony Nickles
To be clear, I'm emphasizing that we inherit our participation in the communication system, are trained into it. We learn to follow the line implied by the pointing finger. I was trained into English, and we can look and see how English has evolved, how the "same" words gained and lost various uses. We can compare this to the "same" Yield sign being treated differently on average by drivers over time. Aphoristically, the life of the sign is in the world. I take Witt to say that we should look & see how signs function publicly. Nothing is hidden.
:up:
Coming back to picturing words... That's how writing was invented originally. Ideograms were the first symbols invented, eg by the Egyptian. The hieroglyph for "duck" is
Note the little bar next to it. It means "1 duck." It also imply the writer is talking of a real, countable duck, and not some other use if the same hieroglyph.
Because ideograms are inherently limited. You can't really have one sign per concept, there are too many concepts. And some of them cannot be pictured at all, for instance higher philosophical concepts, i.e. the concept of" idea", or that of "law". This posed a problem to the ancient Egyptians who were trying to write these things down.
The solution them scribes found was to use all these 2 or 3 thousand ideograms they had invented ALSO as phonograms, as coding NOT for the thing represented, but for the sound of the word, i.e. one, two or three syllables, rebus style. So the duck sign now also codes for something else: the sound "sa". It appears most frequently to mean "the son", the human male offspring, likely because in ancient Egyptian, the word for "son" sounded like the word for "duck".
E.g. Son of Ra is written (pretty much everywhere) as: duck of the sun.
And note there is no little bar next to that little duck above under the circle (ideogram for Ra, the Sun), so we're not talking of a literal duck here, and ambiguity is minimized.
Now the scribes could code for the sound of those words for which they couldn't find a good picture, such as the words "law", they could write them down at last... And with this alteration of the original ideographic system, with this injection of a bit of phonetics, classic hieroglyphics were born. They would ultimately lead to our alphabets.
And this inovation probably happened because certain words cannot be pictured.
Them scribes still needed in their system an ideogram (more precisely, a determinative) for all these high concepts which could not be pictured. They chose the sealed papyrus scroll. Y1 in Gardiner's list
Note the papyrus scroll, placed vertically on the left of the pic. It denotes a "bookish" concept.
The picture of a word-referent clouds our ability to see that language works differently in each case (concept). Here, we are generalizing the case that a word can be defined (fulfilling our desire for a fixed meaning). This is the picture that makes us think that if we know/have defined each word, we understand the expression (as a fixed meaning), but sentences cannot be defined. As an example: the oversimplification-internalization of "meaning is use" is because we see "meaning" and we have the picture Word=Meaning (definition, referent) and we think "use" is simply a substitute (or language-game, form of life). In fact "use" would be considered a term, but it is not simply an issue of defining it, as it is only holding a place in relation to the entire story. ("To understand a sentence means to understand a language." PI #199)
To be clear, him saying "The meaning of a word is its use in language" is to say that concepts have various possibilities (including being extended) depending on the context, as in options. These are the uses or senses of a concept (as nouns). As @hanaH said, this is why "cat" and that thing there on the mat can be more complicated then even word-referent, as expressions involving cats have the uses of not only identification, but description, anthropamorphication, etc.
Another confusion is that Witt says that "we use" language or a concept, etc., but this is not the picture that we manipulate language or cause the use (also he says "our use", but this is to say, not mine, but the possibilities open to everyone in our language). You say something, and, to see how it is meaningful, we look at which criteria of a concept it meets (which use)--was what you said a promise? or a veiled threat (or both)? you say you know, but in the sense that you can remember? or that you are an authority? This expands the idea of a fixed essence (meaning), but still allows us to get at what is essential about an expression.
I think you're exaggerating. If language really worked differently in each case, language would be useless.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Misguided psychoanalysis. Living languages continuously evolve due to random, exuberant creativity.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't think so. He just meant language users are embedded in a world. Pulling language out of that worldly setting won't help us understand ourselves, or our speech and thought.
Well, yes, "public" as culturally, not something individual (special). But to understand how sensations are meaningful (the essence of them) is to understand the criteria for judging how they are what they are, do what they do--their place in our world (their grammar). And so stop signs and toothaches do not "get their 'meaning' " in the same way, much less necessarily "from what happens outside us". The point being that, in removing the imposition of the fixed criteria of certainty that we want for our/your experience (the internal referent), Witt makes room for our private life (the personal, the secret). So it does matter what happens inside us; just in the sense of whether we deny our experience (to ourselves), repress our expressions (to you), withhold our acceptance regarding our toothache or what is just.
Quoting hanaH
Yes, of course, and that is also to say that our (all our) interests and judgments and criteria are baked into our lives/concepts, and so each are different in how they are meaningful to us.
Quoting hanaH
Yes, nice to be able to point out small differences than try to get someone to look behind them.
Well, saying "language works differently in each case" is to say, poorly, that we have different concepts, like: thinking, promising, seeing, believing, etc. and each is meaningful in a different way; based on different criteria--what matters to us about seeing is not the same, and not accounted for in the same way, as promising; so it is an oversimplification to say we have (or can have) a single generalized theory of meaning (and thus language); say, of just word--referent/essence.
Quoting frank
You do not explain how you think that is misguided but it appears you might take it that I am making this statement rather than this is Witt's estimation about why we (humans) want to have a certain picture of how language works. "For the crystalline purity of logic was, or course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement." (#107) (Also, attributing motivations is not about repressed or unconscious anxiety or insecurities, etc.) Additionally, since a "fixed meaning" comes from the desire for certainty (which, again, is not my claim), I agree that there is evolution, say of our lives and thus our language; and also that there are impromptu creative expressions--the criteria we use to judge adherence to a concept also allows for the extension of them into new contexts or expressions.
Quoting frank
I don't know how to see what you object to in what I said, but to simplify Wittgenstein's framework as we are just "embedded in a world" seems unobjectionable (if pointless) except that you follow that with the assumption that I mean to be "pulling language out of that worldly setting". Are you claiming that it is meaningless (or impossible) to examine the possibilities of "knowing" or "promising" or "seeing" or "believing"? and that we learn nothing about ourselves in investigating our language, as part of our lives, e.g., the distinctions we find important, the interests we have in each thing, the methods by which we judge the conditions for identity, completion, evolution?
No, I wasn't accusing you of that. You seemed to be saying that Witt helped us understand that words have various senses. Frege had already covered that.
I think Witt was more about the embeddedness of language in communities, in life.
I almost mentioned that one myself. Consider also if, and, never, false, ...Quoting Olivier5
Actually I've read about some of this. Derrida talks about this stuff. Writing tends to be cast as a dead thing, as opposed to speech which is living. But, as you mention, speech is not so pure in relation to writing. In both cases we have repeatable tokens. In both cases we can quote in new contexts.
We can't currently agree here it seems. "Toothaches" and "God" and "justice" and "truth" are, in my view, tokens, just like the cries of the vervet monkey, albeit caught up in a far more complicated system. It might be helpful here to think of individual social organisms as relatively closed systems that signal one another "materially" (as opposed to a telepathy of rarefied concept-stuff.) As I see it, the point is synchronized behavior. So looking inside a single organism for meaning seems misguided, though one might naturally inquire how the sign system is "stored" as it is learned, etc.
What about the idea that my talking and thinking and sensing to myself is already a form of sociality that submits my sensations and thoughts to contextual
alteration? From this vantage , there is nothing ‘closed’ about an individual social organism , even when it is reflecting ‘privately’ on its own experience. This is the basis of a phenomenological analysis of perception. Not the solipsism of a closed system but a continuous exposure to and being affected by an outside.
Note that a closed system is not a dead system. Yes, we can talk and act when we are alone in ways that end up changing the way we talk and act around others. But unwitnessed actions (including speech acts) don't change signaling conventions/habits directly. (Unless telepathy or something?)
Yes, according to Derrida the logocentrism plaguing Western philosophy for centuries has fiven preference to speech over writing. Speech was supposedly immediate and a direct conveying of intended meaning. Writing was seen as mediated, indirect, and thus prone to distortion and contamination.
As you point out, speech is designed to be repeatable. In fact, a meaning conveyed in speech must be repeated in order to continue to exist. And as soon as we repeat a meaning we subject it to contextual alteration, which destroys the purity of its intended sense.
I agree that we alter context as we speak. Is the intended sense ever fully present? This is the heart of Derrida for me. We never know exactly what we are talking about. The river nymph maintains her cruel virginity, is never quite possessed.
Just to be clear, I'm aiming for something like the opposite of solipsism, insisting on the material (or sensual, if you like) nature of communication. We can't synchronize our behavior without at least indirect bodily interaction. Our nervous systems aren't omnipresent or telepathic.
My starting point is bodies together in a "material" world that need to work together. That's my path into Wittgenstein or perhaps my path on the way back.
But do not these group habits and conventions themselves originate as person, context and perspective based? If everyone , in their ‘private’ experience, is continually, incrementally changing the sense of the language they share with a larger community, then one could say that the shared language is already changing even before any specific language interaction among people. Certainly if there were a severe and prolonged enough breach in communication among participants ina community, then the shared norms would break down.
So there seems to be a reciprocal relation between private and public language.
For me too. For Intended meaning to be present to itself it must come back to itself , and in doing so, it already means something other than what it intended. Heidegger conveys something similar with his notion of temporality.
To me this is drifting in the wrong direction, from the unhidden back to the hidden, from public doings back to the pseudo-explanatory entities of the metaphysicians. We can't be rational or scientific about junk that is unknowable in principle (grammatically).
Been through this before. Your particular construal of an original socialtiy is just solipsism redux. It is relies on, is constituted by, defining a closed off region of the "self", then, by fiat, declaring this self to already be public, which - and this is the real problem - is apparently then all the more reason to discount the actual public. The issue isn't with the notion of an original sociality as such; it's the idea that this original socialtiy itself is cut-off, self-enclosed, uncontaminated, with sociality writ large. It's metaphysics in the bad sense. A reengineered metaphysics of presence wearing Derridian garb, even though no one who would take Derrida seriously would subscribe to it. The issue isn't with an original sociality as such, the issue is that by constantly making a hard and fast distinction between original sociality, and socaility in the normal sense (and then constantly retreating back into the shell of the former, as a pristine, self-enclosed space), is to not take seriously enough the idea of an original sociality, which ought to contaminate - in the Derridian sense - this very distinction. There is an original sociality. But it can in no sense be "proper" to the self without the supplement of society writ large.
For me it's not even there to begin with, not when it comes to the grand terms. (I can more or less intend to say thank you and accidentally say you're welcome.) It's as if even our complicated metaphysical statements are still just complex animal sounds, merely determinate enough in their "meaning."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/
I think this point can be applied pretty much everywhere. When we say that someone "knows French," we don't have some fixed and complete content in mind. It's more like turning a doorknob. The tongue shapes air pushed by the lungs so that it can grasped (reacted to) as a familiar token. (Same with "meaning is use" or "God is love.") Barfing up that string of tokens is like a wave or a handshake, except for being more informative in the sense of more efficient and flexible for coordinating action in the world.
Notice now Antony has been attempting to articulate the difference between my relation to my own thinking and sensing vs my participation in a language
game with others. You mentioned Wittgenstein. For him word use is person-relative and occasion sensitive. What happens to the notion of person-relative if the ‘unhidden” is defined in relation to an overarching group, norm, convention?
You also mentioned Derrida. He was asked this question about the shared , the unhidden and public in relation to
the temporal self. I read his response as grounding ‘unhidden’ in the temporalizing self.
“In the structure of the trace you have something that perhaps Wittgenstein would call 'public': , but what I would simply call 'beyond my absolute re-appropriation' : It is left outside, it is heterogeneous and it is outside. In short, then, perhaps there is here a possible link with Wittgenstein, but it will have to be reconstructed around the history of these notions of 'private ' and 'public', and I am too concerned with and interested in politics and history to use them so easily.
Now the next question, again a very difficult one, has to do with the distinction between the other and time, between alterity, intersubjectivity and time. Again, you make recourse to Wittgenstein in a way which I cannot address here. I quote you: “If one thinks back to the Wittgensteinian debates again, it is clear that there are substantive issues concerning the alleged normativity of meaning and the role of a community in sustaining the practice of a language-game which involves other minds rather more than other times. “ I would immediately agree on the level of the normativity of meaning. No doubt, for a meaning to be understood and for discussion to start, for literature to be read, we need a community that has, even if there are conflicts, a certain desire for normativity, and so for the stabilization of meaning, of grammar, rhetoric, logic, semantics and so on. (But, by the way, if these imply a community, I wouldn't call it a community of 'minds' for a number of reasons - not least those touched on In response to your last question regarding the 'inner' .) This is obvious. And, again, I would say that it is true even for animals, for animal societies. They form a community of interpretation. They need that. And some normativity. There is here some 'symbolic culture‘.
But this is not really the context in which I connect the question about the other who is 'radically other' (that is, is another 'origin of the world' , another 'ego' if you want, or another 'zero point of perception') with that of 'another moment' in time (between this now and the other now, the past now and the now to come, there is an absolute alterity, each now is absolutely other ). So how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I' without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I', that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I' and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I'.”(Arguing with Derrida)
I like Derrida, but this is still just talk about the occult interior. In this context it doesn't seem relevant. What you make of my prioritizing bodies in the world, using signals to work together? "Sign" might already be misleading here inasmuch as we tend to think of the sign as the envelope of a letter.
If you read Wittgenstein through Ryle , that may explain our disagreement. In a previous thread , I distinguished between the Oxford school interpretation of Wittgenstein ( Peter Hacker, Ryle, Malcolm) and that of Cavell, Diamond and Conant.
I read all of them through all of them, when I can manage it (all of them that I've gotten around to, that is, and within the limits of memory & interest.)
On the contrary, it is the notion of ‘body’ and materiality’ as causal conditioning agents that presupposes an occult interior. More specifically , as Derrida, Heidegger and Husserl have shown, such a discourse begins from a notion of body or object or material or sign as a self-identical presence ( even if it only exists for an instant).
It is a mode of reciprocal coordinators and interactions among a multitude of temporary entities.
By contrast , Derrida et al dont begin with temporary bits that interact and condition each other. They dont generate change and difference from the behavior of bits. They derive bits from transition. This is the radically temporal approach.
I guess the question I have is, are you aware of this split among Wittgenstein interpreters, can you articulate what it consists of , and which camp do you prefer?
Is it not a triviality that many concepts come in pairs? Like physical/mental, outside/inside, public/private? I think you are wandering away from the original context.
To me you keep wanting to talk about what's in the box.
Quoting Joshs
I'll say that I've read plenty of philosophers' interpretations of Wittgenstein, which surely contributed to my own view (itself never fixed and complete), and leave it there. The topic is The Essence of Wittgenstein. Let's stay focused?
Quoting StreetlightX
If one understands this move properly, it isn’t a question of ‘discounting’ the ‘actual’ public but of deriving it, It will only appear as primary and actual if you have already presupppsed it to be so.
Quoting StreetlightX
I’m not making a hard and fast distinction between two kinds of sociality. Just as Derrida contaminates the assumed hard and fast distinction between speech and writing by showing them to be complicit in all experience, I am showing that causal conditioning models of sociality presume an opposition between an inside and an outside. Not an inside in the sense of a private subjective interior, but in the sense of temporary entities, bits, objects, materials that interact in a public space of coordinations. Like Derrida and Heidegger, and in some sense Husserl, I am deconstructing this opposition that is implied by all
causal conditioning approaches to sociality. The temporal models of these philosophers accomplish this co-contaminating of the inside and the outside.
Frankly, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around your enthusiasm for Michael Devitt. You really find his overall thesis about realism to be satisfying? I ask because I find him to be a long, long, long way away from any of the authors that I follow, starting with Wittgenstein.
But this opposition is what you wield like a cudgel everytime any sense of sociality that isn't 'original sociality' is raised. Your position is oppositional through and through. It doesn't deconstruct it. It reinforces it with metaphysical steel. Do you notice that your writing is so often exclusionary? In your efforts to isolate an original sociality, you proceed by excluding, excising, distinguishing, always this core of pristine sociality from any outside. But you do this by abusing language and saying, ah but the outside is already inside - but you only do this so as to better and more rigorously exclude the 'wider' outside, the outside beyond original sociality, to which you oppose each time like a immigration agent at the border wall. It's like the solipsist who says: of course I don't deny the existance of the world - the world exists in my head!
And yeah, Devitt is great. Realism means being indifferent to the activites of monkeys on a space rock. As it should be.
For me , the best way to focus on a discussion with someone is to obtain as detailed a sense of their background assumptions and philosophical
worldview as possible. Sometimes it can save a lot of time to find out that the other person is interpreting the subject of discussion through a particular lens. In this case, it could allow me to zoom in on what may be the essence of the matter, which may be the following:
“ There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”
The authors (Hutchinson and Reid) are critiquing Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein. Hacker, like Ryle
and others, understand ‘type of use’ as a category, rule, grammar or criterion of use that come into play when we use a word. But the authors argue that such types and categories are remade in actual
word use, so they are not protected from the contingency of situational use. I think this is
relevant to the issue of the understanding of sociality. You talked about language being essentially just complex
animal sounds, but that seems to me to veer closer to a behavioral approach than to Wittgenstein. Sense
isnt just arbitrary associations between tokens, it is always relevant in some way. I’m not trying to talk about beetles in boxes, I’m trying to show that a reading of Wittgenstein that consists of behavioral
linkages between arbitrary signs relies on a beetle in box picture.
Grammar, as I understand it, are rules on how to use words in order to achieve semantic disambiguation and also, if I may hazard a guess, because certain permuations of grammatical elements are easier on tongue and mind (they feel natural as if they were meant to be read/spoken/written in a particular way).
So are you saying the word "she", in your example above, is a rule (in grammar). What is that rule? Can you kindly explicate it for me? Thanks.
Quoting Olivier5
Poetry is, to me, language + music. Notice here that language retains its identity as a mode of communication (meaning) separate from its musical aspect (rhythm, pitch, tone, etc.).
Quoting Olivier5
Remember "abracadabra" is classified as a nonsensicsal word. We have to be careful here: Is 0 dogs a dog?
:smile:
There doesn't have to be an "eternal dictionary" for words to draw their meaning in the sign-referent sense.
I don't see it. The signs aren't arbitrary but inherited (unless you just mean Saussure stuff). I am thrown into a world of handshakes, salutes, and stop signs which are on the same "plane" as ice cream, parachutes, and mustaches. I thrive by acting on correlations prudently (sifting out "causation" or the more reliable ones.)
I and my fellow humans need the bodies of other animals or plants to eat, a safe place to sleep, physical affection, etc. Our genius as a species seems to be teamwork. Some hunt while others weave and watch the babies. Or some calculate while other operate.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2
Do you think the bodies of organisms like us (or organisms in general) can coordinate their activities without some kind of physical interaction? (We can get into the niceties of "physical"if you like, but this is yet another case of "John knows French."). Note that I do not say "transmit thoughts," as tempting and habitual as that might be. I may absent-mindedly lapse into mentalistic language, but I'm gesturing toward an especially materialistic/behaviorist approach.
:up: Good point.
Quoting TheMadFool
The Beetle In The Box
Essentially, talking about exclusively private experiences is impossible IF (Antony Nickles) meaning is taken in the sign-referent sense.
My question is this: how could we modify the definition of "meaning" in order that we can have a meaningful conversation/discourse on purely private experiences?
On the word "abracadabra"
This word has no referent and yet here's a syntactically correct expression using that word: "Abracadabra, may Fortuna always smile upon you!"
Now, consider a conversation on pain (ignoring physical correlates, it qualifies as a private, unshareable experience). John says "I have a pain in my neck." The sentence is grammatically correct. Semantically, it's dubious - I don't know if the beetle (pain) in John's box is the same as mine or whether John even has a beetle in his box at all.
What this means is whenver two/more people are discussing private experiences, all that's happening is an exchange of syntactically correct statements, the semantics (the beetle, the pain) "drops out of consideration". Does this not remind you computers and AI? Computers allegedly can't comprehend i.e. they're semantically-challenged but that's in the sign-referent sense. If meaning is use, computers and AI do understand words; they are, after all, using words.
If computers become able to socialize as well as humans, I suspect that the grammar of 'understand' will shift to include them. Given our 'meat chauvinism,' a human-like body as in Ex Machina would accelerate this process. Current AI that's designed to chat is trained on mountains of our own human chatter, scraped from the internet. Unfortunately such programs are only exposed to the relationship of words to other words as opposed to words and the world (for now, last I checked.) Or you can say the world of such a being is nothing but words (which further reduces to integers and floats.)
The Linguistic Turn. Just as computers, not even AI, we, with respect to private experiences, are simply manipulating symbols. But that's if meaning is defined in a sign-referent way. Either that or if meaning is use, since computers and AI do use words, it follows that they (computers and AI) understand.
As for words further reducing to "integers and floats", even with humans they reduce to something similar - action potentials in neurons and their synapses.
Don't forget that we have bodies! We also chew food, turn steering wheels, scrub cast iron pans. Even our symbols are physical, something our bodies do. We vibrate the air with our lungs and mouth. We smear liquids on solids. We salute, wave, bow.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes, and it's strange. Is there magic in the meat? Or would something else work? Does something else already work? And we just can't recognize it? Maybe it hasn't been to this planet yet. I don't think we know what "consciousness" means anymore than our ability to use it for practical purposes (or something like that, perhaps an overstatement.)
Irrelevant red herring. Computers too have "bodies".
Quoting hanaH
I probably should say exactly. What is consciousness? We're merely manipulating the symbol "consciousness" according to English grammar and the rules of inference (logic) - very much like a computer. In a certain sense then we've regressed...from semantics (our crown jewel) to syntax (mindless computing).
Bluntly, the desire to have something certain (the referent) blinds us to the actual workings of our personal, individual, secret, expressed/repressed, rejected/accepted experiences and sensations. If I am alone on the edge of the grand canyon watching the sun set, I am not being truthful if I say "it is impossible to talk about my exclusive private experience". I have things I can say, and can continue to, and to answer questions, and clarify distinctions, etc. for as long as we want to have a meaningful discussion about my purely private experience. Now if I claim there is something more to my experience that I can't tell you, I am keeping that secret (as if for myself), refusing to be known, and that desire to be unknowable is the flip-side of the desire that my experience is a certain object to which I specifically refer to when I say something (that I am thus fully expressed; that I do not have to play a part in saying something meaningful).
:up: At least you're trying. Kudos to you.
My point is rather that writing is an attempt to draw language. Literally, our letters are little drawings. But in a modern alphabetic writing system these drawings do NOT code directly for concepts; instead they code for the sound of the spoken word. Imperfectly of course but that's the general idea of using an alphabet.
They do so because historically, attempts to picture concepts directly through ideograms failed for certain words, those words that refer to invisible things. Such as a law. You can apply a law, or break it, but you cannot SEE it. And therefore you cannot depict it.
It also failed because of reasons linked to economy of means: there are too many concepts to allocate one specific sign to each of them. Phonetic writing systems are more powerful, and more economical memory-wise. Learning hieroglyphics is very hard as compared to learning an alphabet: there are thousands of signs to memorize because classic (eg middle empire) hieroglyphics still rely heavily on ideograms, mixed up with phonograms as explained earlier.
This ties in to your mention of Saussure's critique of simplistic views of language as pictures. That it is materially impossible to write down a language only with ideograms proves Saussure right.
I don't see how it does. If you go and see a doctor about your pain in the neck, he will inspect your neck and maybe find something objectively wrong with it.
Plus the signs of guilt or shame are often not in the things you do, but what you don't do.
Behaviorism is just nonsense.
True. We could play language games
Yes, clearly. Even for animals.
Didn't see that one. Thanks.
Just to close the loop, on the last pic with the scroll sign, the vertically-placed scroll follows after the shepherd hook scepter sign (here in blue and orange) = an ideogram meaning literally sceptre (HKA), as well as a K (the little blue hill) as some partial phonetics of HKA.
So our little scroll sign functions as a determinative for HKA, and here it points to the figurative sense, ie not a literal scepter, but a "bookish" or figurative one: the rule, the power.
You cannot see or depict power. So all they could do is draw a symbol of power - the scepter - and another sign saying "figuratively" - the scroll.
In context: "the rule of Osiris". Or if you prefer: "the figurative scepter of Oriris". Osiris being most probably what the big eye on the right stands for. The below glyph is damaged but it must be the throne sign, which together with the eye composes "Osiris". So the highest god is written down as an eye floating over a throne.
I agree with you about why phonetic languages are relatively advantageous. I suppose I'm just stressing a certain skepticism about a framework in which tokens are pictured to have a one-to-one relationship with concepts. While it's easy to think of a drawing of a cow as a symbol for the concept cow, as soon as we get to more abstract concepts (like law or justice), the framework breaks down. One could think that the concept of law is actually definite and that we just can't picture it, or one could doubt that there is some fixed and complete concept or form of justice in some kind of mental realm in the first place. We learn to use the word "concept" in various practical situations, but I think it's like "law" and "justice." It doesn't have a referent, or at least I find such a claim problematic.
Quoting Olivier5
But that's just it. "Pain" gets its "meaning" from objective things like a doctor examining its "location." One can imagine sensation words as black holes that are only visible by the effect they have on the visible. Quoting Olivier5
Very cool & suggestive. Transcendent knowledge? Distance from everything, like the view from a mountain that looks without fear and sees the big picture?
But not doing something is just as observable. It's not about denying the interior. It's about looking at stuff we can uncontroversially measure, record, etc. It's also about plausible theories about the foundation or possibility of meaning. The immaterial referent theory just doesn't make sense.
I don't think so. Grammar in this context is not some fixed, formal thing but involves the entire world as we know it and live in it. For us, words don't just have relationships with other words but with everything else. Brains are also not deterministic (if I understand QM correctly), while (non-quantum) computers are designed to be as deterministic as possible.
It's true that letting go of the ghost in the machine might feel like a regression to some, but the alternative is not mindless computation but "mindful" computation at the level of the species, out there in the world, including not just our talking and marking but everything else we do. It's as if the traditional view crams all meaning into a quasi-mystical immaterial substance hidden somehow in the brain, while the opposing view finds meaning "distributed" across organisms and their environment, without denying that something (training, experience, skill) is stored and updated locally in the brain. A good metaphor is a modern OS that's regularly updated, except in our case it's open source all the way.
They don't have bodies (yet) that inspire us to change the grammar of "understand." We don't talk as if rocks or clouds can think or understand because they don't fit into a pattern (to put it crudely.)
Joe stares off into the distance. Is he feeling guilty? How can you tell?
The law exists alright, even if it cannot be seen or put in a portrait. And if concepts didn't exist, then we would have to replace this err... concept by a better one.
I mean, just because you cannot see something doesn't imply you can't feel or otherwise evidence its effects. The law has effects, I think. Your pain can have effects. A philosophy can have effects. In other words, imagining or postulating a philosophy (or a law) as an existing referent can be justified.
Does the token "law" refer to the concept of law or the law itself? If it's the concept, do you think any two people have exactly the same concept in mind? Or does "law" attach to some Platonic form in some immaterial realm? If in the world, where exactly is the law in the public world? I might say that it's scattered among ways of doing things, documents, buildings. And I also think that modifications in the brain "record" or "represent" our skill with using the word "law" in ways I haven't looked into. So the referent theory is not completely absurd here, but it seems far from obvious what that referent is supposed to be.
I think it's moderately justified. I'd say that my issue is pretending that such an hypothesis is exactly right, or that it's without problems. Sensation words, as Witt shows, have some serious problems, at least if we hope to found a theory of meaning on them.
Joe has a fever. Am I ready to diagnose his disease?
In short, we need more info. Let's say that Joe was drunk-driving and that we know his wife is in the hospital with a concussion. We might be tempted to say "I bet he's ashamed of himself." To me it's a fuzzy empirical question. What kind of behavior patterns are described in terms of "guilt"?
How would I know if my pain is the same as the doctor's pain? It's kinda like the scenario "is my red the same as your red?"
Quoting hanaH
What happens to those handshakes, salutes and stop signs as we move from contextual situation to situation? what can we say about the way that they change, or what about them changes and what doesn’t? What I have in mind here is the idea of pragmatic sense. The sense of meaning of handshakes , salutes and stops signs can be understood in an infinity of ways, depending on the way we are using these terms in the context of our dealings with others.
As you say, they don’t appear out of thin air but are inherited, which I take to mean that we are embedded in cultural practices which shape our expectations. But how exactly do these linguistic entities as pre-existing memory and practice function in actually present situations to exert their influence on our understanding? This is where I think there is an important schism in Wittgenstein interpretations. The radical Wittgenstein that I embrace says that the pre-existing memories and practices are changed by the situations they participate in. In a way, we can say that they only exist in their being changed by actual use. This applies to any notion of the material or the physical.
Witt is playing in the dark and probably at the wrong game. All words are "sensation words" when you think of it. They all code for an idea of a thing, for a type of things, i.e. for a concept, not directly for a thing. The word "apple" codes for the idea of apple.
What do ‘code’ and ‘type’ mean here? That there is a referential link between word and category of thing?
The doctor doesn't need to have a pain in the neck in order to inspect necks of people having a pain in the neck.
Type-> category, set of things that are similar in some way
Quoting Joshs
Yes.
No, not simultaneously, no. However, the doctor must have an idea of what pain is. How else would he (erroneously/correctly) diagnose the condition of his patient in pain? However, is the doctor's pain the same as the patient's? That's impossible to divine.
Yeah but why does it matter, as long as, assuming it's the same pain, things work?
Quoting Olivier5
Do you see in the following from Hutchinson and Reid a critique of the reading of Wittgenstein that sees words as relational codes and as types?
“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-thing relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world“.
The problem is we would be simply manipulating symbols like machines (computers/AI) - getting the syntax right - but with zero comprehension - getting the semantics wrong.
Searle's Chinese Room Argument comes to mind.
It's just that pre-scientific, pre-philosophic assumption that he successfully challenges. To be clear, I'm not saying that worldly things are the actual/correct referent. I'm emphasizing the limitations of the any "referent approach" for understanding "meaning. "
:up:
One might say that we got carried away with certain traditional abstractions until most of us could no longer see them as something like hypotheses that are only tempting if one doesn't look too closely.
That doesn't lead anywhere though. Because what am I supposed to make of what you or Witt say if your or his words have no referent at all?
In this analogy the fever is behavior and Joe's illness is a mental state. So you're drawing a clear distinction between them.
This is a fairly weak sort of behaviorism. :up:
Most of our skill with this stuff is "pre-articulate." We are not transparent to ourselves. Can a squirrel give an account of its squeaks and barks? Humans, to be fair, have something like self-referential grunts and purrs. We've cooked up a whole mentalistic metacognitive bag of tricks.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. It's a mad ocean out there, except that it's constrained by the needs of a social organism. This is why the interior monologue is something like the last as opposed to the first thing to consider. Start from monkeys and their cries as predators approach, not with Descartes running simulations in his head. Or start with the chemical emissions of even simpler organisms.
I like this: language is indeed a miracle. and a Great Deceiver.
Dictionaries offer definitions (meanings) of words. Dictionaries are compendiums of usage. They need to be constantly updated. I pointed out this simple fact of life to you before, but I think you didn't (or didn't want to) take note.
This is where we disagree profoundly. A stop sign's meaning is out there; exemplified in the behavior it produces, but a toothache's meaning is both in here and out there. Even the stop sign could be replete with individual meanings (associations) so I don't view the situation regarding what is private and what is public as being as close to cut and dried as you seem to want to be painting it.
Yes.
(I want to note, in passing, that taking "things" quite narrowly, as sentences, this is obviously and shockingly true; I suppose we could do research on this, or someone has, but I assume that the majority, and perhaps the overwhelming majority, of sentences an individual utters have never been uttered before and will never be uttered again, so varied are the occasions of meaning something by saying something. But here we're talking about types or ways of meaning something by saying something.)
1. Is it possible that we could catalog all of the known uses of language, as Austin desired? Yes. Even if that number was on the order of, say, 10^4, it could be done; he thought getting to 17 or so and then saying, "the possibilities are infinite" was giving up. He compared the enterprise to cataloging species; of course, if it's like that, then the possibility of discovering another one is not worrying, as you needn't claim that your catalog is exhaustive. Its finitude, though, is a matter not just of physics, as even the finitude of historical utterances will turn out to have been, when it's all over for us, but also of terrestrial biology, which is various but not infinitely so.
2. Which naturally leads to something like @hanaH's view that all of these uses and possible uses, even the ones we can't imagine now, have something in common: they are solutions to a coordination problem faced by living creatures like us.
But of course that is quite definitely a theory of language.
Consider thou the vervet monkeys. One gives a particular cry, and the others take the appropriate evasive action with respect to the predator associated by that cry. Or consider that most of us stop at red lights. I don't care much about what-it's-like-for-you-to-see-a-red-light. I need you to stop.
The attachment to concepts/forms is maybe related to the fantasy role of the philosopher as a scientist of these forms. Instead of looking at the changing world in its complexity, the philosopher can gaze directly at the objects of interest with an immaterial faculty. Abracadabra, an armchair science of the eternal essence of reality. I can't mock this project, because I'm trying to approximate it within mortal limitations.
Hi there ! I suppose I am suggesting something like that. At the very least I think considering the coordination problem of bodies helps free us from a largely refuted reference theory.
I think I understand why you might say that, but I don't think the private sensation that you seem to be referring to (trying to refer to?) can affect what I gesture toward with "meaning." I confess that I am trying to twist the meaning of meaning here, just as Wittgenstein and others have.
Quoting Janus
This is tricky, because the implications of my view are that nothing is ever cut and dried (or only relatively so.) It's like Ryle's interpretation of "John knows French" (quoted above) applied everywhere. If meaning is out there in the world, it exceeds what might have otherwise been called my 'intentions.' In the same way, the 'meaning' of the predator warning cry of the vervet monkey is hardly something we'd want to ground in the consciousness of that monkey. Ants might be an even better example. Does the individual ant grok the genius of the system they've evolve to coordinate their actions? Humans, much clever, are plausibly still mostly in the dark on such matters, despite our relative metacognitive genius. Our skill exceeds our self-transparency.
I think you might like this. I think we both have our own, radical interpretation of Wittgenstein.
That's Brandom, btw.
I am not sure what you mean here by "twist"; I'm seeing it more as "restrict". I can refer to a sensation that, even though you have no hope of feeling it (since you are not me), you can nonetheless understand what kind of thing I am referring to since you ( presumably) also experience sensations. We can certainly say that this is a different kind of reference than ostensive reference, but I see no rationale for denying that it is reference at all. You (presumably) take yourself to be referring to meaning when you speak of it, and yet meaning is not a determinate object.
Quoting hanaH
I agree that meaning exceeds our intentions, but I don;t view it as being merely what is "out there in the world". This is what I meant by "cut and dried", 'black and white", "either/ or"; wanting to say it is either what is out there in the world or it is "intentions", or associations, what is "in our minds". In my view it is both.
By that, do you mean not all language usage is referential, or that no language usage is referential?
I think it's tough to deny the seeming referentiality of words like "cow" or "hat." But what is "refer" supposed to refer to? I feel as if I am trying to define a bark with a hiss and a growl.
Yes, restrict. I'm exploring a materialistic, biological, behavioristic perspective ... largely inspired by Wittgenstein, which I also take back into my reading of him.
Quoting Janus
For me the rationale is that the "beetle" serves no purpose. It's like phlogiston or the ether. If, as I do, you choose to start from the bodies of social animals in nature that need to coordinate their behavior, the "beetle" or "what-it's-like-for-them" can't play a significant role, since it's typically understood to completely invisible. Nothing constrains our speculation. Can we even falsify an inverted spectrum hypothesis? I don't see how.
I don't know if you and I see the apple in the same way, but I can confirm that we both call it 'red' (the uncontroversial public use of an uncontroversial public token.) I think, roughly, that rationality reasons from the uncontroversial toward the more controversial (not from sense data but from statements that all parties accept, which skips the quasi-mystical "given" that's been supposed as the source of knowledge.)
Quoting Janus
It's very tough to avoid mentalistic language. Philosophy is something like a snake trying to crawl out of its own skin. Or it's Nuerath's boat. Or it's a cartoon in which a cat climbs a ladder by bringing the bottom rungs up to the top in order to keep climbing higher.
On one level of this discourse I'd say I'm squeaking or buzzing rather than referring. I like to forget for a moment, if possible, all the inherited baggage of reference and think of a pack of wolves using a variety of signals to hunt successfully. In our case, the practical payload is so far down the stream that it's hard to (fore)see.
When you use the words ‘bark’, ‘hiss’, ‘squeak’, ‘buzz’ and ‘growl’ do you mean to convey the idea of meaningless in themselves utterances which only take on sense when they interact in particular ways with other such utterances? But isn’t this notion of a meaningless-in-itself utterance an example of a beetle in a box? Beetles in boxes don’t only have to do with what is supposed to be hidden inside a subjectivity. They can just as well be about things in the outside world or social realm. What makes them beetles in boxes isnt where they are located ( inner subjectivity vs social world)
but that they mean something in themselves (empty signal) before or outside of their relations within a discursive matrix.
So for instance , if you intend ‘hiss’, ‘bark’ , squeak’ ,’buzz’ and ‘growl’ as meaningless in themselves, you defeat your own purpose, because ‘meaningless in itself’ works in the context of your aims as a specific pragmatic but confused sense. It intends to point to a picture of an in-itself, a growl or hiss which only later becomes linked to meaning.
I think Wittgenstein was trying to critique behaviorism.
Hutchinson points out that the American pragmatist versions of pragmatism , while similar in a general sense , failed to overcome empiricism.
“But such similarities are superficial when one acknowledges the empiricism at the heart of pragmatism (and they are what led some Pragmatists, unlike Wittgenstein, toward behaviourism).”
No, I don't mean meaningless. I've used the example of the vervet monkey's cry several times now. Organisms coordinating their action in a shared world, that's my focus. You just mention other utterances above, forgetting all else. Instead think of utterances as physical actions among others, shaking the air. An animal shits, an animal fucks, an animal cries in the proximity of a predator. Or an ant chases the gland of another ant.
The bark-grunt-roar metaphor gestures toward the animality and materiality of communication and away from the typical theology of the philosophers and its pure concepts, pure sensations. In both cases an infinite intimacy is suggested, or, if you like, a self-transparence.
AFAIK, animal communication is generally less historical, so that signs are not arbitrary in the Saussure's sense. I suppose they are inherited genetically as opposed to culturally (for the most part, and I am just speculating.) For us, on the other hand, our conspicuously varying and largely " arbitrary" languages are "received like the law." Just a rock thrown into a pond causes rings, so does one wave of the hand tend to cause another. Cough up what can be categorized as the token "hello, "and expect the same in return or a synonym. (Spoken words are something like equivalence classes of sounds.)
But what would it mean to suggest that the shitting, fucking and crying is always a different sense of these terms? That is , not examples of a larger category called shitting or fucking in general, but events that share a family resemblance without there being any category to hold them? I’m looking for the contextual specificity that is the true and only site of what these terms do. It would help if we could talk a little more about what materiality and physical action are supposed to be about.
Materiality suggests to me a notion that is at least partially independent of context.
Is the token ‘hello’ something we could call a member of a category? Where does the category have its existence? Expecting the same or a synonym is a move in a language game. But there are many possibilities. The other person could fail to return the hello, and thus lead to all sorts of further developments. Did they misunderstand? Were they upset about something? Did they fail to hear? Or we could say hello with no expectations of a reply, depending on the circumstances.
Or we could say hello in a context of hostility, expecting it to irritate the other. In that circumstance, we could be surprised by a return of the hello.
I'm not clear on what you are asking here. But I'm happy to say that I don't claim to have some final theory of everything. I also don't pretend to deduce (in detail) our current, tacit mastery of the metacognitive molasses we're working within from brute biology.
I hope so, since you are using it that way.
As Nietzsche might say, it's a 'lie' we need to survive, treating the different as the same (ignoring the position of the word, the handwriting, the color of the letters, etc.)
Quoting Joshs
You can describe it that way. But my point is to bring talking back to the world. I throw a rock to kill a bird. I make the sound for "food" and my mother feeds me. In one case I move my hand. In the other case I move my diaphragm and tongue. In the second case, between social humans, the sign is arbitrary (culturally inherited).
(I don't think there's some perfect distinction between language and non-language.)
Of course. And the rest of nature never surprises us? I like to visit a fossil bed and walk on rocks. Some of them give way. I've learned to prepare for that.
Human conversation is arguably the most complex thing we are aware of, involving billions of human brains.
Just as "knowing French" is far indeed from referring to some precise and complete (immaterial) "content," so is "material." Think material as the "plane" or "realm" of food & sex ... and medium-sized dry goods. It's a hot air ballon, a vomiting baby, a hot apple pie. It's more fact than interpretation, and therefore, yes, relatively independent of context.
Of course. See the comment about complexity above. I'm aware that humans can be sarcastic. But aggressive irony is not yet rocket science, as irony is a conceptually simple inversion. Also:
[quote = Blue Book].
When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.
[/quote]
Quoting Joshs
But not by an insult.
The issue is perhaps whether one is willing to see humans as continuous with the other animals and then also (very much related) their language as continuous with the body-coordinating signals of those other animals.
Perhaps Wittgenstein should have stressed not only the other signs (the system of signs) but the world with which that system is entangled. It's not so trivial to separate signs from non-signs. It's also hard to make sense of a system of signs that has no use. So we need organisms and a world in which they strive.
Language-games were still in their infancy in the Blue Book.
I want to say that the interesting thing about a language-game is that the sense an utterance (or gesture or other action) makes is obvious. But it's still just a reminder.
More specifically, I think language-games are supposed to be occasions of language use stripped of the non-essential so that the sense of them becomes obvious.
There's a story about Capablanca walking by a board where two masters were analyzing a difficult ending, considering several strategies and lots of lines. Capablanca stopped, moved several pieces on the board to new squares and removed some pieces, and then walked away. What was left on the board was a position that was obviously a win for white, and it was position white could obviously force eventually.
I think that's what a language-game is supposed to be. In real life, the sense of things may be obscured by all sorts of other considerations and complexities. Strip all that away and you don't wonder whether something makes sense or how an exchange works; it's obvious.
It seems you're not sure we know we're on firm ground until we get down to the biological, the material conditions of life, to something we might even do science with. I don't think Wittgenstein feels that need.
:up:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
As far as ordinary life goes, I think we can and do feast on mentalistic language without hesitation. Even in the context of philosophy, I too can and have turned the crank on the old fog machine with a feather in my hat.
I guess I do think we are theoretically on thin ice with theories of meaning that depend on what I'd call (and what I think Wittgenstein reveals as) habitual nonsense. But I also think that we do not practice what we preach, and it's perhaps precisely this distance that affords us our ignorance. So much of philosophy is so removed from practice that it seems to function more like peacock's feathers than the fang of a cobra (quasi-religious status grooming, etc.) It's fine to be wrong (incoherent) as long as one enjoys a morale boost that cashes out in the bigger picture...along the same lines religion may be an advantageous confusion. Our mastery of sign-slinging is mercifully tacit, while the account we give of that mastery is a confused, childish ghost story. To me it's adjacent to more classic forms of theology. I may indeed err on the other side to make a point, impatient at always being offered ectoplasm as explanation. (I asked for water, she gave me gasoline.)
Just to be clear, I don't pretend to speak for long-gone Wittgenstein or even to have the same temperament. I'm working from passages in his text that I found essential, trying to draw them in out in a certain direction, purify them, if you will.
I understand the impulse. For a while I read Wittgenstein as a man desperately trying to invent game theory. Same really for Paul Grice. But the game-theory version of all this you find in David Lewis's Convention kinda ends up in the wilderness without quite reaching the revelation it was looking for.
I don't see much to brag about with any of the previous attempts to make philosophy into a science, and I don't really need a new vocabulary, so I've been retreating from the whole approach.
I'll tell you one thing I've kept from reading Lewis, though I don't remember whether he says it in so many words: once we upgraded from signaling to language, we didn't stop signaling. We use words now because, well, there they are. Sometimes when you utter a perfectly coherent bit of English, you're not really speaking at all, but only signaling. We know that, but we forget. ("How are you?" might be an English question or it might be the vocal equivalent of a smile and a nod.)
Haven't read it, but I'll look into it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think philosophy has tried to become more rational which includes providing a theory of science. Imagine dismissing philosophy's attempts to become more rational. Would that make sense? Is the drive toward coherence aesthetic, practical, ethical, ...?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure, and the way "how are you" can pour out automatically is not so different from the way that philosophical clichés pour out. I think in terms of a continuum. "Speaking" has no definite referent, but we can discuss and debate situations where one either 'ought' to be or is more likely to be applied rather than another. So it becomes a normative (political?) or empirical question. Of course something like inference from analogy is also involved (analogy is the core of cognition, etc.) And this is why I can complain (playfully, like a gripey Seinfeld) about incoherent ghost stories and not just their theorized practical effects.
I'm not sure what version of the term token you are referring to; I take Witt to be showing us that a toothache (a sensation) works differently than justice (a moral claim). Different things matter to us, they operate (or fail to) in different ways, we identify them differently. To say they are just cries is to equate every expression as the same type, when Witt's point is that toothaches and rocks and honesty have different frameworks of criteria for how they work.
Quoting hanaH
"Individual social organisms" seems to be, me, as part of a culture, or humanity. And, at least in terms of sensations, we are, in a sense, closed off from the other except that which we can't but express. And a "concept" is not like an "idea" (something... mental?), it is a term of Witt's just to refer collectively to all our human activity. Not everything is "material" (if that means physical) but justice and thinking and judging are still part of our lives, and affect are lives, are "normative" (if we must say), and synchronized, sure (the similarity maybe not as important as that we are inculcated into our culture).
Quoting hanaH
My point is not that "meaning" is inside me, but I do claim that: I, personally, am interested in some things and not others, that some parts of my experience are meaningful to me (essential even), more than they are for you. In exactly clearing up that there is not "meaning" (or a theory of it), Witt makes the space for the personal, by showing us the nature of human expression (and yes all the public yada yada).
Who was speaking of science, or eternity, or even reality? None of that has anything to do with the fact that words carry meaning, and that's why people use them.
If "meaning is use", then no meaning is no use. If words carried no meaning, people would have no use for them...
I think even this constraint would be too much. The 'untotalizable' character or uncountability of types of use is a positive, "built-in" feature of 'use'. Wittgenstein says as much:
§23: "But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question and command? - There are countless kinds; countless different kinds of use of all the things we call “signs”, “words”, “sentences”. And this diversity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. ... The word “language-game” is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life" (emphasis in the original).
§23 also contains a list of examples of such types of uses - Giving orders, and acting on them, singing rounds, Cracking a joke, are just a few of them. The point is that these types of uses are derivative of our forms of life: there are as many types of uses as they could be forms-of-life. This is why further down, in discussing why he is not offering a theory, Witty says that the point is to do away with any sense of explanation, and to stick wholly with description:
§109: "And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place" (emphasis in the original). This can only make sense if we drop even minimal conditions like "language use has in common the fact that they are solutions to a coordination problem faced by living creatures like us". Witty's strong thesis is: there is and can be no such condition of commonality. The very capaciousness of this approach to language is also mercilessly eliminative: it expels all efforts at welding even minimal conditions upon what language is.
Apposite quotes, thanks. §100 is one of the ones I was remembering.
Is there connective tissue between §23 and §100 to suggest that the Doctrine of No Theory is derived directly from the countlessness of kinds of sentences? (I'm working from memory here but will go back to the text too.) I keep thinking the prohibition would stand even if you had an enormous Austinian catalog of sentence types and language-games.
Why say, "There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations"? The implication is that theory is hypothetical and description is not. I suppose that's kind of what I've been trying to suggest by saying that sense in a language-game is obvious, plain to see. But why say, "there must not be anything hypothetical" rather than "there need not be anything hypothetical"?
I can't connect this "hypothetical" talk to anything else in LW off the top of my head. I can make some guesses, but LW says I shouldn't. Do you know what's going on here?
And for the 'must' - I think it just follows from what I termed before as understanding language as a resource or a fund. Say you have a stock of wood. Can you stipulate in advance all the uses of that wood? I mean you can try. You'd probably be wrong. You'd end up like those old-timey futurologists:
And language is far, far more flexible than wood. Also, the citation is from §109. I mis-cited it as §100 before I edited it.
I was suggesting one motive among other possible motives for the philosophical insistence on immaterial entities. It gives philosophers a special domain, often take to be eternal and offering a kind of ideal, "direct" access. I "can't" be wrong about what I think I mean. I "can't" be wrong about my pain. This "can't" is more grammatical than logical (or, if you like, logic is a byproduct of grammar in some ways.
Quoting Olivier5
I think it's reasonable to speak of words carrying meaning. At least it's a gentler metaphor than reference. The vervet monkey cries when an eagle is before its eyes, and this cry triggers the other vervet monkeys to take an evasive action appropriate for that particular predator. To speak of carrying meaning adds a layer of interpretation, but it's not as thick and objectionable as postulating that the monkey cry refers to the Platonic form of the eagle or of evasion. (I'm suggesting that we be conservative here and be slow to smear immaterial substances on what these bodies are doing in nature. I extend this to us humans.)
"Cries" is an intentionally jarring metaphor. "Just" cries suggests meaninglessness, where I'm simply looking at relationships of stuff in the world (stuff that includes our sounds and scribbles) for meaning. Because animals do coordinate their behavior, meaning is out there. Pain talk is part of us taking care of one another, surviving together.
I agree that one can say there are many different frameworks. I'll always vote for the theory that acknowledges more complexity, more difference in this context.
It seems we are borrowing the Wittgenstein avatar for different projects. Yours reminds me of a therapist. I'm not objecting or mocking.
I think that's actually you who's insisting that we think about immaterial entities.
I don't think the trail of text above this post supports that. It has been suggested (in so many words, seems to me) that pain refers to a sensation, that signs refer to ideas. Private substances. The controlling picture seems to be that of the soul in unmediated contact with pain-stuff and meaning-stuff. Or perhaps of the soul as a self-referential bundle of such stuff.
This morning it occurs to me that the first great 'triumph' of the logical form approach was something called, oddly enough, the "theory of descriptions". And then here's LW opposing description to theory.
Among other things, the theory of descriptions embeds a universally quantified conditional --- i.e., an hypothesis --- in denotative phrases like "the present king of France":
[math]\exists x(Fx \wedge \forall y (Fy \to y = x))[/math]
So could be just a little reminder to insiders, with a mischievous wink, that he's not doing that anymore. In certain quarters at the time, the word "description" alone carried a whole theory along with it.
So for me, speaking of ideas or concepts is not a problem at all, but speaking of visible ("material") things is sometimes more triky, as it involves "thinging" for instance.
Ha. Entirely possible. Although Witty mischievously winking is a very weird image.
Look at the trail again. That's you going on and on about metaphysical issues. What would Witt say about that?
I think it's simply false to assume that "I can't be wrong about what I think I mean." We are not fully transparent to ourselves IMO.
In Wittgensteinian, you don't necessarily know all the beetles you have.
Not to maybe address your comment directly, but my point is that Witt is replacing the internal referent of the essence of a sensation with the ordinary workings of our sensations/experience (that they still are important to us individually, interpersonally, culturally). To say this is therapeutic is to imply he was solely focused on "curing" the desire of the skeptic to leapfrog our ordinary criteria in place of certainty (the temptation for which he leaves open in each of us).
The characterization as "therapy" also misses the goal of bringing back the essence of our ordinary criteria, here, of sensations and experience; that there is a categorical logic of the conditions, possibilities, and structure (grammar) of sensations--based on the idea of expression--which is specifically addressed in the PI (see below).
The reason it may appear imposed or external is that, rather than seeing the point as simply that sensation and experience have a different structure than word-referent, people jump to (stop at) taking the goal as eradicating sensations themselves, or that we cannot talk about my experience at all--with the fact that talking in general is based on public concepts; or that we are still stuck in the Tractatus so that of which one cannot speak, one must be silent (not seeing that, there, the reasoning is that "speech" is being limited only to logical certainty). But saying that language is public is not to say I can't try to express a solely personal experience:
My point is that the answer to the bolded question is, yes, I can "write down or give vocal expression to [my] inner experiences—my feelings, moods, and the rest", even "for [my] private use"--only here "private" is not the term that Witt makes of "private" (that no one else would understand), but with the ordinary criteria of personal, secret. I can even express my experience individualistically, say, poetically:
The fact you may not accept it--care, be interested, be understanding, ask for clarification--as it were, to find it meaningful, is the fact that I may be isolated, alone in the world, not treated as "alive" (#284) or as having a "soul" (#179). The person could "understand the language"--it is public language--but they would not, I might feel, understand me.
Quoting hanaH
And this is the depth of the concept of expression, which includes the non-verbal, the non-linguistic (cries), but also that our ordinary language is much more expressive than we give it credit for, as we only picture it as word=single referent. Thus the analogies to music (#527) in that there is much more going on than may be grasped instantly (taking meaning as simply the individual word's definitions); that we may go back and forth to draw out endless depth in the expression of our experience.
The claim that we cannot get between pain and its expression (#244-245) is to show us that the structure (the grammar) of our sensations is not that they are known, but that they are expressed or not. That they are meaningful to me is in releasing them into the world (or hiding them); that they are meaningful to you is the extent to which you accept them, that you accept me as a person in pain. "If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me." (p. 223 3rd.)(emphasis added) I do not know their pain (use a "criterion of identity" #288), I reject them, or I help them--as it were, beyond knowledge (Emerson's reliance, Nietzsche's human). This is the essence of experience/sensation. ( @TheMadFool ) The picture of a word-referent mistakes this limitation of knowledge as the vision that no one could know me (my "sensation"/"experience"); that I am essentially, always unique/special--that the only failure/solution is a matter of epistemology.
Quoting hanaH
With acknowledging the possibility of multiple uses/senses in a concept (apart even from one context), Witt's claim is not one theory (as if, among others) of the framework of sensations/experience; it is a universal claim on all of us, for all of us to see and accept. The point is there are different frameworks (grammar) for each different concept: thinking, reading, rule-following, sensations, justification, etc.
Indeed. I would t say Antony is borrowing Witt for some side interest. He is putting forth an interpretation in which ‘therapy’ is absolutely central to ( although not the only thing) what Wittgenstein is doing. This is the reading of Wittgenstein I embrace alongside writers like G.P. Baker:
“ Baker's post-1990 ‘position’ is that Wittgenstein's method is radically therapeutic: therapeutic in that the aim is to relieve mental cramps brought about by being faced with a seemingly intractable philosophical problem; radically so in that how this aim is achieved is person relative, occasion sensitive and context dependent.”
We're on the same page there. That's part of why I give the reference theory hell.
If our marks and noises get their "meaning" from the world at large (something like the role they play in it as worldly objects among other worldly objects), then it should be no surprise that we don't "really" (exactly) know or control what we are talking about, anymore than a dog can give an exhaustive account of how the wagging of its tail will affect other dogs.
Quoting Olivier5
I agree that we are not transparent to ourselves, but I think that the beetle is typically understood to symbolize what we do have perfect access to. There's an old joke about atonal music: it's better than it sounds!
The crude view is something like box as 'pain' and beetle as pain itself, directly but privately experienced.
That's a reasonable assertion, but perhaps you'll agree that there's nothing final about those categories. Why not 23,546 categories? Why not a grammar for each word, for each finite sequence of words? Are you cutting nature at the joints here? Or is this just a handy improvised system, heuristic and traditional?
As I see it, the map will never do justice to the teeming territory. The world which includes, among so many other things, almost 8 billion brains...is not going to be mapped or mastered in detail by any single brain. Or with a finite string of words.
I don’t think Witt ( or Antony) is interested in cutting nature at its joints. This notion of nature implies an extant empirical realm that we ‘map’. It s a representational approach to determining sense.
But for Witt lamguage isnt about adequating one’s understanding to a world or ‘territory’ by mapping it , but about producing or enacting a world.
Sure. We have a rich 'mentalistic' vocabulary, which we use for such things all the time. The question is whether animals coordinate their behavior 'materially' or by all gazing on the same immaterial referent, with the same immaterial organ. Do I know what 'pain' means because of some private experience? Or because my body has been trained by the bodies of those around me in the world we share to react to and employ the token in multifarious ways?
My point was that there's nothing magical or necessary about our current categories. We have the signs 'reading', 'thinking', and so on, each with their own grammar, we might say. That's still a massive simplification (which we can't avoid but which we can keep in mind.) 'Rules' are discovered out there in the world by looking. It's not chess but sociology, linguistics.
No, but a dog has expectations of what will ensue when it barks in a particular way or gestures with its paw.
We know what we are talking about to the same extent that we know what any of our behavior is about. Aboutness is presupposed by the normative functioning of a self-organizing system. We always behave into our world on the basis of ongoing concerns , aims and goals. That makes us sense-making creatures. Sense-makers are anticipative, not simply reactive. This is what makes the world recognizable to us, and means that grunts barks and hisses are motivated and emerge out of a background context of anticipations.
Funny that you should say that when I've been comparing our speech to barks, the movements of limbs, and so on. Mouths shake the air, hands smear liquids on solids or scrape shapes in stone. Cloth is sewn so that it can be waved prominently, guns are fired to start a race.
I don’t think rules are discovered out there in the world. They are enacted. This is a different concept.
:up:
I agree, but who said we were merely reactive?
What is the genesis of these associations? Did these events just so happen to be fortuitously paired in temporal proximity at one point and then this created an association between the two? Or was there a pre-wired inherited association in some cases?
You are just telling me what I've been saying, that meaning is in the 'material' world. What people call 'rules' aren't binding but merely low-resolution descriptions of social life.
Grammar is beat and tickled into us.
I don't pretend to deduce the details from what's merely a general approach to the problem of meaning. I'd like to read more about biosemiotics. I suspect that something like a continuum makes the most sense here.
Earlier I mentioned caloric efficiency. It makes sense that an animal would use a "cheap" motion to coordinate its behavior if possible (like shaping the air as it exhales anyway.)
OK, perhaps, but what's the status of that sentence? Are you not describing how one uses 'rules'? Or something like that?
Also I think rules can function at least as the ideal description of a game. Hide & seek, chess.
think I recognize some Deleuzian language, although I may just be reading that in.
I've read some Peirce, and he is indeed an influence.
Never got that deep into Deleuze but wet my toes once.
Maybe, but not excluding normativity. It's a reminder, but a reminder from one member of our speech community to another. If description alone is not enough for you to know what such a reminder means, how you should respond, or what you should do next, then we have a problem
I'm not sure what I said that you took as "final" (what the implications are in saying that); as you point out in #23--Witt would say endless; that our lives change. I would also say, not complete; as there are further contexts for concepts to be extended into.
Quoting hanaH
As part of dismantling the word--internal-referent picture, Witt can be seen as offering a picture of word-public "form of life" or "language game", but this is merely to substitute one "meaning" for another, when he is dismantling the entire picture/theorizing about meaning.
One problem is that because Witt is using an investigation of our history of expressions as data to formulate claims about the workings of each concept, that he is taken to be always (or only) discussing language/meaning. But the imagined gap between an expression and the world is in order to insert theoretical order (rationality, certainty) and/or account for our failings in communication, description, agreement. We abandon our ordinary criteria for our concepts (the limited, fallible nature of moral claims say) and picture a universalized split between our language and the world. But a concept is a living thing, embedded with the history of our interests, criteria for judging, identity, etc. To say "I apologize" is to apologize; our expressions are normative to the extent our lives are. Yes, there are mistakes, lies, empty words, descriptions that fall short, but that is why there are excuses, the endless depth of language; it is not that our words systematically fail us as much as we fail them, to continue to be responsible for them, answer to make ourselves intelligible.
:up:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Perhaps you'll agree that that anyone can emphasize the destructive or constructive mode in Wittgenstein and cherrypick quotes to that purpose. Folks will connect the dots he left behind differently.
I found this one earlier, which happens to fit my focus lately.
[quote = OC]
475. I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but
not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state...Language did not emerge from some kind of
ratiocination.
[/quote]
I also like this one.
As in an animal, you or me, being trained to look to the right when we see this token. Mommy can't see the magic meaning of the arrow flashing or not flashing in our developing mind. She can react to whether we do or do not turn our head.
We can apply this kind of demystification to "God" and "truth" and so on.
I am not describing the periphery of Witt's investigation--just deeper into it, farther along. If we stop at the first idea we hear that we feel we understand, isn't that just to take the text on our terms? for our interests? I am willing to respond to and back up my reading and explain its relationship to what I take as superficial grasping at the text to solve the project of everything at once.
As I responded to @hanaH, the goal of Philosophical Investigations was to understand our desire for seeing everything in one way (word-object). This is not the "therapy" of us (our "mental cramps"--or language's bewitchingness), it is the identification of how and thus why we insist on seeing everything the same way: our desire for the criteria of certainty, universality, pre-determined, strictly logical, etc. There is no "cure" for this temptation, and thus the repeated methodology applied across multiple examples--games, rule-following, sensations, pain, aspects, etc.--pointing out the variety of our overlooked ordinary criteria, the categorical logic of the conditions, possibilities, and structure (grammar) of our lives. This doesn't fit the desire for a generalized theory of meaning to end skepticism? the examples don't show that rules, or knowledge, are the nature and solution of all our problems? huh? wonder why?
I meant to say ‘I WOULDNT SAY’
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Antony Nickles
That wasn’t my phrasing , but from Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read.
We don't learn how to employ tokens, or use words (I don't teach you all the things to say). There is our whole human life with pain, part of the essence of which is that we do not "know" pain, we have it (or we suppress it). It may be meaningful because it is mine--I can keep it to myself (torture myself with it, pity myself because of it), or I can express it (to try to have it attended to, to atone for what pains me, simply for the catharsis of expressing it, as in releasing it). We "learn" all of these things as it were by osmosis, "trained" as you say, but this is not in "reacting" or "employing" tokens, but in taking in the "multifarious ways" themselves (the other way around in that sense).
Well thank you for that. I still don't understand the "therapy" label--I mean I barely get what it is actually supposed to mean, but I do see it as a condescending, dismissive term and also don't see how my reading has anything to do with that interpretation, as I sorta see it.
You may not have taught me all the things to say, but some person or people did. “It takes a village.” Or, at least, they taught me up to the point where “Now I know how to go on”.
That sounds like the goal of a psychologist. 'If you want to know why the word-object thing was so cool back in the way, read PI.' Does that sound right?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Stuff like this:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Not saying it's bad.
:up:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#PhilLangLangThouMean
I think this needs to be updated so that we take a detour around "sensation" and think instead of uncontroversial worldly objects. In epistemological terms, that's uncontroversial assertions (the temperature read 93°, the witness said "I shot the fucker.") Empiricism shouldn't base itself on (private) sensation, which leads to solipsistic games, but start immediately in 'language."
Then 'conceptualization is intimately bound up with[s](perceptual and affective) sensation.[/s]' bodies interacting in/with a world. 'Sensation' points outside of the body. That's what it gets right. We know what it gets wrong. It can be read as an inarticulate shorthand for life in the world.
If that is to say people have different interests in the work, I agree, though Heidegger would suggest setting that aside and letting the object approach on its terms (What is Called Thinking?). I also agree there is destruction and construction, though I might call it diagnosis (of our desire for certainty) and uncovering (our ordinary criteria from behind that need).
Though I believe it is very possible (even tempting) to take quotes out of context and draw a conclusion along our own lines, I don't believe Witt left simply "dots", and I've worked very hard to see from each passage to an overall context. I would think that is the goal. That's not to say Witt only had one point, but that the themes are all related and more open-ended than people see who just want a novel solution or conclusion to a problem, instead of a philosophical revolution.
So it is false that only the meaning can make the arrow point, as it takes a person to apply the arrow as "pointing", but what is true? and about which sentence?
Quoting hanaH
This may seem minor, but aren't we indoctrinated in pointing? and then learn that we can apply that in the case of this sign? (Couldn't we take it as the start of a drawing of weapon? be confused as to what 1992 DOS emoji this was supposed to be?); that there is something important about application/employment (given the number of index references). "The meaning of the brackets lies in the technique of applying them." (#557) I only say this rhetorically (not for an answer) as this is not under discussion here, but also I have not reviewed all the references.
Witt only saw meaning as representational in the Tractatus; so he wrote the PI to figure out how and why he was locked into that way of thinking. It's an investigation into the human condition--the constant threat of skepticism and the effect on our thinking in reaction to it. This issue has affected philosophy from the start and is a continuing shortcoming of humans in everyday life. Labeling this as psychology is the same fear that causes philosophy to want to work outside the involvement of the human.
Quoting hanaH
I get that it is a tad poetic, but that is not just stylistic, those are grammatical claims, logical claims as it were--I'm saying that's the way our relationship to our expressions works. I make them in all seriousness, and to take them as merely therapeutic seems trivializing.
I'd say that we are trained to respond to -----> by looking to the right and <------ by looking to the left. arrows.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, in my view. A mistake is always possible, and we have all kinds of signs for dealing with an initial failure of signification.
Quoting Antony Nickles
This 'technique of applying them' is just what I'm trying to cash out in terms of social organisms in an environment. Conversation, by mouth or keyboard, is still physical, organic, ..the contraction of muscles, the disturbance of a medium. What role does this or that token play in the world, as a type of (material) object? The temptation toward the immaterial is understandable. A token is (as I mean it) an equivalence class of actual marks and/or sounds. Our nervous systems ignore irrelevant differences.
Is skepticism really such a threat?
I think there's a gap between the game of extreme skepticism (it's fun to play both sides) and a more serious and interesting attempt to pin down what it means to be rational or scientific. For instance, some have earnestly began with sensation, others with infinitely intimate ideas ...both constructing the world as we know, if possible, from there. Others (myself lately) take the ordinary world ('material') shared with other humans and all the rest as given, and derive "ideas" and "sensations" from that.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Your good at what you do, in my book. The difference is focus, emotional tone. The issue I'm focused on is relatively dry. How do words get their meanings? Or, better perhaps, what constrains any reasonable theory about how words get their meanings? I take for granted bodies in nature that need one another and that don't get to cheat by using ESP. Then we have beetles in box and inverted color-qualia spectra to show us what doesn't make sense.
This is related to spiritual issues such as WTF do or even can people mean by 'God'?
I'm not anti-psychology, by the way. I just read you as focusing on the psychological, as you do in the passage above.
It's not unreasonable to suspect fear or distaste in the 'positivist.' And the same charge can be leveled by the 'positivist' against the 'sentimentalist' or the 'believer.'
They might all be right.
A torch in the darkness, a 'lie' to light the chaos.
If philosophy provides a theory of science, and then tries to, I don't know, 'measure up' to that theory, then philosophy is trying to meet a standard it has set itself.
If philosophy attempts to become more rational, does that mean that it accepts, from outside itself, a standard of rationality that it tries to meet, or, as above, does it set the standard itself?
And what discipline is responsible for holding philosophy to this standard, for measuring its progress, for determining 'how rational' it is? Is that, again, philosophy itself?
Excellent questions!
Let me play with them a bit.
If philosophy provides a theory of [s]science[/s] rationality, and then tries to, I don't know, 'measure up' to that theory, then philosophy is trying to meet a standard it has set itself.
If [s]philosophy[/s] humanity attempts to become more rational, does that mean that it accepts, from outside itself, a standard of rationality that it tries to meet, or, as above, does it set the standard itself?
And what discipline is responsible for holding [s]philosophy[/s] humanity to this standard, for measuring its progress, for determining 'how rational' it is? Is that, again, [s]philosophy[/s] humanity itself?
How does a moonwalking monkey evolve from a germ?
Do we need a God to get better at thinking, better at living? We can think of the species and its durable cultural artifacts (dusty old books, skyscrapers, seeds) as an old organism still increasing in power.
How can it do so? By the light of what superior entity?
Is moral progress possible? Intellectual progress?
:ok:
1. Yes, I agree. We can't talk about so-called private experiences can either be considered a limitation of language itself or that the sign-referent sense of meaning falls short of the mark.
2. I'm at a loss as to what exactly could be considered private experiences. Wittgenstein seems to have zeroed in on emotions (pain). Pain, it seems, has external/observable/public correlates ( :cry: :grimace: ) but then, if Wittgenstein is right, it must have a private component. What is it? The quality of pain? There's a certain character pain has that I can't put into words. Qualia? Is this exactly what Wittgenstein is referring to? The fact that I can't seem to speak/write about qualia is proof enough, won't you agree?, that Wittgenstein hit the bullseye - language is social in the sense it's domain is restricted to the public.
What's ironic is that there are (exclusively) private experiences has now become public knowledge. Now we can talk about it!
About qualia
We have a word viz. "qualia" that's now entered the social dimension. It refers to private experiences.
Can we now claim that language has made its first tentative steps into our private worlds which until now had been hidden and beyond the reach of language?
Yes and No.
Yes because "qualia" does mean something, it refers to the ineffable, the inexpressible. We can now have a intelligible conversation about our private experiences.
No because "qualia" doesn't tell us what these private experiences actually are. It's kinda like knowing that a person A has something they call a beetle and person B also has something they call a beetle. So we know there's something (qualia) but what that somethong really is is still hidden.
I am aware of an English tradition criticizing correspondance but it never really went anywhere, from what I know, never crossed the channel in particular.
A few Cambridgeans and Oxfordians notwithstanding, words do refer to something, otherwise we would have no use for them whatsoever. They do NOT usually refer directly to particular objects but they refer to categories or sets of things. Like an "elephant" is (in first, literal meaning) a member of a certain mammal species. To my knowledge this is the current scientific (linguistics) view, it's not pre-scientific at all.
Of course the word "elephant" can be used for many other things, such as naming a London neighborhood, symbolising the Republican party in the US etc. Concepts have great plasticity.
Quoting hanaH
What is so shocking or strange about a private experience? It's what our life is made of. In addition, intimate thoughts, feelings and perceptions are the basis for all human knowledge. Discard them, and philosophy and science disappear. Witt should have read Husserl a little more. It would have grounded him better.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well... maybe you just mean talking about Witt's attempt to imagine an experience that I would know but that no one else could (that being the made-up quality/criteria of "private"), but the takeaway is not: that we do have personal experiences but that language just can't reach them, or that we have no experience that is not public. The point is that being known is not how our experience works--we can not get between a sensation and its expression for there to be the opportunity for knowledge (#245). That is not to say we can't talk about it, but only that we express our experience/sensations (even to ourselves, or repress them).
Quoting TheMadFool
Witt's scenario is an imagined one (like the builders), so we can release ourselves from the Gordian knot of picturing an experience that is private in the way Witt was attempting. Again the lesson is not that we do or do not have our own experiences. As I quoted Witt earlier (#243), our ordinary criteria for a private experience is just something personal, secret: a sunset, a trauma, what I focused on in seeing a movie. And we are able to draw out (express, "give voice to" Witt says) and discuss our inner experiences (or hide/repress them).
Quoting TheMadFool
Well expressions of pain of course can be more than words (thus, opera). In imagining a quality (a thing? a referent?) we are here, again, searching for knowledge of something certain, of ourselves, for the other's reaction to us. The feeling that pain is inexpressible is the fact that the other may reject my expression of pain, that I may be alone with my pain.
Quoting TheMadFool
The other part of retaining something of pain within me is that I can remain unknown, untouchable, not responsible, special without having done anything, a unique person without differentiating myself.
Quoting TheMadFool
Irony aside, the idea of "qualia" still imagines our experience as a thing (the MacGuffan of neuroscience); it is a noun (you even have a word to refer to it)--we can "know" a thing (or can not!). Ineffable is an adjective as a qualification of our experience--too much to be expressed; not as if words leave some "thing" left over, but that our experience overflows our words.
Quoting TheMadFool
In fact, we could simply say, "words can not express", "it's just a sense of awe", "I don't know what to say except I feel alive". These are not to tell us (know) anything about our experience, but express that there is nothing to be told (even when singing, crying, or violence can't).
Indeed. Something to ponder upon.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Right!Quoting Antony Nickles
Yep.
Quoting Antony Nickles
A way of looking at it, yes.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I guess so. All words refer to our experiences. The converse, it appears, isn't true.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Spot on!
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.[/quote]
:zip:
I have nothing to say vs. I have something to say but I can't find the words. A person with a limited or no vocab is very much like a person who's a master wordsmith trying to express that which is essentially inexpressible. Take a rock, it has nothing to say, it remains silent. Take a person, has something to say but can't:
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.[/quote]
Our 'private worlds' are what people talk about all the time, what poetry and literature have been about for several thousands years. I will never understand expressions of stupor or bewilderment at the most familiar stuff of all: our own thoughts. How alienated from oneself can one pretend to be?
I assumed you were comfortable with the therapy’ label because it seems to have been embraced by a community of Wittgenstein interpreters that I associate with your approach.
“ The central claim of ? the so called therapeutic turn of Wittgenstein, articulated by Stanley Cavell (1979), Cora Diamond (1991) and James Conant (1991), consists in finding Wittgenstein’s originality not so much in his philosophical arguments but – performatively – in the effects his philosophy is supposed to have on its readers. Not by chance Cavell calls philosophy “education for grown ups”, an activity aiming not at growth but at change or transformation (1979, p. 125).”
“The New Wittgenstein (2000) is a book containing a family of interpretations of the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In particular, those associated with this interpretation, such as Cora Diamond, Alice Crary, and James F. Conant, understand Wittgenstein to have avoided putting forth a "positive" metaphysical program, and understand him to be advocating philosophy as a form of "therapy." Under this interpretation, Wittgenstein's program is dominated by the idea that philosophical problems are symptoms of illusions or "bewitchments by language," and that attempts at a "narrow" solution to philosophical problems, that do not take into account larger questions of how the questioner conducts his life, interacts with other people, and uses language generally, are doomed to failure.”
I only meant ‘therapy’ in the way that it is being used by these writers. Would you agree that in their hands it is not meant as condescending and dismissive?
But discuss with the ignorant as with the wise
The limits of art cannot be delivered
There is no artist whose talent is fulfilled
Fine words are more sought after than greenstone
But can be found with the women at the grindstone
-- The Teaching of Ptahhotep
Attributed to the Vizier Ptahhotep who lived around 2375–2350 BC, the Instructions or Teaching of Ptahhotep are didactic wisdom literature belonging to the genre of sebayt (teachings).
Self-deception is a real possibility. As we are to ourselves is either incoherent (private language argument) or incoherent (beetle-in-the-box).
Don't ask me. I'm just following the herd.
Just because "a community of Wittgenstein interpreters" disagree with what it means for traditional answers to skepticism, doesn't mean they can say that Witt, or Cavell, are outside the analytical tradition and not using "philosophical argument" or that their work is merely "performative".
Quoting Joshs
It's bald-face condescension, attempting to pigeon-hole and minimize the impact of the PI (it's not "linguistic" either; it's revolutionary). I think the desire to misinterpret this work comes from a modern (and old) philosophical desire that it is better if philosophy doesn't involve humans at all; that it is supposed to work out like math or science, were it doesn't matter who is doing it. But philosophy from Plato on has been to change the way we think and to become a better more insightful version of ourselves. There is a reason we see language and the world the way we do in the Tractatus and the opening quote, and the PI is an examination of how and why we get there (over and over) and how we work our way out (in each case); it's not by "therapy", it's a method of thinking and is about knowledge and truth.
I can't help but think we've lost the thread here, because the point of PI is that the conclusion of the Tractatus was wrong. We can talk about all kinds of things (just not when we first require that the outcome be certain). Just because there are times when we feel like we can't put an experience into words does not mean that we must be silent. We can try again, we can bring someone along with us as far as we can (we are not alone); and those examples above were things we can actually say--something that expresses our "ineffable" experience. The fact we do not want to accept that as enough is because we want there to be some thing that is unique and special about us, but there very well may not be. You may not exist if you are a ghost of yourself, one of the herd, if everything you say is propaganda, quotation---you can be empty inside. This is the desperation of the person who wants to "strike himself on the breast and say: 'But surely another person can’t have this pain!' " (Witt, PI, #253) It is this fear that compels the idea that there must be a private experience in the sense Witt explored.
There must be private experiences?
Wittgenstein himself was incoherent, from what I can tell, so he can't help you out.
So it seems, so it seems.
The fear of being empty, not unique, creates the idea there must be some "thing" beyond language which is mine, that I can know. Now it's not that there is nothing there, it's just that experience isn't known, it is expressed or denied (by me)' it's accepted or rejected by you. So to say "It was amazing" is to express our ineffable experience (however poorly). So there are personal experiences but they don't work the way Witt tried to imagine (as the skeptic would like them to).
My fear = my expression of fear
I don't recall ever expressing a fear of being empty. I don't think I ever have. According to you, if I don't express this fear, I don't have this fear.
So I think you'll need some other explanation for my testimony that I have experiences.
Maybe it's just that I do have experiences that I tell no one about. I do, actually. Sometimes I do tell people about what I've experienced, so it's not private in the sense Witt uses in the PLA.
Possible but not necessary.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Quoting Antony Nickles
Is your critique based on a thoroughgoing knowledge of the work of the ‘Néw Wittgensteinian’ authors or is this a knee-jerk reaction to the blurb I quoted?
James Conant is one of those ‘therapeutic’ Wittgensteinians. Do you know about his background? He started out in that milieu in Boston where he was able to shape his view of Witt through interactions with Putnam, Kuhn and Cavell. Later he moved to Pittsburgh and furthe refined his thinking through study with McDowell. I think at least his work on Witt deserves more nuanced treatment than you have given. My guess Cavell would be horrified by your response to Conant, Diamond et al. But then they are academics who respect each others’ work and appreciate the original insights each brings to their reading of Witt.
You’re going to have to help me out here. I’m trying to figure out who to turn to ( other than Cavell) for a reliable and faithful interpretation of the later Wittgenstein. I am convinced that Peter Hacker and Ryle are not good candidates. I am impressed with Phil Hutchinson , but have not read any of the ‘New Wittgensteinians ’ (Diamond, Cray, Conant). So tell me, who is on your list of best Wittgenstein interpreters , other than yourself and Cavell. You’re put yourself a bit out on the limb if it’s just you, Austin, Witt and Cavell , but that can be a positive. Maybe your reading really is better than every other living interpreter. But we won’t k ow that without engaging in more detail with those secondary sources.
BTW, I would think you would consider it a sign of philosophical enlightenment to be outside the analytic tradition. What exactly do you consider worth preserving within the analytic tradition? Maybe you could throw in a few names from analytic philosophy who you admire ( other than Austin. I suppose there’s McDowell and Putnam too ). Conant certainly respects these figures.
No, what Witt is saying is that the way sensations/emotions/experience work, their grammar, is that they are not known, they are expressed, or not (suppressed, repressed, kept secret), as much to ourselves as anyone else.
Quoting frank
Yes you do have experiences; sometimes you tell no one about them, sometimes you do; sometimes you can't even tell yourself.
Of course I don't know to what you are referring that you think is not necessary, but the way I read Witt he is necessarily, grammatically, claiming that the way sensation works is that it is expressed, not known--that is its structure. Where concepts have certain possibilities (uses), and categorical conditions, that pain is expressed (or repressed) is a fundamental ingredient of our lives that differentiates sensations from knowing how gravity works or knowing the structural makeup of the brain's effect on our emotions.
When I have a headache, I know I have a headache.
In what context would we say "I know I have a headache."? Maybe when you've made it aware to me that you have a headache, then, when I see you a little while later and you have an ice pack on your knee, and I point to your head and shrug, saying "Don't you have a headache?", you might look at me (like I'm an idiot) and say "I know I have a headache." -- but this is in the sense of "Duh, I know", as in the use (grammatical category) of: I am aware. The reason we have to twist ourselves in knots to even get that, as Witt would say, is that I do not "know" pain; I have it. This is the meaning of pain (it is meaningful because it is mine). I am the one that owns it, even when we do not know it--which is also in the sense of: are not aware of it, just, to myself---say when we have a headache but we forget (which is a refutation if the above was a claim to a proposed statement about the way pain works). But there is also the fact that sometimes I can not hide my pain; I am expressed outside the control of the conveying (or secreting) of knowledge. There is no place for knowledge in the occurrence to us of pain (say, different than the knowledge of watching an opportunity slip away). "How can I even attempt to interpose language between the expression of pain and the pain?" Witt PI, #245. Between the event of the expression of pain and the meaningfulness of my having it.
There are other uses of "I know" (I acknowledge your pain; I know my way around; I know something is a lie (for I know the truth!)). But there is a sense in which philosophers would like to know sensations, but the criteria of continuous, exacting, certain, and immediate, do not apply to how, say, pain works. Philosophy imposes those as the requirement for knowledge from its other uses in science and, to say it again, in the picture of an object, a referent; as if the physiology of pain is the structure of how we relate to pain.
But the kind of knowledge philosophy has typically wanted from sensation and experience is not how pain works. And the best way to try to show that is to give the example that our pain is expressed, not "known" (expression is the mechanics of it). I can talk about what I know about my pain: I can give a description (even poorly), I can isolate it (even x-ray it, sorta), but that, fundamentally, it is ours to express--to cry out about (or not) #244--to clarify or hide; to relive, or try to forget. This structure is the essence of our experience and sensations, the most important part about them, as opposed to what is essential to making excuses, or doing physical science.
I don't think he was saying you don't know what you're feeling.
Err... TPF? (considering @TheMadFool just said "I know I have a headache" right here...)
On Certainty, §467: "I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this; and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.'"
I found that language; that's an intro Crary did for a book of essays I have that is just new authors saying different stuff--I'm not sure that wiki-author read more than the intro (what?!). I think what Crary, at least, is referring to is that Witt is pointing out how philosophy goes wrong, including his, and he is trying to show how philosophy can get back on track (in each of the different examples--as Austin did with Ayer) and what we learned from that. The people minimizing the impact just don't feel taken on directly, but that's because those philosophies were not so much "wrong" as entirely misguided (by themselves, it turns out), lacking awareness, failing to see that their want for a certain answer pushes them into errors in their thinking. We used to say: how can we win, they're not even playing hockey. They're so fundamentally wrong Witt (apart from Austin) goes back to: how and why do you think that? and there is something to learn in that; something substantive, corrective, but also game-changing, and so not just "therapeutic" as in dispelling an illusion or crazy thoughts or how ta talk good.
"I’m trying to figure out who to turn to (other than Cavell) for a reliable and faithful interpretation of the later Wittgenstein."
Well to me its more the method, so the people I like aren't necessarily writing on Witt as, from him into their own interests. But I liked some Malcolm, Wisdom, Mulhall is at least interesting; you might like Conant (Methods) from the little I've read, he seems concerned to address other readings of Witt. But I was trained in Ordinary Language Philosophy, and, apart from Witt and Austin, Cavell is the best at that and so at explaining Witt's methodology (The Availability of Later Witt). But I'm not sure it's a good idea to read commentators until you just find one you like. I'd slug it out on your own; this book, more than most, is important to work through than be told about.
Quoting Joshs
Well I see the good even in the partly broken, plus I don't quite buy the term itself, because if we're looking at what we say, we're looking at the world (just maybe not like Arendt, Foucault, Machiavelli, a lot of Aristotle). I'd start the ark with Plato, Marx, Locke, Hegel (to a point), Kant, Hume, Descartes, Emerson, Nietzsche, later Heidegger[/quote]
Good catch; that was a test to see if anyone was actually still reading--I only meant that in the sense of the recognition of pain; although Witt does touch on the grammar of our emotions, like sadness (p. 209), and he has a lot to say about feeling as a kind of implicit interpretation or impression.
I'm reading! :grin: I see what you're saying.
Well if that's not just facetious, it demonstrates Witt's point that we want to strip away any context and take a sentence in isolation to have met the standard we want for knowledge. Context is not simply the location where something is said; it is what is relevant to a sentence being one sense or another (or both). Basically, as flippantly, saying that, here--assuming it's trying to make a philosophical claim about knowledge and headaches--is wrong; it's applying the wrong sense of "know". Maybe it's better to ask what context would help us understand what sense of know this is?
Mostly, it's giving the concept know, no sense, as opposed to the wrong sense. What I mean is, it has no epistemological sense to say, "I know I have a headache."
My point was that the sentence was expressed in a certain context: that of a philosophical discussion on TPF. There is no need to look for another context in which it could possibly be said. It arose here and this is the context where it may be meaningful. Look at the post it was replying to. That should be context enough.
However the whole point of PI is to show how different things matter to us in different ways, leading to the various ways they work. What matters to us about pain is the fact of its being mine (having it) thus my announcement of it (and your acceptance or rejection of it) are its conditions, and not the conditions of knowledge.
Basically, epistimology is not the only way things make sense: are meaningful, have conditions, are judged by criteria, have identity, etc. The PI is showing that our relation to the world is not always epistemological (you're missing the third act where all the fun happens).
Of course "...epistemology is not the only way things make sense: are meaningful, [etc]," and I would never imply this. The point was, you don't know you're in pain in an epistemological sense, with emphasis on knowing. You might use know in a way that's not epistemological, as @StreetlightX pointed out above. So, when I say it has no sense, one can see this by pointing out the negation of the sentence, "I know I'm in pain," which must be seen juxtaposed against the statement "I don't know I'm in pain." Now if you want to say it has sense in other non-epistemological ways, that's fine, but that's not my point. Hope this clears up my point.
But it's a little more complicated than that. Was it said as a philosophical conclusion, or as an example of the sort of thing someone might say, when not doing philosophy, that seems to make perfect sense? (Roughly, was it theory or data?) If it's a bit of philosophy, are any of the words there used in a special technical sense that it is not what people ordinarily have in mind when they use those words? And if that's the case, how to connect that usage to ordinary usage, so that our philosophical discussion is relevant?
I don't think any of that has anything to do with Wittgenstein, but with philosophical discussion being unavoidably embedded in ordinary discussion, in the life of a language that philosophy relies on but did not invent.
Why do we need the term ‘epistemology’ at all
after Wittgenstein? What is it supposed to do? What is an ‘epistemological sense’? Maybe you could
clarify. Most of the philosophy I read unravels
the presuppositions behind it.
Take Rorty , for instance:
“Epistemology, in Rorty’s account, is wedded to a picture of mind’s structure working on empirical content to produce in itself items – thoughts, representations – which, when things go well, correctly mirror reality. To loosen the grip of this picture on our thinking is to challenge the idea that epistemology – whether traditional Cartesian or 20th century linguistic – is the essence of philosophy.”( Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
“Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call ‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein” (PMN, 174).
“In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which “the Relativist” keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try (TP, 57).“
Or before! John Cook Wilson said, back in the previous twenties, that to him the phrase "theory of knowledge" looked like a fallacy.
Confirming for someone else questioning why it seems you're not aware you have a headache (your example basically).
Quoting StreetlightX
That pain works differently than emperical knowledge; it is the sense of know as acknowledge--to myself, by others, etc.
Of course. All I was adding is that is only half the battle; Witt goes on to show a legitimate logic of pain in the alternative; in what sense I know my pain (in acknowledging it, or rejecting it--and yours). That the story does not end in the rubble but with remembering our ordinary criteria for judging pain (awareness, attention, isolation, etc.)--the essence of sensation.
It was data. TMF was only stating the obvious. "Having a headache" means "feeling pain in one's head". You cannot feel something like pain in your head and not know that you feel it.
He said so in a certain context, in response to a post pretending (absurdly) that "sensation is expressed, not known". And it made perfect sense in this context to retort: "when I have a headache, I know I have it".
To ask in response: "in what context would you say that?" appeared to me a disingenuous attempt to change the conversation, to escape the actual context of the sentence, to avoid having to face the sentence itself, because it is obviously true.
'Forgetting a headache' sounds an awful lot like not having a headache. How do you forget a headache? Is it the same as forgetting where I put the cup yesterday? I can imagine: "my headache was alot less intense just now", or the use of "I forgot I have a headache" to approximate the former. The grammar of 'forgetting' is not quite right.
Quoting Antony Nickles
That is not my example. There is no one that would question 'why it seems you're not aware you have a headache' - as if they knew better than you. At best, they might say, 'Don't you have a headache? Why are you exerting yourself like that?", or something similar.
--
Cavell: "There is nothing we cannot say. That doesn't mean that we can say everything; there is no "everything" to be said. There is nothing we cannot know. That does not mean we can know everything; there is no everything, no totality of facts or things, to be known. ... If we say the philosopher has been "misled by grammar'', we must not suppose that this means he has been led to say the wrong thing - as though there was a right thing all prepared for him which he missed".
I get that. To you it's like answering "Why didn't you do the dishes?" with "Why are you trying to make me feel bad?" You see it as a rhetorical move to avoid engaging with the literal meaning of the sentence and either agreeing or disagreeing that it is true.
That concern is not irrelevant to the discussion, but it kinda leads everywhere. We are right on top of issues surrounding the slogan "meaning is use", so I'm not going to try to -- that is, I'm not posting any of the lengthy responses I've written where I try to -- wrap it all up definitively.
It's a valid question, and it is presumably close to why @TheMadFool started this discussion.
I agree that the sense of forgetting associated with awareness is maybe not the first sense one would think of (that I should have thought of a better word), and that it is complicated with more possibilities to sort out than needed; a simpler way to put it would have been I got lost in doing something else and wasn't paying attention to my pain for a bit (I would say that is a sense of forgetting though). Also, the example of pain is used for the best-case scenario of sensation so that Witt could understand: "if we can't know our !pain!, than what sensation can we know [be certain about]?"; so we might more easily imagine my not being aware for a while of the sensation of the weight on my leg of someone resting against it on a couch while we watch TV, until it even falls asleep, at which point I can't feel it.
Bad example aside, the point is what is meaningful about pain, what is its important grammar (its essence @TheMadFool) is that the sensation is mine. Not in that only I can know it, but that it is me who owns it. That you do not "know" my pain (in the true/false/referent; of the empirical sense--though that is possible, it does not apply here), that the expression of my pain, my sensation, my experience, makes a claim on you--I am accepted in your acknowledgement of them; if my expressions are ignored, I am rejected, alone with the lack of expression to others. That my "knowledge" of my pain is just in knowledge's sense of my awareness of it, consciousness of it, in not repressing it, as a trauma.
"Questioning why it seems you're not aware you have a headache (your example basically)."
— Antony Nickles
That is not my example.[/quote]
It appears I edited after posting it. It did occur to me that there might be something different that you were pointing out, and I was going to say "similar" but then I got lazy as I would have to say how, and how dissimilar, and I passed it off that you'd get what way I meant, but let's see if there is a distinction that helps.
What I probably should have ended up with was this: "[My] confirming for someone else [who is] questioning [me as to] why it seems I [am] not aware [I] have a headache".
Of course maybe this is not even an accurate summary of my original full example, which was:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Quoting StreetlightX
Gotten to this point I think I would claim that the use of your: "Don't you have a headache? Why are you exerting yourself like that?" is actually the same as my: "Don't you have a headache?" [Why do you have the icepack on your knee?"] And by "same" I'm saying in the same parts that matter--essentially the identical use, as your pain and my pain identically (essentially--in their essence), if we accept they are.
Quoting StreetlightX
And maybe this was before my post about that.
Quoting Olivier5.
TMF: "Obvious", "perfect sense".
Mine: "pretending", "absurd", "disingenuous"
Succinct. TMF's statement does not need a context--that's been the point (above). Every word has a meaning, so no context is needed and any usual criteria and conditions (as that pain is expressed, accepted) can be ignored and a requirement of certainty be imposed, which creates a thing to know, out of our fear and desire of our part in the risk of expression and yet the fear of being known. This is for you to either see for yourself--which you could/might if you try--or you need a legitimate alternate explanation of how this is not the case that takes into consideration the evidence I have presented and the claim I have made. And also what would be considered a "context" for his statement. The game is the game.
Quoting Antony Nickles
1. I'm experiencing this particularly unpleasant throbbing sensation in my head, H.
2. H is, from my interaction with others, an ache.
Ergo,
3. I have a headache.
Statement 3 is a proposition, which in this case, is justfiably true. Therefore, I know I have a headache.
To the three of you addressed above
Tylenol? Aspirin? Pain medication. They seem to work for everybody as if everybody's pain is the same. The beetle, in this case at least, each of us has in our private box is identical...or not?
"When I have a headache, I know I have a headache."
@TheMadFool
I agree. There is something true in this expression, but it is not what this reaction to the skeptic wants it to be. I have not avoided the truth of what that is saying, I am showing a counter-example of when we have a sensation, but do not know it (when I do not attend to it, or repress it), but also to see the truth in the statement is that I know my experience and sensations when I take ownership of them, admit them (even to myself), stand ready to answer for them, as if some things are movements and some expressions, and the difference is in the fact that they express me, reveal me, make my pain open to be known, rejected or ridiculed. An injustice is to have one's expressions become only words of information--to pass over the person in pain to know the headache.
Except that you could be lying, and we may never know; or, we might see your pain, and reject it/you as dramatization, posturing. Or you have expressed your trauma to others, who acknowledge your pain by reacting to it (its claim on them), by accepting what is essential for you and I in your pain (within the conditions and criteria of sensation).
The difference in the picture of them (or me) taking my expression of pain as "justifiably true", is to want to skip over "me", and be able to know my pain as not only true but justified (certain), presumably by something other than my expression. But can I not postulate and accept that my pain is aching, throbbing, rather than, say, flashes of pain, for myself? what is it the "interaction" then does? Define, identify, locate? Until we (or even I) can do these things, am I not having the sensation of being, e.g., hot, though unclear to what extent, how close to heat exhaustion, and so whether I have to express my discomfort, which may be alarming, or taken as merely rude (depending on your acceptance or rejection). What is essential to pain about being true, and justifiable?
That is not what I wrote. Try and pay attention, I hate repeating myself. I said that TMF's comment already had a context: that in which the comment was made. There was no need to try and find another context for it, other than you wanting to avoid dealing with TMF's point, that feeling is knowing.
Very good point. If aspirin works against your headache and also against my headache, maybe yours and mine are not that different.
We can generalize this. Physical sensations (such as of headaches, or of red things) are mental events that have biological underpinnings with an evolutionary history. If aspirin works for you and me, it is supposedly because our biochemistries are quite similar. But if our sensations are based on our biology and if your and my biologies are very similar, then your sensations and mine (say, of something red) cannot be that different.
Why is context the point of debate here?
What does the context in which @TheMadFool made the statement 'add' in this case? You agree with TMF that when someone has a headache, they know it; would you disagree if he had said it in another context? I think what you're actually saying is that the truth of his claim is not dependent on the context in which it is uttered. It's just true.
If we're only interested in truth-value, then we're done with that claim. But if we hope to use that sentence to make a point, in a philosophical discussion, we do need a little more. It proposes a relation between pain and knowledge; we would like to know more about how that relation works.
Is the statement "when I have a headache, I know it" informative? If so, is it because our understanding of pain changes or is it our understanding of knowledge? (Scientific statements can work like this, I think.) If it's not informative, then what's it doing? How can an uninformative statement be useful when doing philosophy? (None of these questions are rhetorical, if that's not clear.)
I'm interested in how we affirm that we do know sensations (me mine, you mine). Of course there is not always a opposite direct negation of an epistemological claim. Maybe its just that we do not have a context in which to say: "I don't know I have a headache" (or is it: "I know I do not have a headache."? )Or could we say "I don't know I have a headache, it may be coming from my back injury", as if to express a lack of confidence it our ability to adequately express ourselves.
Quoting StreetlightX
That knowledge (of me) is acceptance of myself and in being able to admit it to others, as in: 'I know I have an addiction problem." I "know" this in the sense of know that I agree with your critique of me, the pain I was not dealing with but that you saw clearly on my face, or my lack of emotion, given my knowledge of your history, habits, and defenses.
I was not paraphrasing what you wrote. I am pointing out the lack of necessity of a context--all that is needed is a definition of pain and of knowledge; so I provided a counter-example. Do we feel the "context" of TMF's statement is complete? that the implications do not need to be spelled out more because of our ability to see that it could be a sense of knowledge?
Quoting Olivier5
The question is, what does that lead to? imply? do we understand how that is meaningful? I gave a counter-example of not knowing (being aware of) our pain. In response to another post above, I gave a reading of his claim as a grammatical claim about our ownership of our pain--our "having" it.
I will attempt to make another sense of it. TMF's claim could be in the sense that: when I have pain, I [can't help but] know that I have pain--I am pierced through with it. But we could simple ask, why does he feel he has to make this statement? (other than as a defense to what is perceived as my threat "But surely another person can't have THIS pain!" Witt, PI #253).
Is "When I have a headache, I know I have a headache" more than: when I am in pain, I know I am in pain. How is this not tautological? Couldn't "I am in pain" be all that is necessary? but what then do we "know"? Isn't "I am in pain" simply to say (to myself) I am aware that I am in pain? How else is this knowledge? What else is it knowledge of? As I said before, I can express my pain: "I have a scratchy throat" and you can say: "Oh, I know what that is like", and you can object "No, its not a a regular sore throat, it's like fire at the bottom", and then: "Oh, yeah that's happened to me." And you can begin again, but at what point is your knowledge not just your expression? In what context does something remain that you "know" apart from your expression? How is it more than your expression so as to be known?
But, yes, there is a truth to what TMF is saying. It is the expression of a desire for knowledge of a certain kind. I grant that it is not awareness, it is not repression, it is more than just working out my relationship to my pain and your reaction to it; it is the kind of knowledge that is important. None of my examples satisfy the criteria of a certain, constant, specific sensation. Before we even look at what my pain is, much less how pain is meaningful/how it works, we want to be sure I cannot fail to know myself, that there is something essential in my experience, so we manufacture a picture that can meet those requirements. This is the creation of Plato's forms, Descartes' god, Marx's proletariat, Ayer's statements that are only true or false, and positivism's correspondence picture of the world (in response to which Wittgenstein is trying to find out in the PI why we are driven to think this way). But the truth is there is no fact about my pain that will save me from the threat of being unknown, to ourselves, rejected by others. The response to this is the desperation of the interlocutor for knowledge to bridge that gap (to make our separateness a problem of knowledge), but all we have is the true yet empty statement that: "When I have a headache, I know I have a headache."@TheMadFool
Quoting Olivier5
I don't think name-calling got us anywhere previously, and I also think condescension is inappropriate. That's two.
I believe that Wittgenstein’s methods in the PI are important, and at least for me, I see him applying his methods in OC. He points out subtleties that are very difficult to apprehend (which is seen in various interpretations), and very difficult to use.
That said, what I’m trying to convey here is based on the conversation I had with @StreetlightX earlier in this thread.
Most of us agree that W. puts forward the idea that meaning is derived from use in social settings; which is the setting where rule-following takes place. So, use and rule-following are two sides of the same coin; and they form the basis of the language-game. The corresponding analogy is the game of chess, i.e., the pieces move, but they move in accordance with the rules of the game. If you’re not moving the pieces in accordance with the rules, then obviously you’re not playing the game. By analogy, if you’re not using your words in accord with the rules of the language-game, then you’re not doing anything with your words – your words lack meaning. And moreover, not just any use conveys meaning, which brings me back to what I said originally to TMF, viz., the notion of correct use, which seems to be trivial, as @StreetlightX pointed out, but is it?
Aren’t many of our arguments over the correct use of a word? Even those of us who claim to understand Wittgenstein, argue over what the meaning of knowledge is. In fact, philosophers have created all kinds of language-games to convey what the word means. However, language-games are only language-games if they are language-games proper. Not every use of a word that occurs in a social setting can be said to be a language-game. Again, the analogy being, just because you’re playing what looks like a game of chess, that doesn’t mean you are. However, this analogy breaks down (as many analogies do), because the rules of chess are very explicit, and easy to understand. But, understanding which language-games are THE language-games, i.e., those language-games that are language-games proper, is what’s most difficult to discern. In terms of our use of the word knowledge there are many different language-games that convey how the word know is correctly used. There is no one language-game that will give you the correct use, i.e., the essence of the word know. And, this corresponds to what W. said about the definition of the word game, i.e., there is no exact definition that will convey every possible use in our language.
The real question is, how does one know if a particular language-game is correct or not. It’s easy enough to say that meaning occurs in language-games, but there is no easy method for determining what looks like a language-game from that which IS a language-game. There has to be some criteria by which we judge correctness here. And yet, nothing is definitive. Obviously, some cases are clearly not being played by the rules of the game, but language is much more complicated. There doesn’t seem to be any firm ground that isn’t slippery in some setting.
It seems to me, to say, that X isn’t a language-game, so there is no correct use in this context, begs-the-question, doesn’t it? Maybe there just isn’t any precision here. It’s just like the command, “Stand here!” There is no X that marks the spot, but this response can’t be satisfying, at least not to me.
So, is there a problem in what Wittgenstein is saying? Are there insurmountable problems in what W. is trying to communicate? I’m not sure, just thinking out loud.
To the extent my pain goes away with the same medication, my pain is the same as your pain (as it were, essentially--a grammatical claim on the sense of "sameness" as it relates to sensations). They are the same pain but in two separate bodies (as color can be the same on two separate objects)--this is the fundamental fact that makes expression and acceptance the grammar of sensations.
I guess so but I have a feeling the word "grammar" has a rather unconventional meaning in your post and Wittgenstein's writings if he ever uses it.
Well yes, it's a technical term the way he uses it. He is getting at what expresses the essence of a particular "concept" (another technical term, but just a grouping of activities and things, like knowing, believing, pointing, playing chess, guessing at thoughts, following rules, etc.). And the essence of something is how we identify it from something else, what matters about it to us, how we judge whether it is done appropriately, how it can go wrong, etc. These are the ordinary criteria that are implicit in how things have come together in our lives over all this time, so they embody our interests and judgments and conditions--what is essential to us (our culture) about each thing. And each thing has a different grammar, even different senses of the same concept, like knowing--as being aware, acknowledging, knowing your way about, etc., which are really only able to be figured out in the context of something happening because of the possibilities of a concept, its "uses" (which is another term of Witt's, for saying in which sense).
Quoting Sam26
Words have definitions; sentences do not, concepts do not. How they are meaningful is not a matter of definition; that is not how they work. The fact that words can have definitions makes sentences like @TheMadFool's sentence about knowing a headache you have, appear to have (or be able to have) a clear meaning.
Quoting Sam26
The method Witt employs is to look at the history of our expressions (or imagined expressions) as data to make explicit a claim about the implications of what we say, how (in what way) they are meaningful to us when we imagine them in different contexts (their different uses, possibilities). The response to the skeptic is to remove any context, any criteria--Witt is bringing us back to our ordinary criteria.
Quoting Sam26
There are some things that can be done correctly: measuring, a wedding vow; there are also things where it might be overkill to say we do them "correctly": pointing, doubting; and there are things were "correctness" does not apply--where there is no measure of having met a predetermined standard (say, a rule) that would ensure it was right: a call for justice, artistic expression, the extension of a concept into a new context, etc. That is not to say these things do not have any criteria (anything essential about them), but just that correctness is not the way they work (though we desire to have meaning work one way--word here and essence there).
I believe we just disagree. I was making a different claim about "use" and showing the limitations of correctness (and rules; as if to say: there are all kinds of coins)--that rules are not essential to what is meaningful.
Quoting Sam26
If it is a use of a concept it is a meaningful sense of the concept. It is not my use (say, as if intended); a use is a possibility of the concept (although concepts may be extended into new contexts and then the use and the meaningfulness is of course tested--this is where our responsibility comes into play).
Quoting Sam26
As Witt will say about vagueness (~#98) and blurriness (#71), an imprecise expression can sometimes be better than an exact one. The unsatisfying part may be that rules do not apply to vague statements--that our desire for completeness and certainty is unfulfilled. But to say "Stand roughly there!" (#71) and point is all that is essential in my expressing this to you; it makes a distinction from down the street, and there is no reason (given the context Witt provides) to take this as anything except a use of a command--why "must" (#101) we have something exact? how exact (exactly) in this case?
Then it's no longer language language is it? This is one of my complaints against Wittgensteinization of philosophy. It seems to rely wholly or a lot on equiovaction. When I read the word "grammar" in Wittgenteinian philosophy I immediately think language but when I dig deeper it's got a technical meaning that has nothing to do with grammar in the linguistic sense. I fear the so-called linguistic turn, true to Wittgenstein's own pronouncements, is in name only.
That's a bit harsh. He changes the direction of philosophy and he isn't entitled to a term to generally refer to what takes him a whole book to set out. No forms? no thing-in-itself? no means of production?
Quoting TheMadFool
People calling it "the linguistic turn" is, of course, a misnomer (as if Austin just wanted to label "speech-acts"). He is not looking at language itself (although meaning is one of the concepts he investigates). He is looking at our expressions to learn about the structure of different things in our world. The claims he makes are based on the fact that our criteria and the conditions of our concepts are part of us, what we say reflects how we actually work in the world; when we ask: "What do we mean (imply) when we say 'I know I am in pain' " we learn about the implicit workings (essence) of our lives.
@Wayfarer
This, I suspect, is your interpretation. From what I read from SEP, no one seems to have a handle on what Wittgenstein really meant to convey.
Here's my own thoughts on the linguistic turn:
Firstly,
[quote=Some Guy]Don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.[/quote]
Philosophy is not about "moon", it's about moon.
Secondly,
mayhaps there is no moon or possibly the moon is irrelevant.
That Wittgenstein's philosophy has something to do with philosophy of mind (private language) is telling. For some reason I think of idealism.
You were proposing that sensations are felt, but not known, and he thought that it was incorrect, so he told you...
Quoting Antony Nickles
Before I express it.
Quoting Antony Nickles
What's leading somewhere though, is paying attention to what others are saying
Any positive theory proposes a certain explanation for why things and/or people behave the way they do (or the way we think they do). From Popper, such theories are almost always false, but that does not mean that they are useless. They help us think the world, even if imperfectly. Descartes' god and Marx's proletariat are useful concepts (or theories) inasmuch as they help us think metaphysically or politically, inasmuch as they solve certain problems.
So the biggest error in your para above is the one I bolded. We will always fail at understanding ourselves completely. But just because absolute certainty and truth is beyond grasp does not mean that we cannot approximate truth here or there.
That's the insight Popper gives, that lacks in the logical positivists and Wittgenstein: our knowledge is always approximative, tentative, will never be perfect, etc. We are not absolute gods, we are relativistic, approximative animals.
I don't think there is any authorization for this line of thought in Wittgenstein.
But is it a problem with Wittgenstein or with this way of reading him?
Nothing I can say will tell you anything so that you won't have to see for yourself.
Quoting TheMadFool
Can everyone please stop thinking philosophy is like facts; that we can just sum it up in a couple sentences and put it in a box and we've, what? learned something? have the popular answer? reached a consensus?
Is this the "context" in which he said it? Saying it is incorrect doesn't even say how it is incorrect, much less why this is the statement that he feels he needs to make, such as that, say, my categorizing our relationship with pain as expression takes away having something fixed and constant about ourselves.
Quoting Olivier5
The question was asked in response to a back-and-forth were I was expressing my pain and it was being accepted as known; the reason for the question was because if our language can reach any depth of pain, than there is nothing leftover to know except what is unexpressed. But to address your taking it as a point on a chronological line, yes, there is a time before which we express our pain to others (or ourselves), but this is just to say that we are aware of it, which we may not be.
Quoting Olivier5
You mean like saying "You were proposing that sensations are felt, but not known", when I said we have pain, we are aware of it (or repress it), we express it (or suppress it), and it is acknowledged by others (or rejected).
Quoting Olivier5
And here, I was not making a statement or a claim; I was describing why everyone has a desire for certainty--the formulation "we" and "I" is because we all fall prey to this temptation.
Quoting Olivier5
And this is the tipping point, when we realize we cannot know something with certainty, completely. We do not then abandon true/false statements, or rules, or knowledge, or word-referent and let the thing tell us how to grasp it with its ordinary criteria. We cling to the aspiration for the ideal but simply accept that we only "approximate" it, are "relativistic" to it.
I suppose it's taking away or not mentioning self-awareness, or more precisely in this specific case of pain, it takes away or does not mention our capacity for interoception (conscious perception of sensations from inside the body) of pain. In short: pain is an MIS for the body, a carrier of information that can be reliably acquired, consciously examined and thus in some measure known and recognised as such by the subject.
Quoting Antony Nickles
What else can we do than try and approach truth?
Ideals are ideals not because they can be achieved, but because they are desirable even in small measure, even when they can only be approached or approximated. It's good to tend towards them.
If I say: "bad means good", is that in accord with or contrary to the rules of the language game? That depends on the language game is being played. A musician might understand what it means if someone says "that guy's a bad mofo", but someone unfamiliar with the language game might well think it means something very different.
Is that a proper or improper use of the word 'bad'? Someone who is "hip" will understand, but someone who is not might be confused by what a part of the body has to do with any of this. Dig?
The word "its" there is odd, though, isn't it? Why isn't it, "our ordinary criteria"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not convinced by this "clinging" image, or by pointing the finger at our "desire" for certainty, as if the trouble is some psychological quirk. I think language is inherently idealizing, and when we talk about it, we're idealizing the idealizing already there, but--- language is also strangely open-ended, and in coming up with new uses (@StreetlightX, @Joshs) we are not only idealizing anew but undermining older idealizations.
What Wittgenstein is able to show, when he describes the language-game in which an Important Word has its 'original home' (was that the phrase?), is not a use devoid of idealization, but how idealization works, and how it can be used to do work. For a novel use to be useful, we need to understand how older usages manage to be successful, and that's what language-games are supposed to make apparent.
Of course it depends on the language-game being played. The meaning of a word IS its use in a language-game. Obviously there are various kinds of language-games that can occur with the same word, and even though this is the case, we still say meaning occurs within those specific language-games.
Moreover, not every use of a word has to accord with a rule, no more than every action in a game accords with a rule. For example, (Searle uses this e.g.) there is no rule that governs how high a ball is thrown when serving in tennis.
That said, no one seems to be following my point about language-games. It's been said that there are only language-games, not incorrect and correct language-games. Wittgenstein doesn't talk this way, supposedly, and this may be correct, but I'm not sure just yet about this. It seems weird to refer to language-games without reference to correctness, and it seems self-sealing. I can always say someone else's language-game isn't a language-game, because the word is not doing anything. And, in many cases this can be demonstrated, but in other cases, it's not an easy thing to do. Does this mean that there are cases that will never be resolved? Maybe that's just what it means. Is that just the nature of language. It seems to be. This is the point about my post.
I'll just say again that, it seems to me unlikely that Wittgenstein had the same understanding of "language-game" as someone inclined to ask, 'Is such-and-such a language game?' or 'Is such-and-such really a language-game?' or 'Is such-and-such a proper or correct language-game?' since he himself never seems to ask such questions. Rather than think such obvious questions didn't occur to him, I'm inclined now to think maybe "language-game" is not an ontological category at all, but a sort of analysis.
Maybe. But then it's still odd that he didn't foresee what in some ways is a very natural and apparently widespread misreading, and preemptively warn against it, so I don't know that my idea isn't in the same boat.
You don't need a justification in order to conclude that you have a headache. it is not the end product of a process of ratiocination.
As if you could justify to us your claim to have a headache by producing for us your pain - as if the pain were not itself the headache.
The objection here is not that you do not have a pain - that, for you, is certain. It's that "I know I am in pain" is like "I know I have an iPhone".
Quoting Antony Nickles
You so sure? Perhaps, so long as you don't mistake the definition for the use, or for the meaning.
Or 'I remembered my own name again,' when filling out a form.
Grant that it is pointless to say, 'i know I have a headache'; is there also something wrong with saying that? Is it, as some suggest, having read LW, a misuse of the word 'know'?
If you're right people should be saying things like "I have a headache" or "I have a stomachache" even when they don't. After all, according to you, no reasoning is involved. People complain of pain because they are in pain.
True I can't demonstrate my pain to another but surely I must to myself. However, we have to be careful to distinguish between going through pain and knowing pain. The former is a direct kind of experience (you just have pain) but the latter which involves finding the right word for the experience requires reasoning (you know you have pain).
PI§87: "The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose".
That sounds reasonable, but leaves me wondering why you might think religions and theologies, which @Janus had asked about, aren't language-games. What would 'disqualify' them?
By grammar, my hunch is, Wittgenstein is talking about the rules of a given language game. However none of the articles I read on Wittgenstein's theory gives any information on what that actually looks like? What's your take on this matter?
Another Wittgensteinian idea I haven't got a handle on is the so-called rule following paradox. I have a feeling it's relevant. If you have or anyone else reading this has any idea what this paradox is, kindly edify me. Thanks.
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• Philosophical Investigations
• On Certainty
• Culture and Value
• Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics
Many of your questions and criticisms of Witty seem derivative of secondary and tertiary mis/readings of (fragments from) the works listed here.
I've been outed. :blush:
I'll give you the clues that gave you away:
Quoting TheMadFool
Quoting TheMadFool
:ok:
Private Language Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy). Somewhere in that article is a very important sentence that states that no one really understands ol' Ludwig, an oft-repeated warning notice that we should all pay heed to. I'm not alone thought that doesn't comfort me as much as it should I guess. Reminds me of the following quote:
[quote=Richard Feynman]If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.[/quote]
--
Also it is obvious to anyone with a pulse that Mad Fool has never read a word of Wittgenstein and has no intention of doing so. He's a poseur who asks questions whose answers he doesn't give a damn about. That he is literate at all is an open question.
:up:
:sweat: You guys are killing me.
That's roughly my instinct, that theology is a motor spinning alright but not hooked up to a drivetrain; I just don't really trust that instinct. Think for example of how religious belief and the attendant language can be woven into the morality of believers, in their choices, in how they teach their children. It feels arbitrary to deny there is a practice here in which saying this rather than that matters. Maybe the mistake I'm worried about is lumping together all religious speech; there are lots of different sorts of things one might say, that could count as religious, and some of them connect rather clearly to practice and some quite a bit less clearly.
And if we decide, no, there's no language-game here, does that render religious speech nonsense? If a sentence like 'Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead' is nonsense, then presumably it's not just, for instance, false. I can't quite convince myself that sentence doesn't have, and cannot have, a truth-value. It's part of a story, yes, and we're generally not interested in the truth-value of sentences in stories; we're in somewhat different territory when the story is about a real person in a real place. I told someone just today the anecdote about Kurt Gödel's Selective Service form, but then mentioned that I don't know if that story's true. Anyway, I don't find that sequence, [no practice] >> [no language-game] >> [no meaning] >> [no truth-value] entirely convincing.
That's a good point. I said it to emphasize the fact that each thing, like knowing, believing, pointing, has different criteria and grammar than others--say, not everything submits to true/false statements, or that knowledge works differently about pain than it does about objects. I did not want to differentiate that criteria are the thing's criteria, rather than ours. I feel like any attempts to force the question of ownership would miss that things and us and criteria are all wrapped up together in our lives (we'd get trapped into a subject/object picture).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I would say that language has the possibility to lead to problems, one reason is that words have definitions individually, so when we put them together we imagine a sentence has meaning in the same way. But if you look at the way Witt describes the interlocutor, it is the person creating the picture, language is only the means of our bewitchment.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree with the sentiment here, but we are not so much "idealizing", as searching for understanding, truth, depth, breadth, clarity, a sense of solidity, progress; that we still want to understand the world, and, with language in its ordinary uses, we have traction to look into what interests us, what is essential about something, only that we no longer impose the criteria for its "essence".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I wouldn't dismiss it as quirky, or psychological (if that is to mean the position humans are in does not matter in our search for truth), but that Witt is talking about the human condition. The wish to exclude the human from the equation is the step (desire) to abstract to criteria that lead to certainty. The voice of the interlocutor is at times desperate, emphatic, worried, absorbed, tempted, etc. The desire I mention is the "must" in the following:
The Rule-Following Paradox
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.[/quote]
1. There's a rule: Anything goes (the rule is never violated)
2. There's no rule: Anything goes (there is no rule to violate)
There's a rule = There's no rule
This is the rule-following paradox.
If meaning is use and use is completely arbitrary there are no rules. There's no essence to ground meaning, a rule for word usage. Hence, if someone claims there is a rule then that rule is basically do whatever the hell you want...with words that is.
Short language in grammar games no Wittgenstienian have!
To, clarify: words can be defined, as in, they have that possibility, unlike sentences.
I specifically said that knowledge in this case is its sense as awareness (thus sometimes it can not be "reliably acquired" as we are not aware of it, have repressed our pain). And to say "in some measure known" is to be aware of it (in me) and to express (to you). None of this is the sense of knowledge like that of an object.
Quoting Olivier5
The point here is there is not an essence of a thing (like an object) which we know in the same way as everything else. So, epistemologically, everything has a different way it is judged (even outside of knowledge), and, for some of them, it is not truth, or an ideal, or certainty. We nevertheless have ordinary criteria to judge what interests us about it, what is essential about it to us (all).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Consistency.
The language game of "knowing that such-and-such" involves being able to justify the claim.
No justification can be given in "I know I have a headache".
Hence, it is a different game.
Is it a misuse? It would be if, for instance, you then decided that since you could not justify the headache, you were mistaken, or if you did not take appropriate remedial measures because of your lack of knowledge. You would have reached the wrong conclusion as a result of a grammatical error.
Quoting TheMadFool
A trivial criticism. Reasons are not causes. After all, according to me, no reasoning is involved, but People complain of pain because they are in pain.
Quoting TheMadFool
You don't demonstrate to your self that you have a pain - you just have a pain. You've renewed @Isaac's point that there is ratiocination involved in borderline cases, such as choosing "pain" or "itch". It's not relevant here since the same argument applies to itch as to pain. You can't correctly be said to know you have an itch.
Quoting TheMadFool
Bah. The PI is full of examples. A language game is pretty much a use of language as part of an activity. Any sort of finessing is going to get mired in the muck.
Maybe it would help with some examples. Let's say, making an apology. Now, I can judge that what someone else is saying is not an apology, but I would probably ask: "Was that supposed to be an apology? You don't even sound sorry!" But this is not to say it is doing, nothing. And Austin would say they did not pull it off, not that it was "incorrect" (that correctness is not the criteria). And we can say that, e.g., an apology is not the correct, as in appropriate, thing to say if we didn't do it; that we should offer an excuse instead, but it is hard to see in what sense we would argue that excuses are not correct in themselves, as a practice.
But another example might be, say, making a claim for justice. Now the implications (the workings) of such a claim is to call into question what is just, and so to say their words do nothing is not just to say they are not making a correct claim (or making it incorrectly, say, by using violence), but to deny them access to justice. We are now in the moral realm where what we decide to do is based on who we are willing to be--this is the way that works--so, yes, this case may never be resolved, but it is not the nature of language, but our human condition.
So the essence of (what is essential about) a "language-game" (AKA, Witt's term: concept)--the criteria for judgment in it or of it, what interests us about it, its "grammar", may not be correctness (or even rule-based).
I agreed with oyur post, but with some caution.
Quoting Sam26
The criteria is not necessarily stated; but it can be shown by continuing on in the appropriate way.
Hence back to :
Quoting Banno
If you don't get a stronger grasp of the discussion here, you will drown when you meet Kripkenstein. Better to keep your distance.
Quoting TheMadFool
Wrong way. It's just that we feel we need to state the rule in order to follow it, but the proof is in the following. Making the rules explicit just encourages rule-breakers.
What is the sense of "knowledge like that of an object"?
You mean a physical object ? Because I can chose my pain as an object of my attention, so a pain can be an object in that original sense of the word, just like anything else. And I believe that my pain can be known in the exact same sense that any other object can be known: perceived via the senses and explained rationally by the intellect.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Again, rather unclear. How do we know about things, if not via our awareness of them? If you are not aware of any apple, can you know anything about apples?
Hmm. A small point, but I won't agree with you on this. I don't think there is such a strong difference in kind between sentences and words. One might set out the meaning of a sentence, in a way not dissimilar to setting out the meaning of a word in a dictionary, by giving a synonymous sentence. But a dictionary of sentences would be impossibly long...
But moreover, the definition of a word is an attempt to explicate the rules for it's use, and hence must fail through incompleteness.
This is really one you have to read with the larger context of the whole discussion of rule-following, but I did another discussion of Cavell's critique of Kripke's reading of Witt as relying on rules (rather than investigating them as an example), instead of drawing out each thing's criteria, so maybe this topic goes there. But Cavell looks at the "paradox" as the same as Witt's imagining of a "private language"--that the "paradox" is between the nature of rules needing interpretation, endlessly, and our desire to be certain that if we follow this rule we will be correct (right), rather than looking at each thing as having different criteria (even different types).
It might save time to find the phrase "Essence is expressed by grammar" on the first page and see if that post makes sense. But I would say the criteria for judgement rather than rules, as rules are not always our criteria.
Wittgenstein's Ladder
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.[/quote]
Dsp skzliwl wqstm qpiterd!
I feel like a...
Well I took this up above, but the idea that a sentence like "I know I am in pain" looks like it is meaningful in the abstract is because words can be defined (however partially, they can) and so we can imagine we understand what this sentence does. But a sentence is like an expression, which is meaningful by the criteria of a concept, as what I say can be judged to be a threat or an apology, or that only in an expression are we able to determine which use of a word applies.
Quoting 180 Proof
:grin:
Recruitment officer: We need soldiers!
Draftee: What's the qualification? A heartbeat?
That's fair. But I'd qualify this to say something like: "be good and you'll get to heaven" counts as an exhortation or something similar. That's the use to which it is put. But if you then go on to ask: "but where is heaven? What's it like?" - then you've disengaged from the 'rough ground'. So: one can 'make use' of religious language, and indeed, this is done all the time. But I wouldn't say it has any 'cognitive content'. Same goes for your own example which I think is exemplary: "Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead". Maybe it's got some value as a morality tale, but if you're then going to ask about the mechanics of resurrection and turn it into some philosophical or metaphysical debate, I'd tell you to pound sand.
Another way to put this is tautologically: if your religious discussion has some practical import ... then it has some practical import.
Language-games are more or less open-ended. The meaning of words can change. Whether or not a word is being used correctly is determined from within the game itself. This is not to say there is no correct or incorrect usage, but that correctness is a function of the game.
Quoting Sam26
Whether or not a word is doing something is determined from within the game itself.
I think there's some room for debate there, but let's say you're right about all of that. What I'm more interested in at the moment is this sort of claim:
Quoting Banno
Does that mean it's incorrect to say I know I have a headache? "Incorrect" how? In the sense that it's false? Or does "I know I have a headache", despite appearances, have no truth-value?
There are all sorts of sentences that are still meaningful despite lacking a truth-value, but this isn't a question or a command or a recommendation, or any of those cases; it's a simple indicative sentence. For sentences like that, being meaningful and being truth-apt go hand-in-hand. So do we conclude that "I know I have a headache" is meaningless, or that it is some sort of exception?
The question is exactly this: is the use of a sentence in a language-game its meaning? (Whether this is what Wittgenstein claims, I'd leave aside for the moment.) If you show, to your satisfaction, that a given sentence is not a 'valid move in a language-game' --- and let's say "You don't demonstrate to your self that you have a pain - you just have a pain" does that --- then did you thereby show that the sentence is meaningless? Or that it lacks a truth-value? Or both?
We could say we "perceived via the senses"(empirically) and can explain pain "rationally" as neurons firing and tissue swelling and brain processes (this is me being sciency). But my pain is not explained or justified; we don't use reasons, but, at best, describe our pain, yet, in describing it, we are expressing it (even to ourselves, as in, becoming aware of it in that way) because it is ours, we have it. I don't even need to be (necessarily) aware of my pain nor say anything to me or you intellectually rational, because I can merely cry out; and now, substitute words. #244
With an object, we have the space (between us and it) to create the picture of a word and the thing it refers to. This kind of thing can be given qualities and must meet criteria like discrete, defined, perceivable, certain. And in this space I can have knowledge in the sense of what is true. This picture of an object is not how pain works; there is no pain that is true for me, there is no criteria to meet other than my awareness of it and my expression (description) of it to you. Now I can lie (to myself and you) and I can do a better or worse job of expressing my pain, but that will only matter to the extent of the context--doctor's appointment, request for sympathy, comparison to your pain, etc.--and not as knowledge, say, of Mars' atmosphere.
Earlier, here, I said:
The method Witt uses in imagining a context for an expression is to show that the sentence is meaningful, that there are ordinary criteria for judging such a use of I know (as that I am aware), in order to show (by contrast) that the criteria are just not what we want--as an answer to the skeptic that there is in fact something in me that is "me" (rather than pain just being mine), which the example of pain seems to provide with its intensity (apparent inability not to be known) and seeming certainty (that our knowledge is unshakable, rather than not certain at all). The need to "know" our pain in this way removes any context (and our human part in someone's pain) and imposes criteria like correctness and truth-value of the pain. For pain, we judge the expression not the pain, though I may judge the pain by the expression ("That's not quite it")--not having the words (quite yet), not paying attention, not fully aware of my repressed pain, being mistaken out of shock. Others' judgement is also not by the criteria of correctness or truth in correspondence, but it works in the ways that I can lie or be mistaken, and all you have is to accept my expression as a person in pain, or reject the expression (question me or dismiss me).
Note my bolding.
It is correct that you have a headache, but incorrect to say you know you have a headache, because the justification for the claim, if there is any, is the headache itself.
Of course we can draw a distinction between infelicitous and incorrect uses. But this is not an infelicity; it is a misuse. One of the aspects of the language game of knowing stuff is being able to present a justification for appraisal. that aspect, that criteria for knowledge, had not been met. "I know I have and itch" doesn't achieve the status of being eligible for a truth value, to use your somewhat constipated term, becasue it is not grammatically a statement. It's not like "Paris is the capital of France"; Nor "Paris is the capital of Germany"; but more like "Paris is the capital of lemongrass".
Your point might be that it is not incorrect but rather a misfire, that you are taking correct and incorrect to imply merely true or false propositions. In which case we, and here we might include @Sam26, might agree that it would be better to say "misfire"; but we do talk of folk's grammar being incorrect, so that seems to me unnecessarily pedantic.
Can one claim to know one has a headache anyway? Again, of course. This was shown by @Isaac in a previous thread, but keep in mind that this use would be a distinct form of knowing, involving unconscious brain functions, and quite different to knowing one has a clean shirt.
There's an unresolved tension here. Language games do reach out to other language games. It would be brave indeed to claim that any use is determinate.
I’m fairly sure I know what you mean by this: that it would be brave to claim that any meaning is determinate, or that we can be certain to understand any use of language. But isn’t that just what we do everyday? I think the bar is set too high here on knowledge/certainty; a philosophical use of these terms.
That is, to say that we can never be certain what someone means with their use of language, then I think you have gone too far or set too high a standard.
The language game of knowing that such-and-such involves being able to present a justification. That justification must be accessible to others.
Suppose I claim to know I have five dollars, but refuse to open my wallet in justification. It would be quite reasonable for you to doubt my claim.
In the case of a pain, were the only justification is the pain itself, it is simply not possible to provide the necessary evidence.
There is a difference between "I have five dollars" and "I know I have five dollars". That difference is not found between "I have a headache" and "I know I have a headache".
I suspect Olivier will simply deny this; but that just implies he has failed to engage with the argument.
Meh. The bar, so far as it is set, is set by what works.
The counterpoint to the argument that language games are rules-based is found in Davidson's "A nice derangement of epitaphs".No set of conventions can explain all of language use; but moreover, even if it did, some wag would immediately break those conventions.
And I think this puts the lie to the notion that language games are rules-based. That one is following a rule is not dependent on one being able to state that rule, but is found in what one does.
Language games are family resemblances, and the thing about families is that they grow. That newborn second cousin with the red hair might have no genetic link to you, but still becomes a part of your family.
How does it follow that language games are not rule based? Is it that there are no rules or that following the rules is found in what one does?
To determine whether or not a word is "doing something" in a particular game is not to claim a determinate use of the word.
That's what I said.
Edit: in case you missed it, how can one follow the rules (in what one does) if there are no rules (if language games are not rules based). In other words, how can conventions be broken if there are no conventions?
Was it meaningless when originally said here a few pages back?
Quoting Banno
Looking in your wallet is how we would verify that you have $5; how would we verify that you knew that, that you weren't just guessing?
Quoting Banno
If it's like the last one, then is it meaningless?
By the way, are you allowing that it can be true or false that I know Paris is the capital of France? How about, "I know I left my keys right here"? Or "I know I was thinking about something important a minute ago, but now I can't remember what it was"?
I knew there was a more definitive criteria of the sense of knowledge I was trying to contrast with that of being aware for @Olivier5, but I couldn't come up with this, so thank you. I would add that the flip-side is that our impotence to prove our sensations to the other outside of our expression of them makes the other's rejection of our pain all the more isolating, which adds to the desire for a picture that ensures our ability to communicate who we are to someone else as if it were just a matter of simply describing some thing that is certain and complete (all that is required) to be known/justified in a way that defies rejection, ensures acceptance.
The emphasis is being able to show a context; in this way we can see the implications of the expression, the way in which it works (it's grammar) and thus which sense of the concept, what use it is here. TMF's original sentence is meaningful because all the words can be, but there is, as yet, no context (despite its being a retort here) in which we can see which use of know this is and what the sentence tells us of the implications to the concept of sensations. To say the sentence is more/different than I have outlined is to have a different context/example or to be able to say there is something objectionable in my description, reasonably, with evidence (what else we say when we say that).
Imagine you tell a friend about a headache and she asks, "Did you know you had a headache at 3:00?
It isn't gibberish, but you'd still probably ask for clarification because it's such a weird question.
I think anytime people ask for clarification, they're trying to make an utterance useful. They're trying to find the missing context.
It's not like Wittgenstein had nothing to say about meaning, and he's widely read as endorsing a kind of functionalism: the meaning of a word, perhaps as well the meaning of a sentence, simply is the use one makes of it, or can make of it, as a move in a language-game.
Whether that paragraph represents Wittgenstein well, I'll pass on for now.
The question I am trying to raise is whether that view, LW's or not, is defensible.
If no one in this thread holds that view, I won't get anywhere unless someone plays devil's advocate, but I would be surprised, as most of the Wittgensteinian folks around here are only too happy to talk about 'moves in a language-game' and so forth. Maybe @Luke will take me up on it.
haha! Good catch! :blush:
Right. If you can sensibly say one, you ought to be able sensibly to say the other. Negation also comes up here: if you can sensibly say you know you have a headache, you ought to be able sensibly to say that you don't know you have a headache.
One alternative might be to say that "I know I have a headache" is necessarily true, and that the apparent failure of the negations or of the 'doubt' version, regardless of context, show that. The peculiarity of saying "I know I have a headache" would not be, then, due to a semantic catastrophe (that it's nonsense) but something else.
That it is an odd thing to say, a thing perhaps one rarely has any reason to say, is not in question; whether the reasons not to say it are semantic, is the issue.
As I understand the usual take on LW, if a sentence has a use, if it's useful, if it's a valid move in a language-game, then it's meaningful, because that's what meaning is--- use in a language-game. If a sentence is not useful, then it's nonsense.
That's the view I'm questioning, the complete identification of use and meaning.
So I don't assume the sentences in question are nonsense, even if they are odd or pointless or otherwise lacking an obvious usefulness. I'm suggesting such a sentence can still be meaningful and even true.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Can you sensibly say that you don’t know you have a headache?
This doesn't seem right, viz., that "I know I have a headache," is necessarily true (not that you're necessarily saying this :smile:). So, the statement, "I know I have a headache," would be similar or the same as "All triangles have three sides," or "All bachelors are unmarried." In the case of "All triangles have three sides," what we mean by triangle is by definition, having three sides. However, you can't think that this is the same as, "I know I have a headache?" At least not in these cases. Is there something else you have in mind?
Consider saying "2 + 2 = 5". Is that meaningless, is it utterly unclear what someone would mean if they were to say this, or is it just false? Or consider @Banno's example: "Paris is the capital of lemongrass." Is that meaningless or is it just false? (Lemongrass, not being a country, has no capital; a fortiori Paris is not that capital. [hide="**"]On the other hand, Jeff Mangum tells someone that "when you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers." So there's that.[/hide])
Now for our example. It's supposed to be nonsensical to say "I don't know that I have a headache" and therefore nonsensical to say "I know I have a headache." What about other sentences nearby? Suppose someone said, "I don't know whether I have a headache." I would certainly find this a puzzling thing to say, and I'd be tempted respond, "How could you not know whether you have a headache? Surely, if you had a headache, you'd know it." To my ear, that's not only meaningful but true, and the negative I'm dismissing as if it were simply contradictory. I understand them to be saying they do not know something which, I believe, if it were the case, they would know it. "I don't know I have a headache" seems to entail, if not itself to be, a contradiction.
Again, it's not that there's nothing odd about a sentence like "I know I have a headache." The question is whether its defect is semantic. For instance, if that sentence can only be true, it's not perfectly clear it can be asserted, that saying it would count as a "claim" at all. Then what use can be made of such a sentence? Not altogether clear. (We haven't touched on one of the other uses of "I know ..." which I think of as 'concessive': "I know it's Saturday, and I know I said I wouldn't check my work email today, but I have to nail down a schedule for next week." That's not a claim to knowledge but admitting that you have it. And there are others. @Antony Nickles offered some possibilities too.)
The question I am focused on is whether, in denying that a sentence is useful in some circumstance, do we deny that it is meaningful? Do we deny that it could carry a truth-value?
No, it doesn't, and I'm not wedded to the "necessarily true" bit. I'm not sure how else to characterize sentences that we seem unable or unwilling or unmotivated to consider the contrary of. While writing the last post I began to suspect that it may be something entailed by such a claim that must be true.
I'm glad you flagged that --- I'll work on it tomorrow.
Depends on how we're using the term meaningful. In other words, I could use a sentence that isn't meaningful to demonstrate what is meaningful. So, in such a case the claim that, for example, "I know I have a headache," is meaningful in the sense that it's use shows where we go can go wrong. I would generally say though, that it has no truth-value, especially if the use is vacuous.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Meaning is use. Check.
Therefore,
I can use words as signs to refer to things, their essences.
In other words, philosophy as was done before the linguistic turn is a subfield of Wittgenstein's universe of language games. We're good!
Recruitment Officer: Mr. Forester… you’ve been elevated to Active-2 status.
Forester: What?
Recruitment Officer: You meet all requirements for conscription.
Forester: Wh-What… what are the requirements for conscription? A pulse? (sigh)
[Script from the movie Tommorow war]
What an amazing attempt at building up a distinction where none exists... Pain is objective, it is a type of objects called a sensation. It imposes itself to us just as any other part of objective reality. It can be given qualities; it is certain and perceivable; one can take a distance from one's own pain. Pain is a serious issue, it matters, it can be a life saver or a misery. And nobody in real pain ever gave a rat's ass for, say, Mars' atmosphere.
What argument is made here exactly? That you cannot see the difference between a sensation and the conscious examination and exploration of this sensation? Well, I kinda feel sorry for you about that, but I am not convinced your inabilities amount to any argument at all.
This being said, and in the way I read Witty on the beetle in the box metaphor, there is a distinction to be made between phenomena that are apprehensible by many people independently (e.g. the phases of the moon) and therefore verifiable, and those that are perceptible by one person only (e.g. my pain). and not easily verifiable by other people.
The former type -- verifiable independently by several people -- is considered more objective than the latter -- the 'private' phenomena such as pain -- which are considered more subjective. I personally call the former type "intersubjective" aka perceived by several subjects. And indeed intersubjectivity is seen as the main pathway to objectivity, itself an impossible ideal.
Nevertheless, intersubjective phenomena are simply those perceivable by several subjects, and subjective ones are those perceivable only by one subject. The difference is subtle: intersubjectivity is not the opposite of subjectivity but simply its sharing.
Some parts of our subjective experience can be shared, and other parts not, or less readily so.
I meant it just in the sense of 'has a meaning', 'can be understood', and, for these cases of indicative sentences, 'can be assigned a truth-value'.
One reason for distinguishing meaning (sentence meaning) from use (speaker's meaning) can be seen somewhat clearly in Antony's example:
Quoting Antony Nickles
There are a couple things to note about this. One is that "Don't you have a headache?" is a yes-or-no question, but does not receive a yes-or-no response. If we take "I know I have a headache" as an affirmative response, is that to say that, in this case, the sentence "I know I have a headache" means "Yes" because that's the use of it in this language-game? (If I know I have a headache, then I have a headache, etc. There's an entailment there we can work out.) We might also say that the point being made by saying "I know I have a headache" is something like, "You're being an idiot. Obviously I have also injured my knee. The two are unrelated." Should we say that's the meaning of "I know I have a headache" here?
The alternative, mainly deriving from Grice, is to say that the literal meaning of the sentence has not changed; if we take "I know I have a headache" as "Yes" or as "Don't be an idiot", it's for other reasons that have to do with how conversation works. "I know I have a headache" still just means what it usually means, but you can mean "Yes" by saying it.
On such an approach, the trouble with sentences like "Here is one hand" or "I know that is a tree" is not that they are meaningless, in fact both can be simply true; they usually ought not be said because to do so would violate a norm of conversation (Grice's maxims). That's the gist.
And this sort of analysis requires a distinction:
I’m wondering what
would say Wittgenstein’s response to this sentence would be:
Quoting Banno
Does it have a sense or status outside of conxtual use?
If not, then perhaps it does care if we are looking.
Right. The standard Grice 101 examples are nearby: I ask if you want to stop here to eat and you say, looking at your phone, it's more than two hours to the next town.
That implies a yes, but it's not definitely a yes -- it's "cancellable", you might follow up with "I can wait if you want to" -- but taken literally it's a non sequitur. Grice's theory is that when a maxim (in this case, "Be relevant") is violated, we look for an entailment that will maintain the cooperative spirit of conversation, so you reason your way from a comment about geography back to a response to the question, or a suggestion about what to do, and so on. That's "conversational implicature" in a nutshell.
It gives you another way of approaching that sense we might have that many of the things a philosopher might find herself saying would be very peculiar, pointless, or somehow inappropriate, in everyday conversation. That this is true, is not the same as the sentences in question being nonsense or not being truth-apt.
I don't think it's just about philosophical discussion. Chomsky demonstrated that language acquisition has to be an innate ability.
Innate abilities like walking are developed through interaction with the world. Some bones necessary for walking are in seed form in an infant. The stress of trying to walk activates their growth.
If language is like that, there might be the seeds of language in infant cognition. Those seeds are activated by stress.
Chalmers talks about what the components of that 'language seed' might be. Can't remember where though.
Ah I see. :)
1. Having a headache: An experience, private but with public physical correlates (frowning, rubbing the temple region, etc.)
2. I have a headache: A report of a headache (1). It is a proposition, the conclusion of the following argument:
a) I have a sensation in my head.
b) The sensation in my head is called a headache
Ergo,
c) I have a headache (from a, b)
It looks like I have a headache = I (know) I have a headache.
I'm not sure that I understand in what sense it's a contradiction.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It's not an easy question, but I think we could start by noting that claims to knowledge can typically be checked by others and ourselves. You might claim to be able to play the tuba or how to speak Russian, and we could test your knowledge by asking you to demonstrate. But how can we similarly discover or learn whether or not I have a headache? How could my knowledge be tested in order to demonstrate to myself and to others that I really do (or don't) know whether I have a headache?
When you say "Surely, if you had a headache, you'd know it", you appear to be using "know" in the sense of "be aware of". I could be wrong, but I think Wittgenstein might object to the notion of pain as an inner object that one is aware of and can check to confirm whether or not they are in pain, instead of pain as something which one simply has or expresses.
In a chapter of Readings of Wittgenstein's On Certainty, author Thomas Morawetz puts it this way:
Oh good, you figured it out! Enjoy your Kant; we're done.
As a definition (ontology) of meaning, I don't think it works. But as a technique to explore meaning, it does work.
Alright, so imagine I claim I can play the tuba, but there's not one handy to *prove* it. (Have to come back to this.) Suppose someone else says, "No really, I've heard him play the tuba." I think it's reasonable to take that as a claim to *know* that I can play the tuba, because they have experience that put them in a position to know. At this point, you can choose to trust them, to take their word for it, or demand further evidence. But that's the same choice you faced with my initial claim that I know how to play the tuba, and the presumption that I'm in a position to know whether I can. I'm not guessing.
Suppose someone finds a tuba and I play a bit of a song. All we know now is that I can play what I played, and maybe that's it. (Kind of a "Slumdog Millionaire" situation.) How much do I have to play? How much knowledge do I have to demonstrate? At some point, I think it comes back to trust that I possess still more knowledge and capability than I've actually demonstrated.
I think verification gives you reason to trust, but a claim to knowledge is a claim that, on the matter at hand, what I say can be trusted, can be relied upon.
This is why at least most reports about my current condition or my mental states, past and present, can readily be treated as matters of knowledge. When Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "Maybe I love you and maybe you love me," she responds, "You know whether you love me or not, Sam."
It's not that people cannot be confused or uncertain about this sort of thing, of course not. It's not even that when they make a claim about their mental state, they must be right. It's that we by and large accept each other as authorities on our own mental states, because, as the saying goes, "If you don't know, who should I ask?" We are the only ones in the position to know a great many things about ourselves.
You should theoretically be able to demonstrate (at some time) that you know how to play the tuba, whether one is handy or whether you can play one right now or not.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't know. At what point do we say someone can play an instrument? Regardless of "at what point", we often do say these things about people. Can Eric Clapton play the guitar? Of course.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It's most likely that you do possess more knowledge and capability than you've demonstrated, but not necessarily with regards to playing the tuba. We might find that you struggle to make any sound at all with a tuba in your hands.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But you cannot ever demonstrate that you know you have a headache - not even to yourself. You cannot theoretically, at some time, prove to anyone - including yourself - your knowledge of your headache. As Wittgenstein says at PI 246:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That may be true, but Wittgenstein shows us that all language is essentially behavioural, social and public, so the grammar of the word "know" is based on behavioural verifications, not on inner objects. You might think that you know all the words to Eleanor Rigby until you try to sing it and find out you really don't.
Quoting Luke
In this case, as I said earlier, that "I know I have a headache" is "know" in the sense of being aware. To decide what we can "sensibly say" is to imagine that we can understand the context and impact of what we say before it happens, which is not how language works. For example, before judging what use "know" has in the sentence "I don't know that I have a headache", we need a context (as anything does). Here, imagine that you see me wincing and holding my head, and ask "Do you have a headache?", and I turn my head and squint and say, "I don't know that I have a headache, it's more like my neck is sore and I'm getting shooting pain up through my scalp." So here we could say that "know" is related to its sense of what we would make a claim about, what we would stand behind to justify--"I wouldn't say I have a headache, so much as...". As @Banno pointed out though, if you asked "What justifies your knowledge?" I would be at a loss as to how to reply, but if you asked "Are you sure?", I could say "No, it's weird; let's go to the doctor". Now there is a sense of certainty that we want from the first question about justification, which is reliable (verifiable) truth. But in this use of know, the certainty (we can't claim) here is confidence, thus the turn to authority.
Now even the imagining of the context for a concept is not to tell if we can "sensibly say" it or whether we can judge it as nonsense--philosophy is not the arbitor of expression. The method is to be able to bring a concept back to its ordinary criteria to learn why we want to picture it another way, here as reliable, justified truth. Again, the importance for philosophy is its tendency to simplify by abstracting from the event of an expression at a time in a context to a world without criteria other than those that lead to an outcome that is predictable and certain.
As well, the converse or negation of a statement is not necessarily its opposite; Austin's example is that the opposite of "voluntary" is more like "under constraint" than "involuntary", the opposite of which is "on purpose".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Wouldn't we say it is more in the sense of "Hey, I thought you had a headache."--as in confused, requesting confirmation; rather than a question (despite the question mark).
I don't want to run off topic here but the term "use" captures that language can not be meaningful beforehand (as if in a "meaning" or by anticipated rules), that concepts (knowing, pointing, threatening, believing) can have multiple possibilities and various conditions and criteria, so we have to wait until something is expressed at a time, in a place, to an audience, within the context of expectations and implications, etc. that are inherent in a real situation (a full context). The actual "context" does not even create something specific but just the variables of the moment to clarify or question the expression in relation to any number of unexplored contingencies. It may be that a concept is even extended to something new based on a new context (or in a moral moment).
So, "use" plays a part in what is meaningful because, once something is said, then we can look at the expression and the context, what the concept appears to be, its criteria, the possible judgments, etc. and see what sense of a concept we are talking about. And here sense is synonymous with use, and they are like options of the concept and expression, as we have talked about "I know" as in the sense of being aware (or I know in its use as: I can justify).
It is not a utilitarian judgement of what is useful, as in practical. It is not what I "use" my words for, as if I control how they will be meaningful (though I can control what I say).
So@Srap Tasmania, denying that an expression has a use (in the associated concept) does not mean it is meaningless, though its impact might just be to raise brows. And I wouldn't think we could consider every use of a concept as being normative like truth is, but we would need examples of both of these to even start a discussion.
Quoting TheMadFool
You can refer to objects with words--say "Cat" when you see a cat; the use here could be naming, or identifying, or seeing. But this will not tell us anything about a cat's essence (what is essential to us about them) other than it is an object that can be seen, identified, and named (though even as: Fluffy).
Come to think of it, there's something there that not a total waste of philosophy: precisely the fun of turning upside down old certitudes.
This is often useful, healthy and indeed fun. The means through which Wittgenstein does this shake-up are not entirely transparent; the arguments he uses are more often tricks to destabilise or freeze one's thought, than logical and convincing arguments. I often find his arguments nonsensical (not always of course -- sometimes he's on to something), which bothers me. But in a shrewd way, they often work in shaking up one's unexamined opinions.
Especially, I would think, his own. That is to say (a banality) that PI is largely addressed at Wittgenstein's own youthful attempts to formalize a positivist theory of knowledge in the Tractatus. The PI say: "Wait, it's not so simple as I once thought!" And that is useful. Too bad that his arguments in support of a less simplistic but more practical view are so ambiguous at times.
Nothing so obvious or mechanical. We try to imagine what sense it could have based on the context. And sometimes we get the sense of a word wrong. Meaning is only approximated by an analysis of word use.
Why not? A cat is a domesticated small species of feline. These are the essences of a cat. By the way naming is an act of referring.
That said, there is a certain interpretation of Wittgenstein I've warmed up to viz. philosophy, all discourse in fact, is simply symbolic manipulation, including but not limited to logic reminiscent of Searle's Chinese Room. Nobody understands a word they're saying is my point à la Wittgenstein's ladder.
What's inexplicable though is much like how we have no clue as to the existence of free will and still feel, our world is structured accordingly, we do possess free will, we have what could be described as an illusion of understanding.
To be kind, even charitable, the technical term (Thanks, Harry F.) for this "interpretation" is bullshit. :zip:
:lol: Hi there 180 Proof. I just thought I might as well take the linguistic turn Wittgenstein initiated a long time ago to its logical conclusion - philosophy, every and all discourse, is, at the end of the day, simply language minus the semantics i.e. symbols (letters/words), synatax, overlaid with additional rules like, inter alia, logic. This is the apotheosis of Wittgensteinian philosophy and come to think of it, it is bullshit and Wittgenstein concurs :point:
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.[/quote]
ignorant. :yawn:
:blush: :grin:
I'll grant you can get that out of §246. But there's a couple peculiarities to that remark I'd like to ask about.
One is that Wittgenstein suggests that to say of me that I know I'm in pain is just to say that I'm in pain. But then if "He's in pain" is not nonsense, how can "He knows he's in pain" be nonsense? Do they have the same use or not?
The argument seems to go like this: the trouble with "I know I'm in pain" is that you would only choose this expression over "I'm in pain" if you have a mistaken understanding of the privacy of our sensations. You may only end up saying (what amounts to) "I'm in pain", but you are trying (and failing) to say something else, and that something else is nonsense.
But that means it's something like your intention that makes "I know I'm in pain" nonsense. Wittgenstein worries an awful lot about how we picture things working, how we understand them, for someone who's supposed to be a behaviorist.
And I have one little question about the last paragraph. Everyone seems to take this as an anticipation of On Certainty and finds it completely convincing.
But suppose instead of the §246 we have, we had this:
That too is pretty convincing, even if you choose to dance around "know" a little. I wasn't even thinking about §246 when I said of my claim to be able to play the tuba, "I'm not guessing." **
There's a language-game that relates knowing and guessing, isn't there? It's the one he rejects, the one that pictures our sensations as secrets we know and others can only guess. When I say I'm in pain, I'm not guessing, and that makes it, as he notes, natural to say I know I'm in pain. (Note also that the defense of others knowing I'm in pain is just that we do in fact use the word "know" this way — that settles the question even before he gets to the stuff about learning of my pain from my behavior — but he doesn't consider that defense for "I know I'm in pain.")
I'm not rejecting Wittgenstein's entire analysis here, but I'm uncomfortable with the suggestion, often made, that Wittgenstein has demonstrated there is one and only one correct way to use the word "know": it belongs to the knowing-doubting-justifying game and no others, and if you try to use it any other way it's just nonsense. It's his own damn fault, but it doesn't seem like this should have been his legacy.
** I was in fact thinking of King of the Hill.
Hank: "Do you know where I can find 4 D batteries for my flashlight?"
Mega-Lo-Mart clerk: "Aisle 30, I think."
Hank: "This is aisle 30." [It's obviously the toy department.]
Mega-Lo-Mart clerk: "15? 3!"
Hank: "Stop guessing. Either you know or you don't know."
Which goes to my point that we often distinguish — and need to distinguish, for conversations to make any sense — the literal, conventional meaning of what we say from the use we are making of it in the circumstances. "Don't you have a headache?" does not mean "Hey, I thought you had a headache" or "I am confused about your headache status," but we can use it that way.
"He knows he's in pain" is nonsense for the same reason that "I know I'm in pain" is nonsense - because one cannot surmise and verify that they are in pain, so one cannot (technically) know that they are in pain. Grammatically speaking, to know something requires that one can surmise and verify it (and doubt it). One does not surmise and then verify that they are in pain. That's not how pain works. This is why all that could possibly be meant by "I know I'm in pain" is "I'm in pain".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It is not one's intention. but the misuse of the word "know" that makes it nonsense.
Hopefully this is adequately answered by my first response in this post.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The difference between PI 246 and On Certainty is that PI 246 concerns knowledge of private sensations, whereas On Certainty extends the same idea to some public knowledge. Without the appropriate context, it is grammatically incorrect to say, e.g., "I know I have two hands". Whereas it could be argued that it is always grammatically incorrect to say "I know I'm in pain".
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You'll need to refresh my memory of this language-game.
@180 Proof and others as well. What means this :point:
Wittgenstein's Ladder (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.[/quote]
?
Quoting TheMadFool
Anything taken out of context, especially by one ignorant of the context, can be made to seem to say anything. À la principle of explosion! Sophistry (Charlatanry) 101. In other words, one can't "throw away a ladder" that one hasn't bothered "to climb". Fool is as Fool does, no less. :mask:
Wittgenstein's statement, context-independent, is nonsensical e.g. he claims that if anyone understands him, that person would realize Wittgenstein's philosophy is nonsensical. It's paradoxical to assert that one understands the nonsensical. What sayest thou, o wise one?
On the first charge levied against me - "...haven't read the TLP in full..." - I plead guilty. However, in my defense, I did read the SEP and Wiki entries on Wittgenstein's take on language and philosophy. Too, over the years I've gained a deeper understanding of what it is that he wishes to convey. Like it or not, for better or for worse, my conclusion is that Wittgenstein held the opinion that philosophy, everything that has to do with interpersonal and intrapersonal communication, is simply symbol manipulation according to the rules of grammar - there being, as per Wittgenstein himself, no essence to words. That's not all, these symbols (words and some letters like "a" and "i") are also treated within systems of reasoning or, in some cases, unreasoning, depending on where you fall on the Maverick scale.
I know you disagree and I know you're a scholar with credentials someone like me could only dream of BUT...at this juncture I'd like to stick to my guns and say Wittgenstein's philosophy can be summed up as reducing humans to computers (syntactically and logically adept but semantically challenged). We don't understand either ourselves (private language) and nor do we understand each other (Tower of Babel).
And you hit the nail on the head about how critical , I quote, "what Witty means by nonsense" is.
Thank you for your time. Good day and don't forget to be awesome!
As always, good question! :smile:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner (emphasis added)
In the PI, Witt is trying to get us to see why we want there to be such a thing as a "literal, conventional meaning" (a "meaning"). It is the logic of our concepts that make an expression possible, but it is the circumstances which make the expression interpretable. We do not know the use of an expression until it is said in a situation (sometimes even ourselves, as speaker); we may not know the concept even without some sorting out, as we did in this case. As I said earlier, a misleading fact about language is that every word can have a definition (PI, #1), so we can look at a sentence in isolation, without a context, and it appears to have "a meaning". But, of course, even with the simplest cases--like someone saying "Slab!" (#19)--we learn that how something is meaningful to us is tied up with the importance to us (all) of ordering, pointing, seeing, responding, acknowledging, etc. (To understand a sentence means to understand a language. PI #199) That we must have our whole lives to draw on in order to understand a sentence. The idea that a sentence has a meaning (like an object, even a similarly-structured "use") comes from the desire to have a direct, certain, complete, immediate, correlation between what we say and what it "means" (a word and its referent; an object and its essence). There is no simple picture anymore for philosophy after Wittgenstein.
The other part of this is harder for people to hear (accept), as it means our role in language is much less than we had hoped. In saying language is not structured as having meanings, Wittgenstein is not simply proposing a replacement for "meaning" in the same picture with his suggestion to look at the use of a concept. We distinguish between the possibilities of a concept (like knowing), but only when conversations don't go as expected; a sentence can pass unnoticed, without meaning anything at all (a type of non-sense). This means that intention is a question asked when there is something odd about an expression, not an accompaniment to everything we say. Although some expressions are said intentionally, what is meaningful about them is not how we use them . The use is seen in the expression (afterwards). Our wish for certainty is a desire to have control over "the use" of an expression, so that we can avoid our responsibility afterwards for what we have said.
This is a description of a cat; these are facts about a cat for identifying a cat, say, from a dog, or a tiger. These are not the essence of a thing that philosophy seeks. The criteria for a table could be that it is flat and has four legs; but someone might disagree that a table is anything on which we share a dinner. If we can let go of the fantasy that the essence of an object or concept is some fixed universal property that is certain and continuous, than we can begin to have a discussion about what is essential--what is important about the world, captured in how we live and judge and identify. What you find essential about justice and what I do has depth and weight and matters to us (all). Though sometimes that can't be reconciled does not mean the discussion should be cast aside in exchange for rules and meanings and an "essence" (without us).
Quoting TheMadFool
If you want to dismiss philosophy, there is every opportunity. I would offer that you suspend the urge to simplify and judge; you will not be better for having put a label on something and trivialized it. The person who started writing the Tractatus is not the same person who wrote the end of it. It is an exploration of what could be said given a certain standard. The ladder are all the claims he can make in the Tractatus with such certainty because no one would object. (Later in the PI, he will say "If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them." #128) They are not without sense, but there is no sense in having said them. Having gotten through saying them all, he finds himself without anything to say. Yet he is lucid, transcendent, aright. It is a catharsis and expiation of his desire to fix the world to a criteria of certainty that he began with. In Philosophical Investigations, he turns towards what in the Tractatus he calls philosophers' "nonsense", to take that seriously and understand the motivation for it.
An essence is that quality/property necessary for a thing to be that thing. If an essence is absent, then a thing stops being that thing, we're talking about something else entirely. A wolf forebear is an essence of a dog.
Definition is basically a list of qualities/properties that are both sufficient AND necessary for a thing to be that thing. Domestication and vulpine ancestry defines a dog. If you take that list with you, you can identify a thing and if you see a thing that is that thing, whatever it is, you'll discover that that thing has all the qualities/properties in your list.
The combination of essences is the sufficiency criterion while each essence itself is necessary.
Wittgenstein is right in saying words lack an essence but words and definitions are two entirely different things. Wittgenstein seems to be conflating the two - like a bungling ( :joke: ) cop, he identifies the culprit correctly, takes aim, pulls the trigger, and shoots the wrong guy. :grin:
So, when we think of meaning, think of how a word is used in the language-game that is its home. If for example, we’re talking about epistemology and how we justify a conclusion, then we’re using the word know in a way that’s determined by the logic of that language-game. The problem that arises, is when we take the use of a particular word in one language-game, and try to apply it in another language-game where the word is used in a completely different way, i.e., it has a different use, or it functions differently. This is not to say that a word can’t have the same use in a different language-game, but to say that it’s use maybe different; and thus, it may have a different sense.
For example, I might use the word know in the following way, viz., to reflect my feeling of subjective certainty, which is reflected in the way I respond or gesticulate. This is far removed from how I might use it in terms of an epistemological justification for what I believe. The problem is that we try to apply a sense that's applicable in one language-game, but not applicable in another language-game. This is probably why Wittgenstein was against religious arguments. He seemed to think that we were applying the language-game, say of science, to the language-game of religion. The two language-games are just different games with different moves. Some of the moves would obviously have to be the same, but some of the moves are just different, with different senses.
You might think that this is just another way to say that context drives meaning, but it’s not. In other words, use is normative, but context is not, you can’t just change a words sense, by giving it just any context.
I'd add that we can, and do, move terms from one language game to another. Doing this changes the use of the term, of corse, because we are now playing a different game. Problems can occur when this is done without recognising the change in use.
For example, consider the use of "cause" in physics and in arguments for god's existence, or the use of possible worlds in logic and in quantum mechanics. Or China claiming to be a democratic nation.
This process appears to most often lead to confusion, but can also lead to insight. It's not something to avoid, but something to do with great care.
A question for due consideration is whether Wittgenstein thought that language games were incommensurable. Feyerabend seems to have thought so, and at first built incommensurability into his arguments, later changing his mind. Davidson's argument against incommensurability also deserves consideration.
These paragraphs become less troubling if one thinks of them as having been rethought between the early and the later Wittgenstein.
The issue is that, if the Tractatus forms the ladder which one is eventually to kick away, then it is apparent that the propositions therein, even if senseless, are not without use.
And explaining how they might be both senseless and useful is the task of the Philosophical Investigations. The propositions of philosophy are of use not so much because of what they say as of what they show.
Lately I've been trying to answer this question for myself. I've thought of possible answers, but nothing definitive. My problem is that most of my studies of Wittgenstein have been in isolation from much of what has been written. Mostly I've tried to read just Wittgenstein (the primary sources) just to see how my interpretation would later compare with others.
I ran into this problem on my own without reading what others have said, and have been puzzling over it.
Are you saying something like this:
"Is Bb5 legal?" -- Depends on the position.
"Is Bb5 good?" -- Depends on the position.
This actually catches some of what is important that Witt is pointing out, particularly that the grammar of a thing (the way it works, or not) expresses what makes a thing that thing. But to term it as a quality/property is to put "essence" into the framework of an object. For one thing, since there are a number of criteria for judging whether a thing is a thing, that would mean there would be multiple "essences", which would defeat the unexamined reason that we need to create it: to be "necessary", in other words, to be determinate, to be decisive--to create certainty in our relation to the thing. As well, in saying "essence" there is a tendency to imagine one generalized picture for what an essence is, how it works; when the criteria for an apology and of a table are not only categorically differentiating, but the criteria for which can be structured completely differently, such as that moral responsibility does not work as a function of knowledge.
To take a fact about a thing as the essence of it is to miss that our criteria for determining a thing are made up of what matters to us about something, what interests us, what makes up why we judge it the way we do. The impersonalization of a scientific categorization is fixed and certain but is not what matters to us in most cases. We could argue that the essence of a dog is loyalty, unconditional love--that the essence of a dog is that it is our best friend. A definition is set by us (if not just a list of examples), as a criteria can be when it is a standard, such as measuring (these are not the criteria Witt find illuminating). A dog is defined as: ____, and pick whatever fact you'd like. It is necessarily a mammal, does that tell us why it is important to us?
Quoting TheMadFool
The point is that words can be defined individually, independently; that is possible to define words. This ability to put together these definitions is what makes us feel we can understand a sentence without a context, without it having been first said. To say that our definitions capture what is essential, means that it is us who strips away the ordinary criteria for judging, identifying, a seeing how a thing works. And we do this in order to have control and presage our communications rather than be responsible for them.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Interesting! :up:
How right you are! Essences do seem to have a subjective side to it. How would, for example, an alien define a dog, in terms of its essence. There's a worldview hidden behind the scenes that determines, to some but a substantial degree, how we see the world and that, to my reckoning, will have an impact on what we consider as critical to what, say, a dog is. Isn't this why Wittgenstein said, "if a lion could talk, we would not understand him."
As for science, it seems to or, at the very least attempts to, zero in on the fundamental nature of, how shall I put it?, stuff i.e. when science (say) states that water is [math]H_2O[/math] it means to convey that - the molecular permutation thus described - is the true nature of water. Something's off but I can't quite my finger on it at the moment.
I don't think there is a yes or no answer to this question. Some language-games are commensurable, and others are not. It seems clear that Wittgenstein thought that using the language-game of science to judge religious language-games is incommensurable. However, there would have to be something in common with the language-games of both to be able to have a conversation, i.e., there has to be some overlap. If the religious person, for e.g., is using the word know the way you're using it, as say, an objective justification, then both language-games are commensurate. However, if they're using the word know as a subjective justification, then it would seem to be incommensurate. It would be like one person playing chess, and the other is playing checkers.
There is no standard by which we could judge all language-games, there are just the games themselves. Each game has it's own rules, but there is a certain amount of overlap. There are rules that apply to all language-games, and there are rules that apply only to the language-game being played. There is no asking, "Which language-game is better?" It depends on what you're trying to do, or how you're using the concepts within the game. This doesn't mean that it's all relative, you can't just do what you want and expect to mean something with your words. There are norms of use, but you have to be careful just how far you extend that norm, just as with any concept.
What needs to be emphasized over and over, is the idea that meaning is an outward manifestation of language as a “form of life.” Forms of life have to do with “customs (uses, institutions),” namely, those things Wittgenstein cited in PI 23 (giving orders, reporting an event, play-acting, telling a joke, speculating, testing a hypothesis, etc.). The focus should be on what is happening in language from us as individuals. This change of focus, helps us to see the nature of meaning, i.e., it changes the focus from what is happening in my mind, to what is happening as the group functions in social settings (going from the internal to the external).
What is problematic is that since language is an activity of the mind, in the sense that it is me who is speaking, one wants to overemphasize the importance of the “me” or “I” in terms of meaning. However, it is not the “me” or “I,” it is the interaction of each of us with others, viz., the other language users. It is this interaction, that gives us a regularity, or a norm of use.
Another confusion that seems to raise its ugly head, is, my intention, what was, or is my intent as I use the words, i.e., some think that intent drives meaning, or has a significant role in meaning. However, this is also a misunderstanding. Our intentions have nothing to do with meaning. We learn the meanings in social settings, and use what we’ve learned to convey our intentions.
Wittgenstein claimed that people use words correctly even when they don't know their definitions; the classic example being the word "game".
Likewise, people were using logic, quite well in fact, even before logic became a subject of formal study and its rules were explicitly worked out.
To provide some context:
[quote=Wikipedia]The Heraclitean philosopher Cratylus refused to discuss anything and would merely wriggle his finger, claiming that communication is impossible since meanings are constantly changing.[/quote]
What you describe here is a sort of paradox, which might even be called a contradiction. If a word's "home" is its position within a particular language game, but the same word might be used in different games, then it has distinct homes. So we have the problem of the same word having numerous homes. To resolve this problem we ought not think of these numerous and distinct uses, of what appears to be the same word, as actually being instances of "the same word". Having different homes, therefore different meanings, ought to indicate to us that they are distinct words, despite having the same outward appearance. Therefore we ought to apprehend these words which appear to be the same, yet have different homes, as different words.
If we adopt this position, we have a new problem, which is the necessary boundary between a word with one home, and a word which appears to be the same word, yet has a different home, so is really a different word. Since both instances appear to be the same word, yet we conclude logically that they are not the same word, having different homes, we need other principles to distinguish them. It's kind of like they are identical twins. How we might distinguish the words is through context, the word's home, the two distinct games which are home to each, respectively. This means we must identify the game itself, and that's where the difficulty lies.
The various games of a language overlap, they share rules at some points and diverge at other points. And so a further problem develops. If the two distinct words, which appear to be the same, go by the same rule in two games, but different rules in another game, then why can't we say that they are actually "the same word" in those two games, and a different word in the third game. But if we adhere to the principle, a different game constitutes a different word, we must disallow this idea because the two games are distinct, constituting different homes, even though what is said of the two words, "appears to be the same" takes on an even stronger meaning.
What follows though, is that we lose all principles to distinguish one game from another, until we reach the point of "each particular instance of use must be viewed as a different game". Therefore the nature of "understanding" turns out to be comprehending how one instance of use overlaps, or relates to another, as the relationship between one game and another, as opposed to understanding the meaning of a word.
You should think of a word like a tool, as Wittgenstein said. Each use of a tool can be compared to each use of a word (each use being differentiated by a context or language-game). Now, would you say that because a tool is being used differently in a different context that it's a different tool? Obviously you wouldn't because that would be silly. It's the same tool or word used in a different way, with a different function or sense depending on the language-game. The idea that it's a paradox or possibly a contradiction is just not the case.
Indeed.
And this is another example of @Metaphysician Undercover's congenital logical problem. His argument is based on the idea that there must be something had in common by all uses of a word that make it a use of that word. The argument for family resemblance shows that this need not be so.
The problem is not at all dissimilar to that which renders him unable to acknowledge instantaneous velocity because he fixates on velocity being over time. The slight change in word use leaves him floundering.
Yes, I might say that the same object used in two different ways, is two different tools, like in the case of a multitool, and I'll explain further below. But what I was discussing is a word's "home". You referred to a word having a "home" in a particular language game. But if the word has a place in a number of different language games, like a tool has a number of different uses, how would we determine which language game, or use, is the "home" of that word, or which use is the "home" of the tool?
If it turns out that the word has a number of different "homes", wouldn't we have to say that these are actually different words? Homonyms are considered to be distinct words aren't they? Likewise, if a tool is defined by its use, then the same object could be two different tools, depending on how the object is used. Suppose a "saw" is what cuts wood, and a "knife" is what cuts meat. Then the same object could be both a saw and a knife, two different tools, depending on how it is used. And a multitool is a lot of different tools.
In case you're not following, here's a couple examples. I think most people would agree that "right", when it means correct, is a different word from "right" when it refers to one side of a person's body. But in the case of "see" they would say it is the same word whether it refers to seeing with the eyes, or seeing with the mind.
Quoting Sam26
I'm not making a pun, so don't consider this as silly. Homonyms are understood to be distinct words.
Quoting Banno
I don't see how "family resemblance shows that this need not be so". Obviously "family resemblance" implies having something in common. So how can the argument for family resemblance show that the uses need not have something in common?
Quoting Banno
OK, so I'll ask you the question Banno. How would you distinguish between homonyms (in the case of two different words with the same sound and spelling), and one word having two different meanings? To take your analogy of "family resemblances", why would we say in the case of homonyms, "those two words are just like identical twins", but in other cases, "that's the same person"
No, it doesn't. That's what you missed.
Care to explain yourself?
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Family_resemblance&oldid=144270623
"Family resemblance" implies that they have family in common, just like Wittgenstein says: "Something runs through the whole thread—namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres". Therefore there is something in common, it's just in a way other than one might think. It's the overlapping which they have in common. So what you describe as "games held certain similarities and relations with each other", is what they have in common, these relations, like a family consists of relations. And we call this, what they have in common, "family".
That's actually the conclusion of my post above. Why don't you ever take the time to read my posts through to the end? Because of this you commonly misrepresent me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When you work out what it is you are claiming, then your posts might be worth addressing.
When you work out what it is that I am claiming, then you might be capable of making an intelligent reply, instead of off the cuff ad hominem, like the following:
Quoting Banno
What kind of bullshit purpose is "congenital" supposed to serve here? Are you racist?
If you want to look at the issue I brought up, as a civilized, rational human being, without resort to insult, then follow me here.
I was enquiring as to what Wittgenstein means when he suggests that a word could have a "home". It is implied that when a word is used in many different language games, one particular language game might be the game which is "home" to the word. How could we ever determine which game is the home game for any given word?
How do you go from having a "congenital logical problem," to racism? All he means is you have a persistent or chronic problem. That's kind of a low blow, don't you think? People just love to throw this word around to make people look bad. The only people who look bad are the people using it without a good reason.
Quoting Sam26
Since a word has a place in numerous different language-games, would we be correct in saying that the word has a number of different "homes"? You seem to imply that for Wittgenstein, only one of the language-games is the word's true "home". If this is the case, then what is the word's position in another language-game? How is it possible that we look to a word's home language-game to understand its meaning in a completely different language-game? Obviously, the situation I described, that the word is a distinct and different word in each different language-game, with its own home in that game, is not the case, if a word has a one "home" game that determines its meaning.
So, what is the case? If any particular instance of a word's meaning is not dependent on its use in that specific game in which it is being used at that time, and it is actually required that we determine the word's "home" game to know its meaning in that other game, how do we determine its "home" game? I assume that if we do not know with certainty, the word's "home" game, we cannot know with certainty the word's true meaning. Do you agree with this?
Or, is this idea of a "home" game just a ruse? One might search forever, trying to confirm the word's "home" never really being sure which game is the word's "home", therefore never really being sure of the word's meaning. Perhaps the idea that there is one "home" game is just wrong, and the word has a home in each different game which it is used. Then shouldn't we say that these are distinct words, like homonyms, each with its own home in its own game? On what principle then do we say that it is "the same word" used in different games? Oughtn't we say that a word is homeless, and is free to go and find a place wherever one wants it to be?
I’m sympathetic to your thinking in this post, but this is backwards. That is, you’re talking here about reflecting on the meaning of a word, analysing it, theorizing it, rather than using it. When it comes to use, either a word will do for your purpose or it won’t — or it can be made to work the way you want or it can’t. Think first of cases of trying to use a word for some purpose rather than of scrutinizing the word; the point of a tool is to use it when it will get the job done, not to contemplate it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think at the end here your view has something in common with @Joshs’s: he talks about each use of a word as something like inventing a new use for that word on the fly, extending or redefining its meaning with each new ‘application’.
But doesn’t the ‘words are homeless’ line of argument contradict the ‘homonym’ argument? It is the same hammer you use to drive this nail and that, to remove the pin from a hinge, to knock a dent out of your wheelbarrow. So what do we want to say? That it’s a poor tool, or maybe no tool at all, that has only a single use-case? Or that all of these uses are in some (analyzable, theorizable) sense ‘the same’ — maybe, striking an object so as to cause it to move? (But of course you can do more than that with a hammer.)
I think we do better to take in more rather than less of what’s going on, so that we can see the hammer being a part of — being ‘at home’ in — each ensemble of tools and practices where it is useful (cabinetmaking, house framing, tractor maintenance, surveying, etc.), but not part of others where it is not. I’d lean toward multiple homes, with both hammers and words. Someone used to using a hammer in only one way for one sort of job might be surprised to find other people think of it quite differently, and the same thing happens with words sometimes. (Someone might use a chisel as a doorstop for years without the slightest idea what it’s ‘really’ for.)
Which one of my interpretations? I offered two completely different. You are the one who brought up a word's "home". How do you interpret this concept? Does a word have only one "home" in one language game, or does it have a "home" in every language game which it is used in? If the former, how would we know which game is the home game? If the latter why would we call this the same word, if it has many different homes? And what sense is there to saying that something has numerous homes?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
OK, so when deciding on what words to use, making the judgement as to whether the word will serve the purpose or not, Sam26 said we need to "think of how a word is used in the language-game that is its home". So, if the word is a tool, to make that judgement as to whether it will get the job done or not, we need to find the language game which is the word's home. Whether or not this is "scrutinizing the word" is irrelevant, but this is what is suggested that we need to do. One cannot just pick up any tool, and expect that it will get the job done, so we look at a word's 'home game' to determine whether it will get the job done. How do we determine the word's 'home game'?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, that is the point. They are two very distinct, perhaps even contradictory perspectives. That's why I started off with the suggestion that there's a sort of paradox here. The homonym argument says that since each different game in which a word is used is a distinct "home", then really these ought to be considered as distinct words. But then we might annihilate the relations between one game and another, which Banno pointed out is an important part of meaning, in the article on family resemblances. Now, in this homonym scenario each game is a distinct game, as a distinct home for the words within it, and every word in a different game, even though they might sound and be spelled the same, are different words. You can see that this is an unrealistic scenario because it denies the importance of the relations between one game and another.
However, if we go to the other option, that the same word is used in many games and one of the games is the word's home game, which validates the word's meaning, we have an equally unrealistic scenario. We have no way of knowing which game is the home game, and then the word becomes "homeless" completely free from constraints, like a tool we might be able to pick up and use for any purpose.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
OK, so the other two ways I mentioned are both completely unrealistic, being like two extremes, neither of which properly describes the reality of the situation. Now you propose a word has "multiple homes". I would say now, that the word "home" does not serve any purpose any more. The same word, like the hammer, has a different job, in many different games. We can't say that any particular game is the home, so it's rather meaningless to say that every game in which it appears is a "home" for it.
Now we're right back to square one, having resolved nothing. Suppose one wants to decide whether a word will serve a particular purpose or not, how could one proceed? I have a job to do and I want to know whether the hammer will serve the purpose. Each job, or purpose is unique, distinct from every other one so it doesn't make sense to start looking through all the different language games that the word has appeared in, or all the different things I've ever done with a hammer. How do you think the judgement is made? If I do not look at one game as the home game, and I do not consider all the different games, what do I do, take a few games and make an average or something?
I don’t think so. I think there are strong objections to the single home theory, but they don’t touch the idea of a word being at home in a language-game, having a role or a function. It’s easier to see in the negative: if you’re working on a bit of carpentry and you have the wood, hammer, nails, screws, drill, ruler, sandpaper, and so on, then the soldering iron doesn’t belong here.
With words, it’s a little harder to be that simplistic because there’s a chance almost any word might find some use in a given language-game, but there are telltale signs that it doesn’t already have a use — one being that it is only allowed in as metaphor. Still, you can say that when discussing politics you’ll have ‘rights’, ‘elections’, ‘freedom’, ‘policy’, ‘legitimacy’, all sorts of words, but probably not ‘chlorophyll’ or ‘aubade’. And within a particular sort of discussion, say, a nitty-gritty-detail policy discussion, people may see a phrase like ‘the public good’ as so vague in this context as to be useless and thus unwelcome.
The homonym business — eh, it’s almost semantics. The one argument against it would be that in introducing a word into a language-game it does not already have a role in, you’re relying to some degree on people’s understanding of how the word is used elsewhere — either for the metaphor, or by making a case that there’s a strong analogy between the known use and the new one. It would be hard to pitch a known word as an empty vessel you can add a new meaning to at will. (A somewhat outlandish metaphor can do the trick. Timothy Williamson got mainstream philosophers to talk about “luminosity”.)
One point from the other direction doesn’t seem to be brought up much: must a word have a single use in a language-game? Why couldn’t a word have multiple uses in the same language-game?
I think you are changing the subject by switching to the negative. The issue is the affirmation that a word has a home (or possibly more than one home). By proceeding in the negative, as you suggest, all you can do is keep saying 'this is not the word's home', and 'that is not the word's home', so on and so forth. You would always be left with a multitude of possibilities such that if meaning is directly related to the home, as Sam26 suggested, we could never have certainty of meaning.
I know that we are not necessarily looking for certainty, as you say, we are simply looking to accomplish a purpose. However, the context of Sam's post indicates that the issue we are dealing with is the question of distinguishing one "sense" from another, and in the case of logic, certainty is the purpose. So the problem is well exemplified with the way that people use the word "know". There is an epistemological sense of "know" which implies justified. Justification requires logical proof, and this requires that a word's use be limited by a definition. Ambiguity and the possibility of equivocation nullifies any attempt at justification.
So you might really be talking about something completely different from me. You are saying, so long as we can exclude misuse of the tool, we can proceed with the tool in a vast multitude of correct uses. Excluding misuse will exclude the possibility of mistake, and the tool will always serve the intended purpose. But you do not appear to be considering the fact that word usage has at least two sides, the person who hears is distinct from the person who speaks. And, the person speaking cannot exclude the possibility of mistake by the person hearing, in the way you propose, because where the word "doesn't belong" varies from one person to another.
Look at Sam's interpretation of Banno's chosen word, "congenital", a few posts back, in relation to my interpretation. I think that this word does not belong in that context, there is no language game which supports that use, and Banno is wrong to use that what in that way. But Sam, in my opinion fabricates a game which supports that use, and claims that Banno is simply within the rules of that game. As demonstrated by this example, and multitudes of other similar examples which abound in this world, your proposal, that we might just decide that a word "doesn't belong here", is completely inaccurate, because someone else will come along and use it there. And this incompatibility between one person saying it doesn't belong, and another saying it does, will result in the word not serving the intended purpose, and misunderstanding.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't agree with this at all, and I believe that this is why this issue is so "tricky". I think we have to distinguish between two very different "ways" of "introducing a word into a language-game it does not already have a role in". If you are relying on peoples' understanding of how the word is used elsewhere, then you are not actually introducing the word to a new game, you are forming an extension on an old game. This is the sort of overlap which Banno referred to with "family resemblances". But this is where the game analogy breaks down and fails, though people like Banno will refuse to accept this fact. What Wittgenstein represents as a game, is one specific way of using the word. If we allow now, that "a game" consists of two distinct ways, even if one is related to the other by a family resemblance, we contradict the premise of "a game". Therefore distinct uses must be distinct games despite the reality of "overlap" This is the age old issue in Plato's Parmenides, of the incompatibility between One and Many.
That is the one "way" of "introducing a word into a language-game it does not already have a role in", allowing that the two games have a relationship (family) with each other. And the problem is that this really negates the effectiveness of the game analogy. Meaning is attributable to this relationship between games, not to any game. We now have to assume something within language, which is very significant and important to meaning, which is outside any particular game, as the relating of one game to another. This is equivalent to "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". We have to allow that there is something which makes a whole a whole, which is not a part of the whole. It's a sort of dilemma, and the solution is to reject the analogy. Language-games are proposed as the parts, but the whole which is "a language" is not a congregate of such parts. Therefore the proposal is unacceptable.
That "way" we might call the natural way. The other "way," we might call the logical way. The logical way is to strictly define the word, making the usage specific to one particular game, thereby excluding all relations with other games. Excluding relations with other games is very important, to avoid the tendency to equivocate. This way is exactly opposed to relying on peoples' understanding of how the word is used elsewhere, because that way of understanding consists of a multitude of relations between games (which "game" fails to capture because the understanding lies in the relations, not in the games) and this sort of understanding is extremely conducive to equivocation.
With respect to the two "ways", the logical way is consistent with the "language-game" analogy, but the natural way is not. So the language-game description really fails to capture the true nature of natural language, being based in the logical way which is opposed to the natural way.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
In essence, this is exactly why the game analogy fails in accounting for natural language. "A game" as demonstrated by Wittgenstein is a single type of usage. To avoid violating, or contradicting that premise, a double usage cannot be one game. So a usage is a game, and this principle allows for the reality of logical proceedings, free from equivocation. However, natural language is directly opposed to this, deriving meaning from a multitude of very distinct usages. One might portray these distinct usages as distinct games, but that's really a step in the wrong direction. The real production of distinct games is the artificial process of creating distinct logical premises, and distinct logical proceedings. The natural process of deriving meaning is a comparison of individual, particular, instances of use, which cannot be portrayed as games. They cannot be portrayed as games because the game representation assumes that each instance of usage proceeds with the intent of establishing a rule for general usage. Natural language use does not often proceed with the intent of establishing a rule, it just proceeds with the intent of accomplishing the purpose in that particular instance. So when a person compares distinct instances of usage to derive meaning, this is not a matter of comparing distinct games, because that intent, of demonstrating a game is not necessarily there in these distinct instances.
This then brings us to the notion of a private language: the concept of correctness vanishes with the paradox "no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule."
Wittgenstein's theory is itself a private language.
Quoting Agent Smith
Wittgenstein solved the paradox for you:
“It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.”
Quoting Agent Smith
Are you saying that you believe Wittgenstein’s is a no holds barred, anything goes approach? A radical relativism?
Yep, Wittgenstein is a form of relativism:the language game, the form of life has no rationale, it can be anything we want it to be (meaning is use, the rule following paradox). There is no correct Wittgenstein, there's only Wittgenstein just like there's no correct taste, there's only taste.
Quoting Agent Smith
To the extent that Derrida has also been accused of ‘anything goes’ radical relativism, I think his response to this charge is relevant to the understanding of Wittgenstein’s language games, because they share much in their analysis of social conventions and the role of language in creating and sustaining such conventions.
“ For of course there is a "right track" , a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.
Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”
Derrida’s and my point is that there is a difference between ‘no right view’ and anything goes. For both him and Wittgenstein, what is correct and right can be constrained and determined in quite precise ways in relation to linguistic contexts of interaction within communities and cultures. What they deny is the idea that rightness can be fixed from some
culture-independent view from nowhere.
Yes! Discernment of subtlety/nuance isn't my strong suit. I'd like to hear more if you feel so disposed.